When my sister and I were younger, one of our favorite things to do on Sundays when we visited our father was to have him take us to the mall. The mall...a mall...any mall, really. The mall to us was the Westfarms Mall on the West Hartford/Farmington border. He would drive us there, and we would look for outfits while he waited outside the stores and dispensed equal amounts of cash to both of us. Eventually, we got sick and tired of going to Westfarms over and over again and persuaded him to drive us to all the other malls in Connecticut. After trying on jeans in virtually every Express in the state, I came to realize that malls fall into three general classes: the High-End, See and Be Seen Mall, the "Eh" Mall and the Shoulda-Been-Torn Down-By Now Mall.
You Know You're In a See-and-be-Seen Mall If: You see a Nordstrom
Espresso Cart.
Back in the day, Westfarms Mall was pretty ritzy for its time. It was enormous,
it had a plethora of water sculptur-y fountains in its center, and there
were plenty of carpeted ramps and gold handrails for everyone. After being
away from the area for the last ten years, we were pleased to see that even
more faux marble flooring abounds in Westfarms' latest additions. Now we
-- along with all the greater Hartford well-to-do -- can shop in softly-lit,
pleasant smelling stores such as Nordstrom, Restoration Hardware, J. Crew,
Banana Republic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Store, Williams-Sonoma and
Sephora. Yes, Sephora -- the perfume and makeup superstore with such other
exotic locations as Paris, New York and San Francisco -- has an outpost in
our very own Westfarms. Color me surprised!
Westfarms happens to be located in one of the more affluent cities in the greater Hartford area, so you see a lot of people who wear clothes the likes of which I wear to work, to window shop on a Saturday afternoon. People dress up to visit ritzy malls, because they're not just shopping, you see, they're shopping and looking damn good while doing it...and that can only help you if you feel the need to get better service. There's been many a time when I've wanted to browse through one of the many diamond and pearl-laden jewelry stores, but felt so underdressed in my jeans and Gap T-shirt that I've just made do with the spartan window displays. This type of mall contains stores with seemingly no customers but lots and lots of severe-looking salespeople. There are no grease-laden food courts in ritzy malls, only sit-down restaurants like the Magic Pan and the Rainforest Cafe. An upside to shopping at the fancy mall are the nice restrooms, which have 3-way mirrors to inspect your hair from all angles and pipe classical music into the stalls through the overhead speakers.
You Know You're In an "Eh" Mall If: You see a Gloria Jean's
Coffee Bean.
Even though Gloria Jean has tried to upscale her coffee chain's image by
renaming it "Gloria Jean's Gourmet Coffees," we all know it's the 'ole Coffee
Bean, and we know where to find 'em: in "Eh" Malls. In all honesty, I did
notice a Gloria Jean's still located in Westfarms, but I feel that in this
case it's just the exception to the rule. Let's put it this way: if Gloria
Jean's hazelnut-flavored is the best coffee drink you can find on the Mall
Directory board, you're in an "Eh" Mall. If there is a Nordstrom's Espresso
Cart anywhere in sight, then consider yourself in dress-up territory.
"Eh" Malls are also known as "malls with stores that you can really buy stuff from." You still have your higher-end Disney Stores, Baby Gaps and Eddie Bauers, but thrown into the mix are the common woman's Lerner, Contempo Casuals, Claire's Boutique and the occasional Piercing Pagoda. "Eh" Malls often have little carts set up in the main walkways which pass for "stores" on the Mall Directory. The thing is that these carts can go out of business in the morning and then be back in business as another "store" before lunch! It's only a matter of time before the Beanie Baby Cart reverts back to being the Bonsai Tree Cart, and who wants that? Who is responsible for this travesty? The Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester is a perfect example of the "Eh" mall, with its skylights and Cart-Stores and its chicken-fried-air-scented food court. "Eh" malls often have dirty restrooms with only two or three stalls and no soap in the soap dispensers, like the ones at Buckland Hills. Inexplicably, the restrooms are labeled "Damas" and "Caballeros."
You Know You're In a Shoulda-Been-Torn-Down-By-Now Mall If:
You see an Orange Julius.
A tanning salon amidst mostly vacant storefronts is also a good indicator.
A store selling airbrushed "A Touch of Class" T-shirts is another clue. Any
of those little kiddie rides -- plastic ponies or spaceships which children
can ride on (the kids with parents with a couple of quarters to spare) or
just sit on (the poor kids) -- are dead giveaways that the mall has outlived
its usefulness. We recently made a trip to the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside,
a mall right outside of Springfield, MA, which is hovering on the thin line
between "Eh" and "Just Die Already." This mall was a special trip for my
sister and me years ago, the biggest draw being that it had three floors
(never mind the fact that the bottom floor was just a big food court and
a sadly lacking Filene's Basement.) This mall needs to face the fact that
the '80's are dead and get itself a major makeover right quick. The hot pink
neon lighting around the ceiling lights has got to go. The dim, almost
nonexistent ambient light made me feel vitamin D-deprived. I stumbled around so many
outdated, low-lighted, dingy, understocked stores that my mood actually altered
for the worse... even while shopping! A Woolworth-y stale buttered popcorn smell
hung in the air. And what is with that "Psychic Reader" store which was basically
a woman and a card table behind a cheap room divider? Or the store which
only sells clothes which you would wear when following the Grateful Dead,
and the accompanying Grateful Dead accoutrements?
The Holyoke Mall has tried to push itself into solid "Eh" territory by adding such un-mall-like stores to its Directory as Old Navy, the Christmas Tree Shop, Best Buy, Toys-R-Us and Target, which in and of itself was the sole reason we made our second trip to this mall, but the mall itself still has a ways to go. Hopefully, it will not end up like the King of all Yucky and Useless Malls, the Bristol Center Mall which, during the early '90's, tried in vain to lure people in by renaming itself "The Mall at Bristol Centre." (Oooo-La-La!) Who still goes here? And why? It's the "All for A Dollar Store", isn't it. I don't even know about the restrooms, but there is a payphone.
When we lived in San Francisco, we had access to only one mall, which pretty much showed up on the mall radar as "Eh". There was a mall-like structure downtown, but it called itself a "Shopping Center" and it was filled with all things yuppie, including a 5-floor Nordstrom with a shoe department the likes of which I have never seen aside from the one in Macy's New York, and a spiral escalator which slowly twirled you up and down between levels. San Francisco, thanks to the not-to-hot, not-to-cold weather, was largely a freestanding store city, unlike cities on the East coast, where there are actually signs on the highway directing you safely to each mall ("Mall: Next Two Exits", "All Mall Traffic: Merge Right", "No Need to Rush, There's Plenty of Parking"...OK, I made up the last one, but the first two really exist.) Since returning to the East coast nearly four months ago, we have made countless trips to Westfarms and other malls in the area and have come to the realization that "eh" or not, one-stop mall-type shopping is remarkably convenient.
No matter what mall you find yourself visiting, just watch the impulse buying. Shoes from Nordstrom can be really expensive and those bonsais from the middle-of-the-mall cart are hard to keep, you know. And do you really need to spend $59 on that set of Restoration Hardware giant metal "X" and "O" bookends?