MOA - December 31, 2011

It was a lovely dusk at the dog park, and the same this morning when we went for our walk. About the same as yesterday, with a high a little above 40°F. Nondescript weather. Then about 8:30 tonight it began to snow, as we were coming back from a New Years Eve party. By the time we got home, it was sticking. A quick, dense burst of snowfall, and finally it's properly winter again. We'll have cold again tomorrow and wind. I'll need the parka, and the boiled-wool jacket will be back in the closet again.

This afternoon, I took Daniel to Mall of America, the largest enclosed shopping center in the United States (and getting bigger: a hotel is being added to its south front). Traffic was not as bad as one might expect on a holiday Saturday. Perhaps people were still a little spooked by the melée that broke out at the mall last Monday, the day Christmas was observed.

Minnesota used to take no small pride in its indoor spaces. They were the first site of an enclosed mall, at Southdale Center in 1956. We have the Minneapolis and St Paul downtown habitrail skyway system. We've had an indoor dome for football and baseball.

But something has happened over the last decade or so. I think the first realization, which happened pretty early, was that the Metrodome was a lousy place to watch a baseball game, especially on those perfect summer evenings we treasure here. Then street life began to outstrip the skyways as the salient feature of downtown Minneapolis, and to some extent St Paul.

The Mall of America continues to dominate, though, and many of the other regional malls continue to do just fine, thank you. The original four "Dales" (Southdale, Ridgedale, Rosedale and Brookdale) were later joined by Eden Prairie Center, Burnsville Center, and Maplewood Center. But after that, a funny thing happened. The new retail centers of the last 20 years were open-air experiments of various kinds: "lifestyle centers", "new main streets" and similar new-urbanism-ish shopping areas.

This year, Brookdale, which had been fading for some time, is finally being torn down. It joined the metro area's second enclosed mall (and the one nearest to us), Apache Plaza, which was torn down in 2004.

The fact is, after the novelty fades, all these indoor spaces eventually elicit strongly mixed emotions, based largely on their artificiality, the way they are cut off from the "real world." Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is stifling. Will this ever happen to the Mall of America? It's consistently kept ahead of the jaded consumer factor: it adds just enough and promotes just enough to not be too passe for most visitors—and the MOA gets 40 million visits a year, almost eight times the population of Minnesota.

As it gets seriously cold (and it will, eventually, get down below zero here), I think not so much of the mall as of conservatories. St Paul has an absolutely wonderful one, the Marjorie Neely Conservatory in Como Park. It feels so wonderfully green and alive, in all of one's senses, especially in February, when the outdoors seem not only dead but deadly.

And I'm fondly remembering the gardens that used to sit on the top floor of Town Square, an enclosed shopping mall in downtown St Paul. It's a non-descript space now, no longer used as a park, but in the 1980's and 1990's, I at least thought it was magical.

I think the difference in reaction between the two is simple: one give us what we think we want, and one gives what we really need, to relieve us from the stresses of the weather.