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IT'S TUESDAY afternoon in Herald Square. Inside the giant corner window of Herald Center, the area's new,10-story shopping complex, a mime in a tie-dyed clown suit plays herroutine to the strains of Sade's "Smooth Operator." In the lobby, models promenade, showing their wares to the consumers who wander about the center's eight selling floors.
Outside the big window, a street-corner evangelist has turned up the volume on his portable amplifier, delivering a competing message of salvation to the lunchtime stragglers browsing among the earrings, necklaces, mufflers and gloves sold by the peddlers gathered there.
Is this just an amusing study in contrasts, one of those paradoxes that makes New York life so interesting? Or is it a portent of things to come? The verdict is still out, because while some urban shopping complexes are doing a bustling business at full occupancy, others are having problems with the one-stop-shopping approach in the city.
When Donald Trump announced that he had purchased the old Bonwit Teller Building with air rights to the space over the adjacent Tiffany & Co. and was planning to build a towering shopping-residential complex, the pundits laughed. New Yorkers love the street life, they warned. Manhattanites and indoor malls would never mix.
Today, a little more than two years after the Trump Tower Atrium opened its shop doors, it's Trump's turn to laugh. Uptown and downtown, homogeneous shopping areas like the Atrium, Herald Center, Itokin Plaza, The Market at Citicorp (New York's first large-scale development to mix retailing with open public areas), Park Avenue Plaza and South Street Seaport's Pier 17 are, indeed, bringing New York's shoppers in off the streets. Once inside, they get to sample the complicated mixture of mercantilism, culture, cuisine, ambience and climate-control-led security that is the big city's version of the suburban mall.
THE VERTICAL shopping complex is a relatively new phenomenon on the urban horizon, with Water Tower Place in Chicago generally credited with starting the trend when it was built in 1976. One observer likens the structures to a suburban mall standing on end, but whatever the image, the complexes are playing a major role in the revival of America's cities. They offer, some observers say, a profitable way out for individual retailers plagued by...