After picking fights with irate self-absorbed dog owners, I finally decided to check out the Americana in Glendale. My honorary title of Captain Obvious only permits me to offer up one comment: Yup, it’s a shopping mall. Still, it’s a shopping mall that’s fully 21st century buzzword compliant. Walking around the place you can easily visualize the individual layers in every engineering drawing of the place. Here’s the implicit “public space.” “Luxury condos” up here. A marinade of “new urbanism” over there. A blanket mist of “mixed use” over the whole area. If that doesn’t make the point for you then the ear-splitting background music will certainly enforce it. I’m serious here – the Americana’s background muzak is set to somewhere between “stun” and “kill.”
The Americana is eye pleasing, but not terribly different from the Grove, Santana Row, or any other kind of downtown redevelopment that skips around the “Olde Towne” prefix. The old Glendale Galleria is still there of course – cast aside to the back of the driveway like a hulking old beater car that’s been replaced by spiffy retrofuture-mobile.
The ads and the ambient branding for the Excelsior condos remind me way too much of the Longfellow poem “Excelsior.” In the poem, Longfellow describes a young man passing through a town on his way up into the mountains. His only possession, a banner with the words “Excelsior.” The locals warn him anyway from the dangerous mountain pass, but the young man ignores them and continues his climb until eventually he is found frozen to death in the snow, still grasping “the banner with the strange device, Excelsior!”
The poem describes a young man passing through a town bearing the banner “Excelsior” (translated from Latin as “ever higher”, also loosely but more widely as “onward and upward”), ignoring all warnings, climbing higher until inevitably, “lifeless, but beautiful” he is found by the “faithful hound” half-buried in the snow, “still clasping in his hands of ice that banner with the strange device, Excelsior!”
Irony Department on the phone? Perhaps. I do wonder about the wisdom of opening luxury shopping malls in economic uncertainty. The press release fanfare piles on the Tinker Bell clapping. Still, I keep picturing the Americana – dead empty except for some graffiti on the Excelsior sales office.
There, in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!
