The Muse and the Mall

Shopping, loneliness and the glory of a kids' museum.

A dog waits for its owner in Factoria Mall's parking lot | photo by Greg Plumis

Factoria Mall exists inside the faintly beating heart of a Bellevue interurban area known for its concentration of bargain-driven retailers. Like many suburban regional malls of seven hundred thousand square feet or less, Factoria has become something of a relic — a reminder of a shopping culture that has gone out of fashion in favor of the “mixed-use” model. “Mixed use,” in architecture-speak, refers to a single place where people meet, shop and live. A mixed-use building is no longer zoned for purely commercial or purely residential endeavors, but functions as a microcosm of the city block, complete with shops, restaurants and services at street level and homes above them. On a recent visit the corridors were haunted by a few of the mall’s reported ninety-two thousand value-hungry weekly visitors. Plastic bags rustled and echoed out of sight.There was the waft of industrial-strength cleanser, buffet food and recycled air. Justine at Nordstrom Rack lip-synched a Tears for Fears song as she realigned a sale rack. Shana at Arts West Unique Gifts had trouble printing her bank statements but delighted in showing a customer crushed-marble and resin box figurines from Harmony Kingdom. A busser at Old Country Buffet told a patron, “No trays here,” and a fish expert at Petco clearly demonstrated her vast knowledge of black mystery snails. At Goldberg’s Famous Deli, the host admits he cannot really say why the deli is famous.

A sedate soundtrack echoed off the walls of the mall, yet there was also the unmistakable sound of children at play. Where were they? Turns out, the kids were swarming inside a remarkable institution, unknown to many Seattleites, called the KidsQuest museum. One of the most promising children’s museums in the state, KidsQuest is a sure indicator that even an outdated mall can become a place for new life the same way an old hollow tree is perfect for bees.
 
“Each nook and cranny of KidsQuest offers an unexpected delight,” says the museum’s brochure, “each visit a new discovery. Come visit today and explore these exciting exhibits!” It seems both incongruous and brilliant to locate KidsQuest inside Factoria Mall. If malls are, as William Severini Kowinski once wrote in The Malling of America, like “TV you can walk around in,” KidsQuest is prime-time interactivity.

KidsQuest was founded in 2005 across from the mall’s Petco — the same year Kimco purchased the mall for $102 million. To understand the museum, one must experience it. “A common misconception is that we are an indoor playground,” says one of the museum’s three Sarahs. “Not really the case. All of our exhibits are educationally based.”

At KidsQuest, many parents remain stiff as their children lose themselves in themed sections of the museum. One mother looks around, not really sure what to do with herself. Another relaxes when she realizes that, for the most part, the exhibits are built for safety, not mayhem, though mayhem seems apparent. One kid builds a blanket fort in the Backyard. Two little girls play peek-a-boo through the circular see-through cutout of the Treehouse floor. In Waterways,  serious civil engineering potential is evinced by an articulated pipe sculpture that channels water from a fountain. A boy and a girl race to see who can stuff a spaghetti of pneumatic tubes with the most pieces of fabric, each piece getting sucked up and spit out in unpredictable places. Another girl hoists herself into the cab of a truck and starts a long imaginary road trip.

The remarkable, healing, energizing effect of free play lights up the museum, unencumbered by the rules of commerce that govern the mall. You would not even know a mall was outside, or that Mervyns once occupied the space just beyond the museum’s entrance.

In a way, malls are museums, too. Factoria Mall holds a kind of sweet, melancholy memory of innocent teenage Orange Julius binges and crushes on Regis hairstylists.Yet ultimately malls are museums of material fascination which do not generally inspire a more grounded being the way KidsQuest does. Malls mostly fail the muse part of the word museum, and are more like reliquaries of human longing.

Mall shops call to us and make us feel important. We are repeatedly and sensually solicited every twelve paces. “When we get home from the mall, we tell the family, ‘I was shopping,’” writes James J. Farrell in One Nation Under Goods. “It’s not just a matter of choosing items and paying for them; it’s an act of desire that is shaped individually and culturally, an interaction with shops and with a complex infrastructure of production and distribution.”

The average Factoria shopper makes about $40,000 a year. Half are married and a third have kids, in a mixed neighborhood of mostly Asians and whites. Once a thriving destination, the mall is now starting to resemble what retail industry folk call a “greyfield.” Its dearth of exterior aesthetic and sprawling parking lot are telltale signs of the greyfield. Yet inside, the greyfield effect is interrupted by chance encounters with some of the merchants who have real local history: Andy’s Watch Repair, Factoria Shoe Repair, Arts West Unique Gifts.

Factoria Mall is a distant relation to what Victor Gruen, a Viennese émigré and inventor of the indoor mall in America, had in mind after he failed to make it in cabaret and started building shops for his Jewish friends in New York back in the 1930s. The postwar prosperity of the 1950s led the way to more extravagant shopping environments until white flight to the suburbs and automobile hegemony combined to create forty-five thousand shopping malls in this country, eleven hundred of which are enclosed, like Factoria.

Today more than ten million people work in malls and more than a trillion dollars is spent in them annually. In the U.S., malls outnumber high schools. Nevertheless, since the mid-90s a reverse flight back into mixed-use “lifestyle” centers is turning many regional suburban malls into fixer-uppers, hence Kimco’s plans for Factoria. By 2011 the owners hope to transform the mall into a mixed-use center called Marketplace @ Factoria.

Kowinski wrote that the mall “is our latest attempt to cure the great endemic American disease of loneliness.” Perhaps the trend toward mixed-use marketplaces is evidence that the cure did not work, that the mall still feels lonely no matter how crowded the parking lot. As they turn into greyfields, some malls will be demolished in favor of entirely new structures. For others, their structures will be preserved but the interiors reinvented, revived, inhabited by new imaginations — like those thriving inside the KidsQuest Museum, where children squeal, hide, find, paint, celebrate birthdays, vote for their favorite dinosaurs and discover how ordinary things — like pots, pans and blankets — might help them enter the museums in their own minds.