Are tamaracks hard to find?
Well one's ease in finding a tamarack all depends on one's city planner. Back at my (David's) first home away from home, Tamarack Hall at Bemidji State University, finding the place was simple. One would just go to Bemidji, or climb a hill near Bemidji, and look for “the tallest building within 100 miles.” Piece of cake.
Finding the Office Max in Woodbury, on the other hand, is a completely different story. I had some errands I had to run Tuesday evening, and Office Max was a stop on the list. The first stop was Cub Foods, a newer grocery store located in the Sun Ray shopping center. Sun Ray is an antiquated shopping center, so it follows the time tested design standards of the classic L shape. At some point when I was a child they had changed it to a C in order to accommodate a Panencooken house, but it has since returned to an L.
Knowing that I'd be heading East to get to Sun Ray, I checked online to find the nearest Office Max, so that I wouldn't have to go to Midway (another classic L shaped shopping center). Well the internet suggested that I go to the Tamarack Village Shopping Center in Woodbury. Admittedly I had no idea where this was, but I was able to take a well educated guess. Having made multiple trips to Woodbury's shopping district in decades past, I knew from experience that the only 'center' of sorts that resembles an L shape, and which has multiple big box retailers, was the one just East of 494 on Valley Creek Road. So I went there. And I drove around looking at all the store names. I even went to check names of the few stores that lay scattered outside of the L.
Since Cub Foods didn't have the brand of Ice Cream I was planning to pick up (which was a good thing, because it probably would have started melting by this point), I stopped at the Starbucks in that shopping center and asked about their ice cream and about directions to Tamarack Village. It turned out that I had the wrong shopping center. No one at Starbucks knew the name of where I was, but they all knew that Tamarack was a couple of shopping centers further down the road.
So now I knew where I was going... or did I? I arrived at the center, and drove around on 3 of it's perimeter streets looking inside for a glimpse of the Office Max sign. I wasn't able to see it, so I had to venture into the consumerist's village blindly. Even before I had entered the center, I could tell that something was wrong. This place was far from any variation of the letter L. Not even Harmar Mall's predictable Z was at work here. Instead, this place was designed by some freak who was obviously so inspired by the potentials of an “attractive” shopping center, the s/he threw all concerns for function out the window. Now I'll be the first to admit that the aesthetics of the classic L leave a lot to be desired. No one likes to be greeted by a giant parking lot. But if you're going to design a commercial “center” where no other varieties of 'center' exist, the only way one can expect people to show up is by car. This designer ran with the village theme, forgetting that there was no resident populace for the village. A tree lined parkway, windy roads, randomly clustered buildings, and a roundabout only serve to interfere with commuting consumers. Hey I know, let's put a fountain in the middle of the main through-fair. The worst part though, is that you can't find the store you're looking for until you're about to crash through their front door after completing 4 or 5 laps around the place. As bad as it is, I'd be curious to see the confused faces of first time visitors after all of the trees have matured. And, of course, none of the trees are Tamaracks.
Finding the Office Max in Woodbury, on the other hand, is a completely different story. I had some errands I had to run Tuesday evening, and Office Max was a stop on the list. The first stop was Cub Foods, a newer grocery store located in the Sun Ray shopping center. Sun Ray is an antiquated shopping center, so it follows the time tested design standards of the classic L shape. At some point when I was a child they had changed it to a C in order to accommodate a Panencooken house, but it has since returned to an L.
Knowing that I'd be heading East to get to Sun Ray, I checked online to find the nearest Office Max, so that I wouldn't have to go to Midway (another classic L shaped shopping center). Well the internet suggested that I go to the Tamarack Village Shopping Center in Woodbury. Admittedly I had no idea where this was, but I was able to take a well educated guess. Having made multiple trips to Woodbury's shopping district in decades past, I knew from experience that the only 'center' of sorts that resembles an L shape, and which has multiple big box retailers, was the one just East of 494 on Valley Creek Road. So I went there. And I drove around looking at all the store names. I even went to check names of the few stores that lay scattered outside of the L.
Since Cub Foods didn't have the brand of Ice Cream I was planning to pick up (which was a good thing, because it probably would have started melting by this point), I stopped at the Starbucks in that shopping center and asked about their ice cream and about directions to Tamarack Village. It turned out that I had the wrong shopping center. No one at Starbucks knew the name of where I was, but they all knew that Tamarack was a couple of shopping centers further down the road.
So now I knew where I was going... or did I? I arrived at the center, and drove around on 3 of it's perimeter streets looking inside for a glimpse of the Office Max sign. I wasn't able to see it, so I had to venture into the consumerist's village blindly. Even before I had entered the center, I could tell that something was wrong. This place was far from any variation of the letter L. Not even Harmar Mall's predictable Z was at work here. Instead, this place was designed by some freak who was obviously so inspired by the potentials of an “attractive” shopping center, the s/he threw all concerns for function out the window. Now I'll be the first to admit that the aesthetics of the classic L leave a lot to be desired. No one likes to be greeted by a giant parking lot. But if you're going to design a commercial “center” where no other varieties of 'center' exist, the only way one can expect people to show up is by car. This designer ran with the village theme, forgetting that there was no resident populace for the village. A tree lined parkway, windy roads, randomly clustered buildings, and a roundabout only serve to interfere with commuting consumers. Hey I know, let's put a fountain in the middle of the main through-fair. The worst part though, is that you can't find the store you're looking for until you're about to crash through their front door after completing 4 or 5 laps around the place. As bad as it is, I'd be curious to see the confused faces of first time visitors after all of the trees have matured. And, of course, none of the trees are Tamaracks.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home