A Little More Panache, Please

Dear Macerich;

Thanks for the invite to your recent “Looking Ahead With Broadway Plaza” open house meetings. How nice of you to invite us locals to “Come share ideas about ways we can continue to update and improve Broadway Plaza.”

You sure came to the right person. But as luck would have it the meetings were scheduled for the very week I was attending my high-school reunion back East. Isn’t that always the way?  You keep an opinion bottled up inside all these years and when you finally get the chance to say it, you have to go to Jersey City. 

I emailed you like you said to but I haven’t heard back. But I guess your inbox gets pretty full. So here goes.

 I like to shop. I like to walk. I live in walking distance of Broadway Plaza but I never walk there. I never shop there. It is just too boring.Store after store of either Gap Republic  or Juicy Victoria. See’s and Sephora. JCrew and JJill.  Candy and candles. How can there be so much there without anything being there at all? 

Walnut Creek’s been hard at it trying to shed its staid suburban rep for a more sophisticated urban vibe. Broadway Plaza, you’re not helping things here. You’ve given us many of the same chain stores one would find at the Great Mall of America in Minnesota. Or closer to home, Sunvalley Mall. 

I get hoof and mall disease at Broadway Plaza. My eyes glaze over, my mind numbs and I have to will my legs to keep walking instead of buckling under me like a dead horse.  The sight of all that blandness is blinding. I want to shop till I drop but not from boredom.

When I shop – even if I’m just window shopping, which I mostly am — I want to enjoy the experience. I want my senses to be engaged and delighted by seeing interesting, wonderful things artfully arranged for my visual pleasure. I enter each shop hoping for a refreshing immersion into an environment uniquely different than the store next store or down the street. I want to be charmed into an exuberance that carries me along until I’ve seen everything there is to see.

So I go to Rockridge to shop. Along College Avenue I might step into Atomic Garden, the earthy boutique partly owned by the wife of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. Or I’ll head down to Bella Vita, a crafty blend of vintage and local designer chic, and many other shops whose names I can’t recall but are just part of a fun shopping expedition.

I realize Broadway Plaza’s rents are way too steep for a unique boutique. It’s gotta be chain stores.  And believe it or not, I am OK with chain stores as long as they’re interesting. Another place I love to shop is upper Fillmore Street in San Francisco.  Sprinkled in among the ravishingly gorgeous women’s clothing boutiques with fabrics so exquisite they could make you weep are – yes — chain stores. But these are chain stores worthy of some love.

Why can’t we have a Jonathan Adler with the quirky white ceramics and Mad Men retro mod furniture? Or a Zinc Details with the chic Euro-style housewares? Or how about a Marc Jacobs?  The clothes are edgy and the trinkets in the front of the store are fun.

Or consider Berkeley’s Fourth Street shopping district. There you’ve got an eclectic mix of individual shops sprinkled in with the typical Crate & Barrel stores. But they’ve also got a CB2, Crate & Barrel’s new fun spin-off. Can we have one too, please?

Hey, I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. Broadway Plaza has pretty flowers and those nice fountains. Broadway Plaza is clean. Broadway Plaza is orderly. And maybe Neiman Marcus will be so fashion forward that it will make everyone else up their game. Or maybe it will just be another expensive department store with predictable stuff.

And I’ll continue to be grateful for the tax revenue Broadway Plaza generates for my community.  And I’ll continue to go elsewhere to shop.

Thank you for this opportunity to express my thoughts.  See you at the next meeting.