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Building A Mall In A World Gone Mad

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 24, 2008

WESLEY CHAPEL - When the regional mall that would bear his imprint was scarcely more than dirt roads through a pine forest, Jim Richardson knew already what would inform the center's trademark symbol: Its logo would borrow from the 1963 Hollywood farce, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

Employing virtually every comic actor of its day, "It's A Mad, Mad" etc. is the manic tale of a cross-state dash by witnesses to the dying words of a just-paroled master thief who claims to have buried a fortune beneath a giant "W" in a town 200 miles away.

Comedy ensues, framing a timeless fable about the despoiling qualities of greed and easy money. Not that the story's moral was on Richardson's mind; however else we regard consumerism, the process of taking an 800,000-square-foot shopping plaza from imagination to fruition is anything but easy money. Instead, Richardson took inspiration from the movie's mystery destination, four towering palm trees set at angles to form the giant "W." Adapt nature, he said.

But even as workers employing a crane and a bucket lift set in place the 30-foot-high, white and strategically curved blades of grass producing the desired letter Tuesday, the project manager's vision had proved ruefully, if inadvertently, prescient.

Madness Takes Its Toll

Truer now than it was then, the long-awaited Shops at Wiregrass opens next month in a world gone mad, mad, mad, mad and then some. Meltdowns, bailouts, bankruptcies, foreclosures, ghost-town subdivisions, rising unemployment, frozen credit lines, $4 gas ... and don't even get us started on property taxes and homeowners insurance.

Meanwhile, we're still putting out fires in Iraq and trying to keep a lid on Afghanistan, even as al-Qaeda presents its deadly calling card to the new leaders of Pakistan, Iran makes Middle East mischief and Vladimir Putin snacks on breakaway Soviet republics. Madness, indeed.

But if the folks who have built, or who soon will assume operation of, the Shops are counting down to the Oct. 30 grand opening under a cloud of dread, they keep it well disguised.

To paraphrase a former secretary of defense, Richardson says, essentially, you don't debut your mall with the conditions you want, you debut your mall with the conditions you have. "It'll recycle," he says. "It always does."

Standing in the heart of the Shops' future restaurant row with blowing dust and the aroma of curing drywall mud on the wind, the project chief was more interested in discussing "foo-foo" details - up-lighting in the trees, the native landscaping, the sconces, the awnings, the center-plaza water features, the children's frontier-Florida play area.

"We're unique," Richardson says. "People will come."

Shivering With Antici ... pation

Of that Shops General Manager Greg Lenners has no doubt, even allowing for troubled times. Two months into his first job east of the Rocky Mountains, Lenners has been on the ground long enough to have seen for himself, "This area has wanted a shopping center for a long time."

In fact, it has wanted this shopping center, one with a colossal bookstore, upscale boutiques, big-name department stores and precedent-setting eateries. Now, if we can just find a credit card with a little breathing room.

Columnist Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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