With the opening of the Americana at Brand just over a week away, the national press is starting to take notice.Editor's note (2008/04/27): More stories from the Los Angeles Times in Friday's business section (looking at the financial prospects for the new complex and for the city of Glendale) and in today's Image section (focusing on the shopping experience).
In today's New York Times, Mike Albo writes in the Fashion and Style section about his impressions about visiting the Grove at Farmer's Market.
An excerpt:
The Grove opened next to the gracefully old Farmers Market in 2002, the brainchild of Caruso Affiliated and its chief executive, Rick J. Caruso, a government commissioner turned real estate developer. The 575,000-square-foot retail park quickly became a much needed public space in this coiffed yet lonely city. According to Caruso Affiliated, 18 million people visit annually and spend an average of $169 per visit. This seemed like an outlandish number until I realized I had spent $83 on Kiehl’s moisturizer in under an hour, and trust me, I am always on the pathetic end of any income statistic.
With its old-time trolley, jazzy music, familiar storefronts and manufactured midcentury nostalgia, the Grove, as is often pointed out, borrows much of its aesthetic from Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.
But if Walt were to return from the dead and take a tour, he would freak out. There are no signs for milkshakes or hot dogs or Mickey Mouse ears here. In this happy consumer village, desires are organized by brand and brand alone, and unless you are familiar with the Nike swoosh, the Gap’s blue square or Crate & Barrel’s clean logo, you will walk around shoeless, naked, with no respectable flatware.
Sure, the Grove is creepy and fake, but at least it’s honest about it. Nearly every week we are shown a new computer-rendered architectural plan of a super futuristic building designed by Santiago Calatrava or Zaha Hadid and are told we are looking at the future. But as long as we continue barreling along our path of unmitigated consumerism, the future will not look smooth, white and sleek. It will look like the Grove: a Frankensteinian hodgepodge of branded facades that we walk into and out of, forgetfully.
The article concludes with a mention of the new shopping complex in Glendale:
[The] Americana at Brand will have luxury homes above the stores. Residents will be able to use their key cards to buy goods, order food from restaurants, have their dry cleaning delivered. It sounds like another preposterous place I know, named Manhattan.
Meanwhile, in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, columnist Steve Lopez weighs in on the new shopping complex:Americana is clearly a first cousin of the Grove, except that it's not just a destination, but an address, with 238 apartments and 100 condos (priced from $700,000 to $2.4 million) built into an upscale village Caruso says he modeled on Madison Avenue in New York and Newbury Street in Boston.
The stores include Barneys New York, Juicy Couture, Anthropologie -- the kind of places that will "redefine" the retail experience in Glendale, my guide [Caruso] explained. A two-car trolley will transport shoppers through an undisturbed dream of consumptive indulgence, a movie-set reality dressed up with an 18-screen theater, dancing fountain and massive outdoor crystal chandelier.
"We're trying to re-create urban living, where it's nice and luxurious," Caruso said as we came upon a European-style entryway to the Marc, an apartment building he said is inspired in part by the Four Seasons Resort in Maui. It has a "Caruso Affiliated" symbol blazed into the ground like a medallion. For the busy professional just home from work, he told me, there will be a concierge to answer every need.
[snip]
What I like about Caruso is that he is unabashed and unapologetic.
And judging by his success, more of the world shares his taste than mine.
But here's my question: Where do all these shoppers come from? There isn't an unlimited pool of people who can afford places like Americana on Brand or the Grove. So you have to think they're just luring people away from some other shopping spot, including more authentic cityscapes like Larchmont Village or Montrose's Honolulu Avenue.
Caruso has told me he admires those more organic commercial zones, but he is in a very different business. Caruso builds monuments to Western civilization, and while some might find the Americana at Brand a soul-sapping contrivance of nostalgia and patriotism, the masses will undoubtedly flock there.
The truth is that I occasionally go to the Grove, which my daughter loves (though not as much as we both love the adjacent Farmers Market). I could imagine her running across the Green at the Americana too, as I reluctantly surrender my stuffy inhibition, knowing that with several more mega-projects in the works after this one, soon the matter will be indisputable.
It's Caruso's world, and we just live in it.
Two critical views of Caruso and his visions of the shopping experience. Of course, there are probably more to come. But as Lopez points out, it will be the people who decide the fate of the new shopping complex with their pocketbooks, and all the bad reviews and criticism in the press won't make any difference.
Top photograph by Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times
