A walk around City Point with LangeAlexandra, author of 'Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall.' heybonanos reports
Lange at City Point’s McNally Jackson store, sizing up the placement of her new book. Photo: Christopher Bonanos I’d asked Alexandra Lange if we could get together at the Manhattan Mall, the failing 1980s vertical shopping center at the south end of Herald Square. It would, I suggested, nicely frame a conversation about her book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, which includes a lot about the woes of retail and especially the ways in which malls interact with cities.
We turn toward the retail complex itself, and the most obvious thing about it is that one big tenant is gone. “What we see here that also has happened in hundreds of malls across America is that the anchor department store, which was a branch of Century 21, closed.” Most malls have more traditional department stores in those spaces, but that was probably never going to happen here because Macy’s is right around the corner.
To be clear, she likes shopping malls; this book is, to a great extent, an appreciation. The reading experience is a little mall-like itself: generally linear with some wandering on side paths and pauses engineered in. The technical term for the fundamental appeal of a mall visit is “the Gruen transfer,” named for the architect Victor Gruen: It refers to a point where utile shopping is replaced by the pleasurable experience itself.
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