My wife gets home around seven and she says hello and then goodbye to the dogs and we walk out the door, smiling to the neighbors we pass, and make our way through the park that separates our street from the mall, and soon we have arrived at The Grove.
The Grove is no mere shopping mall—oh, yes, like its older (read: passé) competitor malls one, three and four miles away it has the usual department store anchor tenant, movie theater multiplex and assortment of chain store spin-offs (such as Nike Goddess, Pottery Barn Kids and Victoria’s Secret Beauty). But The Grove is different; The Grove, I am convinced, will soon become the nonpareil envied item of urban development: Every Dallas and Jacksonville will want a Grove the way every Cleveland and Pittsburgh a decade ago wanted a retro baseball stadium like Baltimore’s Camden Yards.
Because The Grove is not the shapeless, windowless megalithic concrete structure with escalators and skylights and furniture no one ever sits in but that nevertheless is replaced biannually; The Grove is a live, sanitized, outdoor simulacrum of urban existence. It’s the type of place New Yorkers mock but Californians (outside of San Francisco, that is) crave: It’s a place where actual humans may experience random face-to-face encounters with one another.
My wife and I are a little bit embarrassed by how much we like and look forward to our Fridays at The Grove, and we know several college-educated adults who feel the same way. I think we all suspect there must be something wrong with us or the lives we are leading to be so enthralled by a shopping mall, and this suspicion reflects our relationship with the city at large: There are a lot of very pleasant things about living in L.A. but there is also the nagging sensation that something about this place is terribly, terribly wrong.
Although in some ways The Grove is typical of shopping malls, these bland monuments to consumerism that dot the suburban landscape, in cities absent any street life we feel a perverse need for what it offers. The Grove is a testament to the effect architecture good or bad can have on communities—the very creation (public squares and parks) or negation (housing projects) of community, which is social interaction. When my wife and I go there it seems everybody is smiling; there’s music that seems to be coming out of the trees. The alienation fostered by experiencing the city through tempered glass in fast-moving, air-conditioned compartments leads us to relish watching others engaged by The Grove’s fountain, shooting colored jets of water upward to music like the one in Las Vegas, at the development’s center. As in Las Vegas, the line between our enjoying The Grove for camp and our genuinely enjoying it is blurred beyond visibility.
The social animals in us are happy at The Grove because it gives us the illusion of public space in a city that has little; the well-trained consumers in us are happy with the dozens of options of food and film. The lovers are happy to be together at the start of a weekend, and the tired commuters are just glad we can walk home and be in bed by eleven.
But either way we find ourselves there—more than that, we willfully go—on Friday nights, ducking our shoulders to avoid brushing against people pouring out of the glass elevators and walking out into the evening.