My Kingdom for a Mall With Real Individuality

I think there’s something fundamental about shopping malls, something that hearkens back to the days when mankind first began tilling the land and gathering in the centers of walled towns and fortresses. One can imagine the festive booths that were the precursors of our modern retail and service giants: Plagues R Us, Dunkin’ Witches, and the favorite department store of Vikings, Fyordstrom.

Now, so many centuries later, studies show that 70% of Americans go to the mall each week, flocking as they once did inside the citadel walls, still seeking security, bounty, diversion and free squirts of cologne.

There’s a shopping center that recently opened near my home. Harking back to its medieval roots, Costa Mesa’s new turreted, crenulated Triangle Square actually looks like a fortress, if fortresses had been built with the idea that attacking hordes could be repelled by bad architecture.

It’s a bright yet forbidding place; its grandness defies anyone to make an individual mark there. Not that we’re supposed to. As with practically every other mall, all we’re expected to do is come, consume and leave. Triangle Square is certainly no worse than other malls in this respect. Perhaps it’s just more apparent there because I’d read some blather by its designers and civic leaders about how the new center is meant to be a focal point for the community.

We could sure use a few of those in this sprawling suburbia, but I don’t think these high-rent marketplaces can serve that function even as well as the little mom and pop businesses that were displaced when the center was built. The only discussions I’ve ever heard at a Triangle Square restaurant just sounded like power lunches that kept on powering through dinner time and dessert. It’s funny: When I first wandered through the still-under-construction $90-million center eight months ago, I thought it looked so slick and out of human scale that I peremptorily decided I’d never go back to give it a penny of my business. Now I find myself going back to let the place appall me a couple of times a week.

Some things about the center are just darned convenient. The Barnes and Noble bookstore has one of the brainier stocks to be found in local shops, and it’s open till 11 every night, which is right handy if you happen to run out of reading matter at 10:40 p.m. on a Sunday.

It also helped to find that Sfuzzi isn’t a linty Italian ice cream sensation but a trend-oid restaurant with a fairly adventurous chef. (The pastas aren’t anything worth staining your shirt over, but the soups and appetizers are a kicker.)

There is a frozen yogurt emporium due soon, called Humphrey Yogart, which I think shows little regard toward whether Humphrey Bogart, an actual dead person, would care to be associated with something that comes in a cone. If a business is going to be so brazen as to appropriate a deceased performer’s name or likeness, I believe it also should make use of the artist’s works. Toward that end, I might suggest that Humphrey Yogart offer such selections as “The African Queen,” made with leeches and cream, or “The Big Sleep,” shaving stubble in a vanilla base. Best of luck.

Then there’s the multiplex cinema run by James “I never met a theater I didn’t own” Edwards Sr. I’m not suggesting each of the eight theaters is the size of a Dodge Caravan, but the screens do have windshield wipers.

The center also houses a supermarket, fast food joints, casual clothing shops, and one of those curiously modern sporting goods outfitters that--with $440 ski jackets and $220 sunglasses--seem to subscribe to the notion that the hardships of “roughing it” should begin at the sales counter. If they really had the concept down, the only lighting in these places would be the miners helmets they’d have you wear as you shopped. There would be a few venomous snakes coiled about the merchandise, and you’d have to scale a rock wall to find the exit.

There is less to the center than one would think from the outside. That’s because, viewed as a pie chart, the stores are essentially the crust, while the fruit filling is the indoor parking lot. They’ve got some wild parking control going on, including a special section--sort of the reverse of the “you must be this tall” signs at Disneyland’s Autopia--where the vehicles have to be at least 6-foot-10 to park there. A fellow actually goes around with a measuring pole to check the heights. Maybe he’s an advance man for Evel Knievel.

The centerpiece of the place--at least until the Virgin Records “megastore” opens in a few months--is Nike Town, a 30,000 square-foot emporium. I dropped in during its grand opening the other Saturday but missed the big protest. In the past, people have objected to Nike’s use of the Beatles’ “Revolution” in its advertising while having its $100-plus footwear made by 15-cents-an-hour Indonesian teen labor. Leave it to Orange County to find the real meaty issue, though: Here, the protest was mounted by a organization of stutterers objecting to Nike’s use of Porky Pig in its ads. Evidently, I showed up too early, while the protesters were still home watching cartoons or something.

Even without a “stutter-in,” Nike Town is a strange place. Like the Bizzaro World in Superman comics, where everything is bizarre, under Nike Town’s dome every single sock, sweat band, shoe and shirt is Nike. The sales people all sport the Nike emblem, and even the customers do. Their DNA molecules probably say Nike. I’d somehow left home that morning wearing clothes that don’t have a huge brand name on them, and boy did I feel like I’d gone to school in my pajamas.

Design-wise, Nike Town is made to look sort of like your old hometown, if you happen to have been raised in a hi-tech abattoir. With hard lines of concrete and sleek black metal, the space is decidedly utilitarian, in the sense that you could spend the night slaughtering 500 head of cattle there, simply hose the place out, and be ready to sell Air Jordans again the next morning. The machine-generated wind and/or applause sounds and flashing video screens don’t add much grace to the place either.

The center does boast one antidote to the impersonal cast that makes it something less than a fun zone. The just-opened Alta Coffee & Roasting Co. is nearly as friendly and funky as its original sister location on the Balboa Peninsula. It’s nicely pre-aged, with a worn wooden floor from a house that was being demolished. Like the Newport location, it features music and poetry (the excellent local guitarist Tom Long plays May 20) and if anything is ever to make Triangle Square feel like a community hub, it’s probably this place.

The center exists today because the city of Costa Mesa forcibly bought out the old property owner and moved his little tenant businesses out, all with the curious idea that the government should seize your property if some rich guy has a better idea of what to do with it. One of the better ideas about Triangle Square is that it offers acommanding view of all the failed, empty storefronts at the similarly city-created Costa Mesa Courtyard center across the street.

Maybe it was the same centuries ago when feudal lords built their fortresses and city-states. And maybe, like then, people will find ways to humanize and clutter up these coldly planned structures. After a Viking invasion or two, I imagine Triangle Square may loosen up quite nicely.