He’s authentically disappointed
New lifestyle center brings the retail experience to a faux town setting
When I was growing up, the interior of my local Western Massachusetts mall was designed to look like a quaint, old-timey village. I ate up the village motif like it was one of the Happy Ending sundaes at Friendly’s, which was conveniently located in the food court. Instead of my scary hometown, where thugs sat on the wall in front of the YMCA and storefronts were dark and lifeless, the mall was bustling, climate controlled, and I could buy Eurythmics records and sweat shirts at Chess King to my heart’s content. To my teenage brain, the mall was better than real life.
I had forgotten about my favorite mall as a teen and its contrast with real life until earlier this week when I was walking around Legacy Place in Dedham, a recently opened lifestyle center that’s a hybrid of shopping mall and town center. Al fresco lifestyle center sounds so much more flowery and posh than the humdrum malls of yore.
Dedham’s new retail extravaganza primarily consists of national chains - Banana Republic, Apple, Victoria’s Secret - along with a sprinkling of locally owned shops. It’s topped with a high-end bowling alley, and a cineplex. If you don’t mind waiting an hour, you can even dine on delicacies from the Far East, meaning lettuce wraps at P.F. Chang’s.
I am a sucker for lettuce wraps, but there is something about Legacy Place that felt hollow to me. A circle of stores around a mammoth parking lot doesn’t scream “special’’ or “authentic,’’ even when anchored by L.L. Bean and Whole Foods. I’m not picking on Legacy Place. These lifestyle centers are popping up at a rapid clip all over the country. Boston may have shown up late to the party because of our Siberian winters, but we’re catching up. They are now fixtures from Burlington to Hingham.
There’s no denying that the setup is convenient. If I were a Westwood dad, I could easily park, dump the kids at
“Lifestyle centers are little more than indoor shopping malls turned inside out, then atmospherically enhanced as if by a set designer with market umbrellas, cobblestone ‘streets,’ ‘antique’ lampposts,’’ says Lee Eisenberg, author of the recently published “Shoptimism.’’ “Their growth and apparent popularity is unquestionably related to how predictable and sterile the old-style indoor mall had become. Authentic? Hardly. But their appeal strikes me as solid evidence that a great many of us had gotten climate-controlled to the point of oxygen-starvation, and that we are yearning somehow to return to a kinder, gentler way of shopping - even though we know it’s fake.’’
It’s sad that we’re so starved for authentic, town-center shopping experiences that we’ve turned to parking lots surrounded by chain stores. Legacy Place was mobbed when I visited, and this is with the Christmas shopping season a few weeks away. Deborah Martin, an associate professor at the Clark University Graduate School of Geography, explains that this phenomenon is partially dictated by cost. Developers can snap up cheap parcels of land and then control everything about them, including who loiters (or doesn’t loiter) and the mix of tenants. Along with their limited parking, downtowns cannot exert strict control over the mix of tenants or the customer base.
Boston-based real estate economist Mark Hickey, with the firm PPR Global, said that tenants within lifestyle centers also have a greater say over who is located next to them, and most of them have studied which competitors actually help boost business.
“It’s similar to studies that have found that McDonald’s does better when there’s a Burger King nearby,’’ he explains. “H&M knows the right mix of stores to have nearby in order to generate the right amount of foot traffic.’’
All of which is fantastic for H&M, but not so fantastic for those of us looking for new or interesting shops. Day-to-day life is routine enough, shopping should at least offer a hint of escapism.
Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com. 
