Robert Campbell’s take on new “suburban shopping center”

By Matt Haviland

Would you want to live at the mall? Many Americans might say yes. Robert Campbell says, “well, maybe after a couple of renovations.”

Legacy Place, a new open-air mall (or “lifestyle center,” as they’re officially called), is trying to make changes in the way we shop, but as Campbell points out, the changes aren’t quite evident enough to matter. Built like a “big square figure eight” and stranded between Interstate 95 and Route 2, this is a mall of sidewalks and stores facing outward, where you park your car and walk in the fresh air between stores like Urban Outfitters and The Gap, to grocery places like Whole Foods, and even to a bowling alley/sports bar. Legacy Place wants to be a town square, a Main Street, a place that grew organically.

Yes, there is also a movie theater. How did you guess? Probably because the main – and apparently only – difference between this and a normal, more enclosed shopping mall is that it’s open to the weather. With 40 acres of stores to choose from, it’s certainly big. But Robert Campbell had suggestions for further Main Street style elements, including day care centers, tailor shops, watchmakers, post offices, hardware stores, gardens, etc. He found that, in making the experience entirely based on buying ‘things’ – as opposed to services – it doesn’t feel like a small town. He also pointed out that the businesses are ones you would see at any mall in America. It would probably help Legacy Place’s sense of “quaint” to put in a few stores that aren’t owned by rich men in New York City office towers. Adding to the corporate aspect is some upstairs rentable office space.

Campbell wondered if the Boston winters would pose a problem. According to the designer, Richard Askin, there were people who asked that during the construction process. Says Askin, “it hasn’t been true.” Depending on how new this mall is, maybe it hasn’t been true because it isn’t winter yet.

Of the architecture, Campbell was unimpressed but unoffended. Developed by W/S Development, the specific designers (Cambridge’s Prellwitz Chilinski firm) worked at one time under Ben Thompson, the creator of Faneuil Hall. Legacy Place is supposed to look like an assortment of buildings that each have their own distinct personality, as if each came there of its own accord and at a separate time period. Campbell calls it “far from memorable but easy to take.” He observed that, at worst, there is a sense of flat modernism, and at best, the shopkeepers are trying to compete with and stand out from each other, “the kind of sense you get in any up-and-coming ethnic neighborhood in any real city.”

Legacy Place appears to be a serviceable mall. It isn’t completely finished, but what is there is architecturally, if not thematically or realistically, reminiscent of what it’s trying to remind us: Main Street. The fact that you have to get on the highway (or take a T-ride) to get there makes the whole experience a little more detached, and a little less convenient. Not to mention less homey. Robert Campbell was not appalled, nor was he satisfied. Lifestyle centers are apparently a big up-and-coming trend in shopping malls, and Legacy Place is trying to be the most lifelike of all. The results are a place you can bring the family, but not one where you would particularly want to live.