| Last April, on a visit to the new Mall
of America near Minneapolis, I carried with me a small book provided for the
reporters by the public relations office. It included a variety of "fun facts"
about the mall, such as: 140,000 hot dogs am sold each week, there are 10,000
full-time jobs, 44 sets of moving stairs and 17 lifts, 12,750 parking places,
13,000 tons of steel, and ＄ I million is drawn weekly from 8 ATMs. Opened in the
summer of 1992, the mall was built where the former Minneapolis Stadium had
been. It was only a five-minute drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul International
Airport. With 4.2 million square feet of floor space--22 times the size of the
average American shopping center--the Mall of America was the largest shopping
and family recreation center under one roof in the United States. I knew already that the Mall of America had been imagined by its designers, not merely as a marketplace, but as a national tourist attraction. Eleven thousand articles, the small book informed me, had been written about the mall. Four hundred trees had been planted in its gardens, ＄625 million had been spent to build it, and 350 stores were already in business. Three thousand bus tours were expected each year along with a half-million Canadian visitors and 200,000 Japanese tourists. Sales were expected to be at ＄650 million for 1993 and at ＄1 billion for 1996. Pop singers and film stars such as Janet Jackson and Arnold Schwarzenegger had visited the mall. It was five times larger than Red Square and it included 2.3 miles of hallways and used almost twice as much steel as the Eiffel Tower. It was also home to the nation's largest indoor park, called Knott's Camp Snoopy. |