The Malling of Leizen
by Pam Mandel in Europe , Austria
I hate the EuroSpar. I hate the parking lot and the building and the way the store is laid out inside. The EuroSpar reminds me of one of those Escher drawings where you start out at a white bird and you end up as a black bird, but you're never really sure of what's happening in between, only in the EuroSpar, you start out in produce and you end up at the dairy case. Forget about your paper products, you'll only end up back at the produce. Want something in a can? Nope, how ëbout some nice cheese instead? Better to stick to cheese and produce and get all those mid-store items at another market entirely.
The EuroSpar is the biggest supermarket around and, if you can deal with the navigation, it's also got the widest selection of merchandise. It shares space with the Hervis, which is a low price sporting goods chain, a café, and a shop that sells custom engraved crystal. The parking is shared with the Arkade, what passes as a shopping mall hereabouts.
I hate shopping malls and I don't like the Arkade just because it's European. A spiral staircase and an elevator bisect the most open area of the shopping center, making what should be the namesake arcade in to nothing more than a stairwell. It's open the floor below, so you can look down in to a central area, which, over the Christmas holidays hosted the roasted chestnut and gluwein stand, but now stands empty. The Arkade has three coffee houses, a book and CD shop that sells mostly compilation disks (the BEST love songs of the 80s - don't GET me started!!!), a health food store, a news stand, a few shops that sell clothes, a lingerie store, and a small market. The husband used to hang out here all the time; the Arkade is home to what used to be the coffee shop of choice for his posse. We'd rush off there to meet the homies every Saturday morning. I'd sit staring out across the aluminum and plastic atrium, swathed in second hand smoke, pining for my favorite Seattle coffee house. Four Angels, which has since closed, was a dumpy little dive painted in bright colors and furnished in shabby but comfortable antiques. They made a satisfying cup of joe, a delicious hot chocolate, and provided plenty of alternative press to read while you waited for your companion. We used to sit out on the sidewalk on sunny afternoons to watch our neighborhood go by. Our intent was no different than that of the Austrians I found myself with, but naturally I feel that our staging showed more character.
Liezen, home of the EuroSpar, the Arkade, and a handful of strip malls, is the nearest Town with Services. If you've ever driven across the US, you've passed through those towns where you find a WalMart, a Target, a couple of fast food places. If you're lucky, you'll find a delicious plate of teriyaki or a mean burrito, but more often you'll be saying okay, I'll pay 50 cents more for the value meal. Liezen is a value meal town. Why, yes, there is a McDonald's.
If you haven't guessed, I don't care much for Liezen. Liezen, however, doesn't care much what one mouthy American thinks of it and is proceeding with its boomtown urban planning. This involves strip-malling the outer reaches of the city with abandon. A new strip mall seems to be open every time I return to the country, or every six months, whichever comes first. Over the spring the Zielpunkt got new neighbors - a cosmetics store, a shoe store, and a housewares store, all lined up under one flat roof with parking out front. You are now entering Tukwilla. Last year a Sports Experts store opened in a huge building just behind the EuroSpar. Next to the Sports Experts is another megabox, home to New Yorker, a place that sells what I guess you'd call street wear. Welcome to Orange Country. The BauMax, a Home Depot kind of place, expanded just towards the edge of town and across the street a big blue box stands alone in what was once a pasture, home to a franchise health club. Rawlins, Montana welcomes you.
I think Liezen used to have a nice downtown, but I can't be sure. The old church is still there with its onion-domed tower, there's a traditional bakery hidden below some old apartments, the former main street where the butcher has his shop is lined with brightly painted buildings. But the growth is outside, on the edge of town, where you can put up any old strip mall that you can afford.
I know that architecture doesn't have to be
this way. When we were in Vienna, we visited the Gasometer. This used to be a
storage facility for natural gas and has been restored and expanded to contain a
shopping center, business offices, and a lot of apartments. Austria's national
crackpot, I mean treasure, Hundertwasser, designed during his life,. a number of
facilities, and while I wouldn't want to have to wait tables on the uneven
surface of his floors, I love the buildings. The old style stores and
restaurants are cozy and pleasant to shop in, and here in Aigen, there are a few
surprises, one of them being the local church, an asymmetrical wonder with
colored glass panels all over one side.
Still, the malling continues. Liezen, which was not founded in the 60s but acts like it, continues to construct strip malls around the outside, dispersing the village center and providing retail jobs for the local youth. It's awful - the architecture, not the jobs, of course. I'm not sure who's responsible, but there's a distinctly American flair to the architecture. While big box store spring up like mushrooms on the edge of town, perfectly serviceable store fronts in the center of town stand empty. I don't like it. I'm not buying. The EuroSpar may be the only place in town you can get chickpeas, but I think I'd rather do without. I hate the EuroSpar.
