I was reading in a recent edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the Galleria shopping mall has instituted a chaperone/curfew thing, and they have highly publicized it in an attempt to more quickly go out of business.
I say this not because I think unsupervised teens spend mad mall money; in fact, I imagine teens are actually terrible customers, just going to the mall to roam around in indecent clothing and listen to that hippity-hop music too loud on their confounded i-Pop contraptions and talk about YouTubes.
The thing is, the Galleria alerted the media, ostensibly in the hope that older, upscale customers would respond to the information by saying, “Hmm! The mall is safe for us crusty, mature consumers again,” but I contend that those people listened to this news and distinctly heard, “people are getting murdered at the Galleria every day.”
Which is not remotely true, incidentally. As far as I can tell, the Galleria has experienced two noteworthy incidents in the last year: a lengthy scuffle in November and a teen shouting match at the beginning of this month. (Two more than usual, yes, but one year not too long ago the dishwasher at the Galleria Houlihan’s carjacked a patron, and they didn’t respond by closing down all their restaurants.) The key words above are “two,” “scuffle,” and “shouting.”
Last weekend at the grocery store, the day the story broke, I heard the following conversation between two cashiers:
“You can’t go to the mall anymore, squirt.”
“What?”
“Kids can’t go to the Galleria anymore.”
“Yes they can!”
“Dude, it’s right there on the front page of the paper.”
(glances at paper) “Aw, man! I can’t even go to the mall anymore! That sucks. I guess it’s because of all the gang fights they’ve been having there. My brother’s friend heard shots fired a couple weeks ago.”
“Shots?!”
“Well, somebody had to kill that leopard.”
In a neighborhood not too far from my own, there was once a part of town called Gaslight Square. In the early sixties, it would not be unreasonable to say that this neighborhood was on the cusp of becoming one of America’s hippest cultural hotspots (see the link if you think I’m blowing smoke). Gaslight Square vanished like the Roanoke Colony only a few years after its heyday. When you read first person accounts of its decline, crime is always cited as the reason, but not in the way you’d think. The way it’s remembered by the people who were there, people stopped coming to Gaslight Square not because there was an increase in crime, but because there was a single shooting a block away that the local media reported like a Son of Sam murder spree. It was the appearance of a crime spree that killed the business. The Galleria could have learned a valuable lesson from this, if it weren’t for the fact that nobody remembers Gaslight Square existed.
April 6th, 2007 at 11:28 am
That’s the nature of it. I live in downtown Minneapolis, not too far from the downtown drinking district where people hankering for downtown partying head to every weekend. A few months ago, someone was shot - rather randomly, down there. Now, it is a police state on the weekend as the city tries to keep up the perception of safety and keep the drunken money rolling in. Nonetheless, people will talk about how dangerous it is, even though people are much more likely to be killed on the drive to downtown (even before they’ve been drinking) than while they are actually downtown. Interestingly enough, people are spending more time going to gigantic clubs in the exburbs (even further out suburb) - which they often have to drive greater distances for. This increases their risk of actual injury or death as opposed to just going downtown - especially if drinking and driving. Yet, “safety” will be a given reason for going to these distant clubs.
It just highlights that people don’t think rationally about risk. If they did, we’d be pumping much more resources into highway safety, for example (about 50,000/ year die on America’s highways), and less into other stuff.
April 17th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Jim,
You are right on about this one. The Post-Dispatch article in 2015 will read: “Whether business declined at the Galleria because of the closure of Highway 40 or because of a wave of juvenile crime there beginning in 2006, the fact remains that it will be imploded today to be replaced by a Save-a-lot and a Check Cashing Emporium.”
Actually, to be correct, I should hope that by 2015, we’ll be calling it “the New I-64.”
April 17th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Why do you hope that??
I don’t need these out-of-towners cruising into my city, telling me what to call my ****ing highway after thirty-five years. It’s 40. Yankee, go home!