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12 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, September 30, 2009 Basic Black In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree. In the spring of 1938 a short, pudgy Austrian immigrant name of Victor Gruen waddled hopefully down the gangplank of a ship newly docked in New York harbour. His timing was not propitious -- America was coming off the Great Depression and heading towards a World War. The guy had eight dollars U.S. in one pocket and an architect's degree in another. Nevertheless that Austrian immigrant probably did more to change the physical world you live in than any other human being of our time. Gruen was a socialist as well as an architect, and he greatly missed the warmth and conviviality of the typical European towns he grew up in - the cheery cafes, the bustling plazas, the common, cozy meeting grounds. He resolved to bring some of that magic to cold, car-ridden North America, so Victor Gruen invented the modern indoor shopping mall. Boy, did he screw that up. Today, just about every medium-sized town and all of the big ones have at least one indoor shopping mall - several acres of parking stalls surrounding a blank-walled complex consisting of inward-facing storefronts, airconditioned in the summer, heated in the winter. And all dedicated to separating people from their money. Like dinosaurs, the shopping malls dominated the terrain they overlooked by virtue of their sheer size. Traditional downtown retail districts shriveled and shrank before the mighty malls with their fountains and food courts and near-endless siren enticements for consumers. But somewhere around the turn of the 21st century the shopping malls assumed another characteristic of the dinosaur. They began to go extinct. Not surprising really. The enclosed shopping mall was a rarified and artificial creation from the get-go. It was dedicated to the proposition that consumers would always be ready to nibble and that each year they would always happily spend more than they did last year. Unlimited growth forever: the modus operandi of the cancer cell. Your typical shopping mall has another fatal genetic flaw: almost everything it sells is unessential. Name-brand jeans? Designer sunglasses? by Arthur Black grotesque line; it's a quote from Larry Siegel, the man in charge of the nascent Xanadu mall currently a-building in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Xanadu is scheduled to be truly a monster mall - 2.4 million square feet - with an indoor ski slope, a for-real fishing pond, the largest Ferris wheel in North America - even a 30-foothigh chocolate waterfall. Xanadu broke ground in 2004 and was slated to open to the public last August, but what with the recession and all the grand opening had to be pushed back to late November. Then it was delayed again. Right now, Xanadu is now scheduled to open 'sometime in 2010.' Or not. Mauled by malls Pastel-hued cell phones? Two-hundred-dollar running shoes? As social scientist Henry Fairlie puts it: "The most important fact about our shopping malls is that we do not need most of what they sell." Which may work when times are flush; but it's not so hot when the economy is hurting. Our next-door neighbours are feeling the pinch more than Canadians. Over 400 of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls have closed in the past two years. The plight of U.S. malls has become so grim it's inspired a website. Deadmalls.com was created by a couple of guys who decided it was archeologically important to document the abandoned malls for future students of American civilization before those malls disappeared entirely. Dinosaurs were doomed at least partly because they were cursed with fatally small brains; the powers behind malls have a stronger survival instinct. For the past ten years or so, mall promoters have been re-inventing their product, encouraging visitors to use the premises for walking and jogging, book signings and karaoke get-togethers. Some offer their facilities for laser tag, paint ball for teenagers and merry-gorounds for the kiddies. "Parents still need to entertain their kids," an industry analyst says. "Teenagers still need a place to hang out. Adults need a place to walk, out of the elements. Workers still need to buy their coffee." All true - but a bit of a scaleback from the high times when supermalls confidently promised "the ultimate in 'shoppertainment.'" 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