Youths Foresee New Social Vistas Opening Along With the Mall : Retailing: Two girls invited to give their impressions say the center will be a place for Santa Clarita Valley teen-agers to meet.

Sally Rowland and Becky Nelson proclaimed a carousel inspired by the Clyde Beatty Circus “pretty” and admired the way that ceramic frogs spit water into a fountain. They liked the mall’s colorful murals and said the sun shining brightly through the skylights made everything look clean and new.

But during their maiden visit Saturday to the Valencia Town Center, the two 15-year-old students at William S. Hart High School were less interested in the aesthetics of the 2-day-old mall than the role they expect it to play in their social lives.

“I think a lot of people are going to start coming here because it’s something new and exciting,” Sally said.

The Times asked Sally and Becky to spend a half-day bringing their teen-age perspective to the Santa Clarita Valley’s first regional shopping center.

Armed with $50 apiece, they set out to investigate the 790,000-square-foot, $150-million mall, which will allow local residents to forgo 20- or 30-mile shopping trips to the Northridge Fashion Center and the Glendale Galleria.

Becky said that she usually visits malls in the Valley about once a month. Sally said her trips were limited to three a year, including a Christmas shopping expedition. Even then, the girls said, the trips to shop elsewhere often seemed like they were more than trouble than they were worth.

“You had to drive and you were with your parents,” Sally said.

On Saturday, though, the reviewers approached the shopping center like a trip to Disneyland.

They screamed in delight when they saw a person dressed as a giant orange dancing in the middle of the mall and giggled when a mime playfully caught Sally as she passed by and picked her up in his arms.

But all of that was mere frosting on the shopping cake. “I’ve never even heard of half these stores in here,” Sally said with wonder.

They soon had. The pair blasted through more than $120--the Times’ money plus more of their own--in two hours as they picked up a potpourri of merchandise, including a book on the art of massage.

Sally made the first string of purchases, racking up a green T-shirt, a gift certificate, a silver bracelet and the book in less than half an hour. Becky took a bit longer to settle on a forest green body suit, a T-shirt, earrings, a bracelet, a necklace and a poster of a dolphin.

Only after they were loaded with shopping bags did the best friends stop to get some lemonade and iced tea and reflect on the mall itself.

They said they believed it would become a popular place to hang out. Indeed, they said, that day they had spotted about 20 people they knew from school.

“You know what I just thought?” Rowland asked her friend. “We never really meet a lot of kids from Saugus or Canyon Country and now we’re gonna start meeting them here.”

The only drawback to so many teen-agers shopping in the mall is that “everyone’s going to be dressed alike,” Sally said.

They said they and their friends could easily while away the hours by playing video games in the arcade, watching movies, shopping and snacking on foods that include bean burritos, triple chocolate chip cookies, banana shakes and tuna salads.

“It’s something you can come and do all day and it probably won’t be boring for a while,” Sally said.

Part of the appeal of the mall, Sally and Becky said, was its use of bright, vibrant colors in historical murals and eye-grabbing elements such as the green, yellow and blue beams that support the ceiling.

“Most other malls are like all orange and yellow,” Becky said. “This one has more colors in it.”

Sally agreed. “They add color to it so it’s not so plain and boring,” she said.

Not that the teen-agers gave the thumbs up to everything at the mall.

Becky wondered whether many shoppers would even notice a clock embedded in the floor with the slogan, “Pride in the Past. Commitment to the Future.”

And Sally brought up another practical concern as she walked around a blue-tiled fountain where water burbled from several spots.

“I feel like I’m going to fall down in there because there’s no guardrail,” she said.

Becky said she liked another fountain outside the entrance, with rows of water sprouting from the concrete, even though “it just looks like a bunch of sprinklers.”