If you build it, who will come?

If you live in Elk Grove, you’ve very recently probably received a little mailer from the developers of the “Elk Grove Promenade” – the envisioned shopping mall off Highway 99 between Elk Grove Boulevard and Grant Line Road that has been rumored and innuendoed and planned and then gone back to the drawing board for the last couple of years. The developers are looking for some community support for the project, especially considering resistance from nearby Galt and others within Elk Grove who don’t believe a mall would be the best thing for the community.


It turns out that the dream is to build a huge outdoor shopping complex complete with a movie theater, a 20,000 square foot food pavilion, a Macy’s (of course), and a whole load of trees – among other things. You can check out the full vision for the mall at http://www.elkgrovepromenade.com .

While personally I believe Elk Grove does need something (there is simply nothing to do in that town other than sleep before you go to work the next day), and I agree an upper scale shopping center is a good idea, I wonder if it really will suit Elk Grove. Walnut Creek’s outdoor mall is a pleasant place to shop, but can that be replicated in Elk Grove? Or will the Elk Grove Promenade just bring to it the problems that Arden Mall now has (my recent experiences have caused me to give Arden the tagline “where white trash meets the ghetto”), where you can’t shop out of fear of abuse by other “shoppers”?

I hope that the mall is actually a success and is a place where families can go and spend a day shopping in peace. But, I wonder if that would really turn out to be the case.

9 thoughts on “If you build it, who will come?”

  1. Wow, the fly-through video is so dramatic! The music actually makes it sound like the kind of place where thousands of shopper enter, one shopper leave…

    Like

  5. I am fully ready for Pointfinder or Hank (if that’s your real name) to jump all over me for this comment because what I’m about to reference is neither a mall nor in Sacramento County, but all of these new “destination” venues really make me miss the Nut Tree even more.

    Now THAT was some good family fun.

    We should start a site where people can post scanned copies of their own version of the same photos we each likely have: on the large rocking horses, peeking through an opening so you look like a monkey or lion, riding on the train..

    Like

  6. When I lived in Denver, I had a lot of fun at the upscale malls despite being very broke because they have the best window-shopping available. I think an upscale mall could work— you just have to make sure you don’t have certain stores there. Forever 21*, for example. Those folk who act “ghetto” tend to not hang around places like Neiman Marcus.

    *Not to slam them, but any place that has the flavor of a discount store is more likely to bring in a certain mindset. And yes, you could get the “snob” mindset in with high-level stores.

    Like

  9. Elk Grove used to be a nice place, and now we’re hearing of gang violence, robberies- among other things. Bay area transfers complained because it wasn’t a “city”, now look what they’ve done to this quaint town. It’s ruined. I hope they’re happy.

    Like

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this: