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Who says there's never any positive, uplifting news? For the past fortnight, at least, almost every dispatch that reaches here from the metropolitan zone has proclaimed the virtues and wonders of the Park Meadows Shopping Mall, which officially opens Friday.
Thirty-four acres of shopping all under one roof! More shoes in more sizes and more varieties than at any other spot in the observable universe!! A dozen restaurants, and it's so classy that they don't even call the eating area a food court!!! The largest traffic jam in Colorado history expected at the grand opening!!!!
No word yet on whether Park Meadows will cure cancer, heal heart disease, or eliminate war and poverty, but it does appear to have everything else covered. It's certainly educational.
One lesson Park Meadows offers is the irrelevance of two
Colorado shibboleths: Local Control,
often
proclaimed by our Republican legislature, and Smart
Growth,
recently promoted by our Democratic
governor.
Back in 1993, residents of the Park Meadows area had a chance to vote on a bond issue that would have funded a highway interchange to serve the shopping mall. They voted against it; happy with things as they were, they didn't want the mall.
This didn't stop the mall developers. They imposed the
equivalent of a sales tax -- a 1.4 percent user fee
on all sales by mall tenants -- and that money goes to pay
for the interchange.
In other words, even though the local voters exercised
local control
in an effort to enjoy smart
growth,
it didn't matter in the least what the
residents did or didn't want. If corporate America wants to
supply you with noise and traffic, you've got about as much
chance of winning as the Sioux did of keeping the Black
Hills.
I will take this lesson to heart as Salida continues to try to develop a comprehensive master plan. The rationale is that a plan will give the community some control over development. Park Meadows teaches otherwise, and I hope it is included in future civics textbooks, lest children grow up with noble but foolish ideas about how America really works.
We've been reminded often recently of one horrible result of youthful idealism -- the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. All these kids, people about my age, grew up thinking that if people just voted against the Vietnam War, it would end.
Americans voted against that war in 1964 -- remember,
Lyndon Johnson was the peace candidate
that year and
promised not to send American boys 8,000 miles to fight in
an Asian Wary. In 1968, Richard Nixon had a secret plan to
end the war within a year, and in 1972, just before the
election, Henry Kissinger announced that peace is at
hand.
Not that it made much difference. In the short run, North Vietnam achieved a military victory. In the long run, well, Hanoi now has American franchise outlets, and for all I know, a shopping mall or two under development.
Maybe it's just a guy thing, but I really hate shopping malls. My idea of a good trip to the store is to run in, get what I need, and get out.
The mall is designed to keep that from happening. First,
you have to park several furlongs away. The store you need,
of course, sits at the other end of the mall. By the time
you find it, you're hopelessly lost, searching desperately
for one of those you are here
kiosks. What was a
simple errand just turned into a major expedition.
I suspect this is no accident. The idea is to make you
think well, as long as I'm here, I might as well look
for a ...
The longer they can keep you in the mall, the
more you spend, and they don't make it easy to get out.
It is difficult even to step outside to savor some uncontrolled climate, or to take purchases back to your car so you don't have to carry them from store to store. After all, if you realize there's a world outside the mall, you might be tempted to depart before you've reached the limit on your credit cards.
I've read that malls function as modern Main
Streets,
but that's preposterous. I live near a real
main street with panhandlers hustling change and agitators
handing out petitions -- spectacles you never enjoy at a
sanitized mall, which is as scripted and organized as a
national political convention.
Further, real main streets offer old men sitting on benches or leaning against lamp posts, grousing and grumbling about the condition of the world. Since that's my retirement plan, I hate to see it eliminated by the malling of America -- what am I supposed to do during my sunset years after the mall developers eliminate all the main streets?
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