Suburban Soul Man
Ron Sher thought he could build a community around an ugly, failing shopping mall. Is he nuts?
Crossroads “had the only interesting urban energy in Bellevue, and we felt that that was a plus,” Sher explains. “We felt that if we could just become a fun community gathering place, a place for everybody to hang out and visit—the concept of the public market—it would really give us an identity and it would give people a reason to come here.” To that end, he programmed free events such as live music every Friday and Saturday night. Years before ethnic food courts became ubiquitous, he founded one with independent eateries rather than mall chains. He brought in civic institutions: a King County Library branch, a police substation, and a satellite city hall with services in nine foreign languages.
More counterintuitively, Sher actively encouraged people to use the mall for noncommercial activities, organized and ad hoc. One end of the food court became a kind of public living room, anchored by a giant chess set. A passerby might encounter half a dozen multinational chess matches, a free ESL class for food-court workers, a crocheting circle, or a meeting of Bikers Against Child Abuse. Aficionados show up for a Dungeons and Dragons club, a farmers market, Sahaja Yoga Meditation, and Mandarin Story Time at the library. All this activity has helped bring business to tenants that now include Michael’s, Old Navy, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Equally important for Sher, it has made the neighborhood a more vital, cohesive place.
“You create connections,” he explains. The thought behind the free events is, “How do you make a community work better for everybody in it, and how do you make it stronger? If you do that, people get it, they know whether you’re sincere. And it acts as the glue that brings the place together, and it promotes the retail, and it does it in a way that is not predatory.”
Not that other shopping centers are “predatory,” Sher hastens to add. But Ethan Kent, a vice president at the New York–based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces (on whose board Sher sits), notes that there is a clear difference in the ways Crossroads and more traditional malls like -Bellevue Square engage the public: Most mall developers understandably start with the retail, even when they incorporate all the latest hyphenated urbanist concepts: mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented, human-scaled. “Many are moving toward lifestyle centers, which try to mimic downtowns but are still very controlled and private and retail-driven,” Kent says. “The luxury retail model has definitely dominated a lot of mixed-use, upscale development. Where Crossroads is inspiring is that it’s a viable retail model that can appeal to a diverse population…. It starts with the public spaces.”
However much sprawled-out suburbs crave third places, Kent says, the place-making business has focused instead on urban cores such as downtown Bellevue and Redmond Town Center. But while these renovated downtowns may look more like “real cities” than Crossroads (whose physical plant is still, inescapably, a hulking old-school mall), Crossroads in many ways functions more like a city—a place of cultural and class mixing, perhaps even social and aesthetic surprise. Where else on the Eastside can you see Sikhs enjoying bluegrass or whimsical public art such as an electrical transformer painted to look like a cow that moos when you pass and a cement-encased VW bug erupting from a sidewalk?
Published: February 2009
