Woo-hoo! New shopping mall!

Well, okay, maybe only "Woo", or possibly half-a-Woo. One of the two big shopping malls opening in Richmond this month opened today. The Short Pump Town Center is big and flashy, all right, and brings some stores and restaurants to Richmond that haven't been here before. But it's oddly designed, and today was a good day to show off the flaws.

The mall is designed to bring back memories of old-time small-town town centers - storefronts to look like different buildings, a band-shell for concerts, open-air walking - and the mall is not enclosed. As a result, as you're walking from store to store, you're outside. That's fine on a nice spring or fall day, but what if it's raining, or snowing, or 100 degrees? Well, a lot of the walkways are covered - but not all of them, and the covering is strangely incomplete. You can walk under cover along half a "block" of buildings, and come to a covered crosswalk which goes to the other side of the open space. If you stay on the same side, though, the cover goes away, and if you want to get to any of the stores on the remaining half-block, there's no cover for you. If it's raining as hard as it was this afternoon (during the storm which produced a tornado in the county to the south), you'll have the choice of opening your umbrella or getting drenched. Or, of course, not going to that store, which ought to delight the store manager.

So once you've gotten "inside" the mall, you cannot get to all of the stores without exposing yourself to the elements, and you cannot even get from one end of the mall to the other without being rained or snowed upon (in the appropriate weather). And do you really want to have your paper store bags rained on as you're going from store to store, and end up wondering whether they're going to disintegrate before you get back to the car? I can't believe that anyone thought about any of this when the mall was at the design stage.

The Streets at South Point mall in Durham, NC, which opened in 2002, does a much better job of capturing the feel of a town square, with different shop fronts and an overlying theme of shops built in old warehouses (complete with stressed-looking bricks and faux weather-faded tobacco and patent medicine advertisements). Old time street lamps and park benches add to the atmosphere. But the mall is enclosed, so you don't have to worry about buttoning up your coat to go from one store to another in the winter, or bringing an umbrella to go shopping at the mall.

Bottom line: I'm not impressed by the design and layout of this new mall, I'm not especially impressed by the stores in the mall. Once all the restaurants open, I think there'll be a couple I want to check out, like the Copper Grill lobster and steak house, the Firebirds Rocky Mountain grill (this is their third restaurant in the country, and the second is in the South Point mall in Durham), and Maggiano's Italian restaurant. I won't downgrade the mall for not having any movie theaters, when the Short Pump theater complex is only 100 yards away (as the crow flies; a mile and a half and 25 minutes if the crow has to drive a car). When the restaurants open up, I'll be back. Until then, I probably won't.