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,NEW LIFE 'O LD A ._ ;Y'VE GOT FOUNTAINS, HANGING ~ ~ 11, (~ zs and ice rinks, and if you stay in •~! ., • 4 long enough you may eventually ~chita Lineman' res noareld woe le 0 but most shopping ~ ~•, just vast sheds that consumers through until, with nothing left to r. .`_J they are spit out into th ekato desert '° ~_ ~ __ ~~ nder people are so 9u down the - hen abigger one opens up :host malls are no longer a rare sight ,rice, phoenix has at least two, in- one right across the street from 1 of its largest office buildings. But ~d they occupy can. with some inge- nd alot of money, become the nude- . real neighborhood, an architectural Went rather than a hulking blight. process is happening first with strip ing centers, which are usually older nclosed malls and less complex azchi- ~ ': ally. The first step is to transcend the of a "shopping center" as a group- ~elated stores m the middle of a '~'°''~ ig Iot. That pretty much described the ""~ Seabury Shopping Center, a dreary era strip mall on a busy highway in In Portland, Ore., these commuters are choosing to ride the rails Cod, Mass., about 70 miles from Bos- ~ decade ago, the ° ~erent schemte, ~elop it on a radically pled on a New England town. New is were laid out in what had been the Ong lot; new shops were built in the acted area behind the existing ones. A ~az development plan was drawn up, ;inning a substantial community; of- alibrary, achurch and a seluor-citi- ' home have already been built. Irking was redistributed along the •s of the new internal streets. This es for some congestion and inefficien- rut lessens the frustration of trudging v long aisles of parked cars toward a ant mall entrance. Developer Douglas Ts says that shoppers find the strength vallc as much as half a mile down the ~wallcs of what is now called Mashpee nalons, passing shop windows, benches l planters. The same people reach the :shold of exasperation when they have nark more than 400 feet from the door to ordinary mall. les, including there are other examp r pazk, ~ Boca Raton, Fla., where a shopping center was replaced with a acre mixed-use development organized Lund a new public park. To be sure, not developers will be this ambitious witl :ir properties. But as a first step, hidinf ugly collection of Dumpsters and load docks on the backsides of strip mall: uld eliminate a lot of suburban blight. PLAN FOR MASS TRANSIT Is there any way to get Americans out of their 10 cars and into buses and trains? In Los Angeles, not even an earthquake sufficed; many S b der t eir cent of drivers switched toem~assand most of them freeways fell down la as soon as the roads were went right back to driving patched up. The problem is that transit seems to need a cri~ti' ce mass to work, and many metropolitan areas (Los g les among them) are just too spreads utd.~Manyo ~~~n ers seem to think that >_f you have , p oui to station anyway, you might as well 'ust kee g ' g the ofFice.Caltho ~ e's idea for the "pedestrian pocket": a Hence ~ carter-mile walk relatively dense settleom land Ot re , ~ey're building the of a transit stop. In P , transit line first-putting stops literally in the oddment empty fields - in the expectation that the develop ' will follow C MAY 15, 1995 NEWSWF.F.X 51