Mall MaulingOK, you’ve decided to make a...
Mall Mauling
OK, you’ve decided to make a few decorating changes in your home and think you might like to enlarge the skylight and get some new furnishings.
Maybe add a little granite, cherry wood and some etched glass, as well. And definitely a new color scheme. Something lighter, more elegant.
Then you get carried far, far away.
Walls start coming down, floors start coming up and rooms get rearranged. Old areas are closed, new wings are opened, additions are planned.
The home now looks like the day the world ends, with dust shrouding everything and naked structural underpinnings exposed like the rib cage of an anorexic.
Once you get started with this sort of thing, it’s hard to stop.
Now imagine your “home” is The Promenade at Woodland Hills, and thousands of shoppers want to do what they normally do while you are giving the home a face-lift.
Larry Schnurbusch is in charge of keeping the mall running during the March-to-December reconstruction. He has to keep traffic flowing, shoppers shopping and store renters happy enough to pay rent.
He also has to keep workmen doing the redoing as quickly as possible.
Between midnight and 8 a.m.
Every night.
And often Schnurbusch--whose name means He Who Will Not Sleep Until Christmas--is usually there.
Then, between 8 a.m., when the workmen leave, and 10 a.m. when the shoppers arrive, Schnurbusch sends crews to make sure everything is picked, cleaned, washed, swept and tidied up.
There is nothing he can do to hide the construction of the new entrance, the repositioning of escalators, the installation of the new elevator, all the understructure that’s now exposed.
The mall is definitely a work in progress.
The latest addition to the chaos is a 40-foot-high, two-story scaffold up the center of the mall that allows workmen to pull down old roofing and put in a huge glass dome.
This first, face-lifting stage will cost--when completed in time for the holiday season--about 90,000 man-hours and “many, many” millions of dollars, according to Elizabeth Pedersen-Knapp, mall marketing director.
The result will be a marbled, domed shopping Shangri-La, where spenders will be able to experience Beverly Hills without having to go over the hill.
And while you are shopping in style, your Bentley can be baby-sat by a valet.
Major Hero
The next time you need a 204-foot-long hero sandwich, call up the Sub Machine Shop in Lancaster.
A dozen employees spent a recent Saturday putting together such a biggie in hopes of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, so they have the track record if not the world record.
The 204-foot sandwich was made with 34 six-foot loaves of Italian bread, 450 pounds of bologna, cotto and dry salami and provolone cheese, 40 gallons of Italian dressing, 10 gallons of mayonnaise, seven gallons of mustard, 46 pounds of pickles, 70 pounds of tomatoes and 35 pounds of onions. If sold, it would have cost about $2,000.
No word yet about the record.
Helping Out
Ongoing cutbacks in funding make it necessary for many local schools to find outside financial help for “non-essentials” such as special programs, library books, copying machines and the like.
In some neighborhoods, parent groups underwrite many of these things, or a local business may adopt a school and help out.
In Mission Hills, according to Chamber of Commerce member Denise Prangle, there hasn’t been enough of that, so the chamber is gearing up to do some matchmaking.
Prangle, along with Co-chairman Terry Balderrama, is heading up the chamber’s new School Business-Partnership.
“We are going to give the local business people more information about the urgent situation in our local schools, and we are going to be asking them if they will help out with money, time and/or supplies.
“At the same time, we are going to be talking to people in all of our area schools to get an idea of specific needs,” Prangle says. “Then we are going to try to match a business to a school or several businesses to a school, to meet the schools long- and short-term needs.”
She says that most of the businesses in Mission Hills are small and may be afraid to commit to any large project, especially in a slow economy.
But she thinks that if she and Balderrama are good at matching schools and businesses, the relationship will be beneficial for both.
“By giving their time and energy at local schools, the business people will benefit as well. They will become better acquainted with their own consumer base,” Prangle says.
One More Time
More than 400 people showed up for the recent reunion for anyone who had ever attended school in Lake Hughes, according Jim Lewis, who was in charge.
There was dancing and dining and a lot of remembering, and the event was well worth the year of work Lewis and his committee put into it, he says.
But now that it’s over, he’s planning another event.
He put off his marriage to Virginia Tanner, his partner in his Desert Rain trucking business, because both were so wrapped up in reunion plans.
Their January wedding is the next item on their agenda, and as far as Lewis is concerned, all the reunion folks can head right back for that.
Overheard
“She’s into ecological revolution and shopping. We call her the Neiman Marxist.”
--Woman to friends over
lunch at La Serre
