On the Sunny Side of the Mall

“Pedestrian shopping experience” is apparently the new term for malls. It’s always nice to see capitalists making hay while the post-ironic sun shines, and it’s as good a term as any, if you don’t mind having a word that once meant a sensual, emotional occurrence--that would be “experience,” not “shopping”--dragooned into the ever-swelling ranks of synonyms for “stores.”

But time spent at the newest local “experiences”--Hollywood & Highland in Hollywood, the Grove in the Fairfax district and Paseo Colorado in Pasadena--leaves one longing for a well-placed hyphen. As in “pedestrian-shopping experiences.” As in shopping for pedestrians.

For all its drive-by reputation, Los Angeles has become a runway of pedestrians. These three are but the newest links in a bracelet of similar marketplaces strung across Southern California. Somewhere between the creation of the Century City Mall and the refurbs of Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and Pasadena’s Old Town, urban planners and merchants realized that people like to see the sky as they duck in and out of doorways, that they prefer the breezy noise of the open street to the trapped cacophony of the average indoor mall.

Many argue that a true street scene can never emerge from some prefab Main-Street-in-a-Box. And it’s true that within the frescoed and fountained faux-ness of the three new marketplaces many of the stores are redundant (does every Angeleno have his or her own personal Banana Republic yet?)

But the people milling about within them are not.

From the backpack-and-camera-strung tourists of Hollywood Boulevard to the cell-phone addicted locals in the Fairfax district to the Pasadena moms in their khaki capri pants and white canvas tennis shoes, the crowds could not embody the neighborhoods better if Central Casting had been involved.

Hollywood & Highland

In the courtyard of Hollywood & Highland on a Monday, at least seven languages are being spoken, including French, German, Japanese and Russian--and that’s just from the folks perusing the kiosk stacked with sunglasses. High above, white marble elephants rage, but the frescoes of jackals and pharaohs frame less-than-exotic stores--an Ann Taylor, a Nestle Tollhouse cookie shop.

Unidentifiable disco and a small white sun beat down on the pale cement, coating everything with a glittery silver haze. It is not an inviting light, and this may explain why so many of the folks are simply circling the courtyard, rather than sitting at one of the mosaic-topped tables to take their rest. Or it could simply be that most of these people are tourists and it is too early in the day for tourists to sit down.

People who are on vacation often need to buy things. Not just touristy things like T-shirts and snow globes, but high-end items like gold jewelry and expensive handbags. This is the main reason Hollywood & Highland exists.

In Los Angeles, all tourist roads lead to the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where people from Rhode Island and the Ukraine take similar comfort from the size of John Wayne’s feet and Trigger’s hooves.

For years, residents have watched the inevitable disappointment bloom on the faces of visitors as they realize that not only is there no Hollywood in the real Hollywood, there’s not even a decent place to shop.

So now Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton lurk beside the stores that sell Marilyn posters. Wandering past them, and occasionally through them, are barelegged and relentlessly blond German families, multi-generational clusters of Asian women, a conga line of Australian teens and a French couple with two toddlers.

In the first hours after the stores’ 10 a.m. opening, there are more security guards than shoppers. But by noon, people have tired of looking at stars in the sidewalk and of trying to picture the red carpet on the concrete outside the Kodak Theatre, and the mall becomes a floor show of vacation wear--fanny packs and shirts that wick, hybrids of Teva sandals and lots of expensive video equipment. Cameras outnumber shopping bags by about 3 to 1, which is not a good sign for the mall.

“I cannot see what stores there are,” said a woman with a Down Under accent, peering out of the shade in the white light of the courtyard.

“And so many stairs,” said her mother, pausing to take a picture.

Reports are that business is not as good as planners had hoped at Hollywood & Highland, and on this day that is not surprising. Even when locals beef up the lunchtime crowds, there are simply not that many people here. In the tunnels that spin off the courtyard, there is not much to do after one has admired what may be the nicest Burger King in town. And everyone looks slightly lost in the dim light. But lost to a disco beat, and that may, along with the elephants, the Oscar walk and the sheer size of this thing, live up to someone’s idea of L.A.

The Grove

Less than five miles away, the Grove’s blue-sky version of the city could not be more different. For one thing, it’s inexplicably 10 degrees cooler, as if the merchants, in their zeal to create a Midwestern ambience, had April breezes from Missouri piped in.

The dearth of bare legs makes it clear that this is a native assembly--while visitors from icier climes may find spring in Los Angeles shorts weather, Angelenos do not. 68 degrees? Brrrr.

On the swath of grass at the center of “towne,” a crowd has gathered to watch a French puppeteer--toddlers in Gap hats and Peg Perego strollers, boys in white shirts and yarmulkes who laugh and shove their dark-eyed sisters, and women so lean in their Lycra tops that a biological relationship to the infants in their arms seems a biological impossibility.

For all the kvetching--about the impact on the Farmers Market, the traffic on Third, the ugliness of the Grove from the street--the place is packed. Certainly, there are tourists here, whistling by in their matching windbreakers on their way to or from the buses that surface like whales in the various parking lots.

But for the most part the crowd that moves past the stores--Kids Pottery Barn, Sur La Table, Banana Republic and the incredible tiara collection at a cart called Juliette’s--is L.A. at its most filmable: long-legged, midriff-baring girls; well-shod TV executives on their lunch hour; Orthodox Jewish men in blue suits and fedoras; hand-holding 20-something couples of every ethnic background and gender pairing; mothers and fathers armored in Baby Bjorns and trailing toddlers like ducklings. Cell phones are everywhere but there’s not a camera in sight.

If this commercial storm has an eye, it is the FAO Schwarz. The revolving door, the stuffed animals the size of VW Bugs and a floor-sized piano keyboard right out of the movie “Big” evoke life before the measureless caverns of Toys R Us.

Here shoppers can contemplate the meaning of Judy Garland dolls (the highball glasses and barbiturates are, one assumes, optional accessories) and other mysteries of life.

“I’m sorry, honey,” said a woman to one of the two teens with her, “the Easter Bunny does not bring cell phones to 13-year-olds.”

“Aren’t there any regular Legos anymore?” one man asked his companion as they trawled the shelves. “Are they all tied to movies now? I remember regular Legos, and I’m not that old, am I?”

“Her situation is very similar to mine,” said a woman into her cell phone as her daughter tried on feather boas. “Her ex-husband also lives in Paris, and it’s been very difficult with all the security ... “

“He didn’t find anything in his zone,” said a father to a mother over the head of their son. “What about this?” the mother asked, holding up a Harry Potter game. The father shook his head. “Harry Potter is not in his zone.”

For a novelist or screenwriter in search of inspiration, there really is no reason to go anywhere else but FAO Schwarz at the Grove.

Paseo Colorado

At Paseo Colorado, women rule. All sorts of women. Streaky blond moms in flat-fronted khakis and untucked white button-down shirts, women in long flowered skirts and black blazers striding toward lunch with their male colleagues, pairs of older women with matching pixie haircuts, and younger women in black leather coats and square-heeled boots that clomp like Speed Racers.

It is a feminine mall, more at one with its environment than others we could name. The rosy sandstone of the steps, and tiles and planters echo similar accents on nearby landmarks--the Civic Auditorium, City Hall, the post office.

Yes, there’s an Ann Taylor here, a Macy’s and the newly ubiquitous Tommy Panama, but there’s not a Gap or Banana Republic in sight. Instead, there is an unusual mix of specialty stores--Harry and David, J.Jill, the Yankee Candle Co., Jacardi and Japanese Weekend, one of the nicest and priciest maternity stores around.

It is quieter here than at the Grove or Hollywood & Highland; there are fountains but not noisy fountains. There is music, but it is soft, New Agey, barely discernable. No one yells, not even the small children.

On a Monday afternoon, people are buying things, but slowly and not in great quantity. There is a Gelson’s, which does good business, and an apartment complex attached--people live at this mall, which helps explain some of the people walking and sitting, and talking and strolling.

It’s not hard to imagine the types of folks who would live above a high-endish mall. Moms and grandmoms who would not find it unusual to spend $95 on a wool dress in size 3T, older men barefoot inside their Topsiders in search of the perfect Hawaiian print, folks who would pay retail for the latest Coach bag, who, on their way to a facial at the Amadeus Spa could walk past a sign offering “12 wax potpourri tarts for $9.99” as if a wax potpourri tart were the most normal thing in the world.

But in the end, the things that are for sale here are not that much different from the things for sale at the Grove or Hollywood & Highland, or any other mall, for that matter.

But the lure of the marketplace has never been just the market.

As much as they need to buy things, people need to brush past strangers, eavesdrop on conversations, take a look at their neighbors. People need to hold hands and kiss their lovers right in front of everyone, to walk in a crowd that is neither waiting nor in a hurry, to eat in the sunshine and watch people walk by, to feel part of something bigger and more bustling than their own thoughts.

A year from now, two years from now, the sales figures will tell how successful these new pedestrian shopping experiences are as venues.

But as public spaces, they’re working pretty well right now because it’s almost always the people rather than the things that make space interesting.