Permanent Galleria

I've long subscribed to the conventional wisdom that shopping malls have historically failed in Manhattan because malls require car-centric suburban density to thrive. Compact, crowded, pedestrian-based urban environments don't need malls -- they have sidewalks!

But it only takes about fifteen minutes walking around the Central or Kowloon districts of Hong Kong to explode that theory. Here you have an urban environment that's even denser than Manhattan's, and it's absolutely teeming with malls. You literally can't avoid going to the mall here. I found myself at least a half dozen times accidentally stumbling into a mall. I'd take a pedestrian underpass under a busy street, and suddenly: Armani! Calvin Klein! Prada!

Mall designers in the States are famous for concealing the exits to their shopping environments, to ensure that folks make one more lap past the tantalizing windows before they find the parking elevators. Here in Hong Kong, they've reversed that principle: instead of hiding the exits, they've expanded the entrances. If you want to go to a mall in Manhattan, you have to truly apply yourself. Here, you just have to walk a block or two, and you'll collide with one.

I suppose the malls are actually, in a funny way, a reflection of the greater density: once you get to a certain extreme density, the sidewalk alone can't handle the flow of people, and so you have to stack the sidewalks and pedestrian commerce vertically. And once you start stacking shops on top of each other, you've got a mall.

Comments

[yellowhandman]

just wondering : have you ever visited singapore? it would be an interesting comparison to hong kong. and yes, we love our malls here, too.

[Gary Chapman]

I went to Singapore before I went to Hong Kong, and I found the two cities comparable in this particular feature -- their malls, in the way that Steven describes them. Like him, I was struck by this particular aspect of both cities, and I'm not quite sure why.

In Hong Kong, I stayed in a place -- university housing, actually -- that required me to walk through a mall every time I left the building, which was very strange. And it was one of the biggest malls in Hong Kong, so it was an experience of leaving a small, Manhattan-sized apartment and then traversing through a cavernous, packed and raucous shopping space.

The other thing that Steven may experience, being in Hong Kong at this particular time of the year, is that people in Hong Kong are mad for Christmas. A zillion Santas, Christmas music wherever you go, every conceivable kind of Christmas decoration in the malls. But very quickly it becomes apparent that Christmas is mostly an excuse for shopping. . . in the malls, of course.

[istoica]

In Toronto the Eatons Center acts as a respite from the cold weather. The mall becomes an avenue of art, especially as Christmas time comes around.... Santa with all his reindeer hang in all their glory juxtaposed with Michael Snow's Canadian Geese. It's best view after closing when its dead empty. :)

[John Branch]

I was recently in Paris, looking for one of its arcades, when I stumbled across another one. Essentially the same experience Steven had, and of much the same thing, since a mall is a much bigger version of an arcade--a set of shops under one roof.

The arcades have been around for more than two centuries. (I have a side-by-side picture showing one today and in 1908, along with a very brief historical note, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/52044955@N00/69870741/.) As for why such things aren't found in Manhattan, I have little idea. But there are some things that Manhattan relegates to other boroughs and outlying areas; no one expects to find an airport in Manhattan, after all. And you could say that themed zones such as the photo district and the diamond district are specialized arcades without the covered street; Fifth Avenue is already a mall without the roof.

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