Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 7, 1990 TAG: 9003072101
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's also the end of a hellish week of public relations damage control for mall manager Joe Marx.
Marx looks like a kid himself in his jeans and running shoes as he stands watch on a busy mall corridor with a phalanx of security guards, Roanoke police and news reporters. They're gathered at a mall entrance that has become one of the most popular meeting places for kids in the Roanoke Valley.
But on this night, there are about as many cops as kids. Police question a teen-ager about shoplifting and haul her away handcuffed. That's the extent of the night's excitement. Nothing much happens, at least nothing bad.
Kids and families wander in and out, sucking down frozen snowblasts from Cookies & Yogurt, zapping the menaces to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the Mindboggle video arcade, and drifting off to the mall's 120 stores.
There'd been rumors in mall shops of a riot set for the previous Friday night. A "rumble," a shoptender had whispered. Nothing happened then, either.
For Marx, 31, and his security chief, Jerry Wody, the peaceful weekend demonstrated that the mall's recent bad publicity was way out of whack with reality.
"It looks pretty good to me, families coming and going," said a weary Marx, exhausted from the tension of fighting bad press all week as he keeps up his regular duties.
Marx's troubles climaxed Saturday night, Feb. 24. He was headed home on Interstate 581 when he heard on his security radio about 8:30 that there had been a shooting in the mall parking lot. He hurried back.
In what was described by police as the most serious criminal incident in the history of the five-year-old mall, shots were fired by two 16-year-olds in the parking lot after guards broke up a fight inside the mall. There were no injuries in the shooting.
It was an uncommon occurrence, Marx said. He said stories of crime and violence at the mall are way overblown.
His guards spend most of their time doing things like opening cars for customers who lock their keys inside (570 incidents in 1989), jump-starting cars (266 times last year) or letting in the 2,000 mostly elderly members of the mall's walking club early in the mornings.
Marx said his statistics show mall crimes are not prevalent: only 53 arrests last year; 152 barrings from the mall; 138 disorderly-in-public complaints; 106 shoplifting apprehensions; 40 attempted shopliftings; 19 drunk in publics, and eight indecent exposures.
But Marx and everybody else - the merchants, the kids, the mall guards, the police who moonlight there and the leaders of the Roanoke NAACP who accuse mall guards of unfairly targeting blacks - agree on one thing:
Too many kids hang out at Valley View because they have nothing else to do. Some walk there from home, even cutting across six lanes of traffic on I-581 to get to the mall. Some are dropped off by parents to wander unsupervised for hours at a time.
That appears to be behind the mall's recent troubles and the troubles of shopping centers in many cities.
Of the 53 arrests at Valley View last year, 60 percent were of people 18 to 20. Nearly 91 percent of people barred from the mall were 20 or younger.
Kids used to grow up in neighborhoods. Now they're doing much of that under the warm roofs of shopping malls. They're drawn like magnets to the many attractions - the fast food, the movies, the video games and, most of all, each other.
"The mall has replaced the corner soda fountain," said Judge Philip Trompeter, a judge in Roanoke's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.
Joe Marx, who has a 7-year-old daughter, recalls seeing three unaccompanied boys her age at the mall one night not long ago. They'd walked from their homes about three miles away near Williamson Road. Marx doesn't think their parents knew where they were.
That's nothing new to Roanoke Police Sgt. C.D. "Doug" Allen, who has moonlighted at the mall almost every Saturday night for five years.
Allen has seen another threesome, all about 9, who walked miles to see a horror movie their parents had declared off-limits. Then there were the two 9-year-old girls dropped off by their parents with $10 each and still at the mall at the 9 o'clock closing time. Allen drove them to a grandmother's house.
"We're probably the highest-paid babysitters in the city of Roanoke," Allen said.
"Parents need to realize we're not equipped to supervise 1,000 kids on the weekends," Marx said. "We're primarily a shopping center. We're not a teen nightclub."
Last weekend was quiet, but on some nights, kids crowd around store entrances. Shoppers have trouble getting through throngs of youngsters.
"I've stood out there at night and seen them outnumber adults sometimes 10, 15 to one," said Jerry Wody, a Brooklynite and former North Carolina police officer who's been mall security chief for two years.
"The four-letter words that drift in here . . . I wouldn't bring my grandson out here," said Benny Drew, 48, who works at This End Up, a furniture store near the mall entrance at Mindboggle.
For a number of reasons, that entrance in the back of the mall has become Kid Central. The video arcade is there. So's food. It's near the movie entrance and it's where many parents leave and pick up their children.
Drew and other clerks said they're sometimes afraid to walk to their cars at night because kids socialize loudly in the mall parking lot.
Clerks talked about petitioning the mall to close Mindboggle because it attracts so many young people. Some of the arcade's stockholders are associated with the mall's developer, Faison Associates in Charlotte, N.C. Mindboggle Inc. runs other arcades in Lynchburg, Colonial Heights, Charlotte and Fayetteville, N.C.
John Vail, Mindboggle's corporate manager in Charlotte, was at Valley View last weekend. He said his game room is a safe place. "I don't even let people cuss in there," he said. "I want a mother to bring her 6-year-old daughter in here on a weekend night and not feel threatened."
Over and over again, Wody and Marx say that nine of 10 teens at the mall are good kids who cause no trouble. Malls everywhere are careful not to alienate youths. After all, malls cater to them.
"The mall has in effect replaced the town square, so you're going to get the youths as well as the senior citizens," said Billie Scott, public relations director for Melvin Simon & Associates of Indianapolis, owner or manager of more than 200 shopping centers in 37 states.
Scott said older shoppers often are intimidated by large groups of kids even if they're doing nothing wrong. "I guess I feel sometimes that kids get a bad rap," she said.
Kids are good customers and are expected to be excellent ones as adults. A national survey last year showed that teens between the ages of 15 and 19 spent an average of $27.09 per visit to malls and shopping centers, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, the industry trade group in New York.
Valley View draws kids from all over Western Virginia on the weekends. Phillip Godfrey, 14, a student at Covington High School, was quietly watching girls go up and down the escalator Friday night. He often sees friends from Alleghany County at the mall.
Around the country, two problems are nagging malls: complaints by shoppers about herds of unruly teen-agers and complaints by black organizations that malls are overly harsh to blacks when they try to control crowds.
Tanglewood, Roanoke's other big mall, seems to draw fewer complaints about kids or guards. Joe Marx isn't sure his mall draws more young people, but he pointed out that it is bounded on three sides by residential neighborhoods and gets a high number of shoppers who walk from home, while Tanglewood is farther from homes.
This winter, the Roanoke branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People received seven complaints that Valley View guards were singling out black teens and adults when they broke up gatherings at store entrances and food tables.
President Evangeline Jeffrey and other members of the group's board of directors went to the mall last month to see how they would be treated. Two board members, including an elderly woman, were told by guards not to linger in the corridors. Jeffrey said one of the board members had stopped to admire a baby.
The NAACP also questioned the mall's compiling of 1989 incident reports by race, sex and age - something Marx said in an interview last week he probably will not allow again. Blacks outnumbered whites in most categories. Jeffrey wondered if it's because guards don't watch whites as closely.
The manager of another Western Virginia mall, who asked not to be named, said year-end analyses of mall incidents by race are not uncommon in the industry.
Although few will speak openly about it, there is racial tension at the mall. White clerks and shoppers complain black kids curse loudly to each other from the balconies and intimidate customers. Other whites say kids of their race are troublesome, too - it's just that black young people often outnumber whites.
After Jeffrey raised questions about the mall's treatment of blacks last month, she and another prominent NAACP member received threatening calls about "niggers" at the mall. Callers to Jeffrey said they wanted to "blow up" blacks there.
Thursday morning, Jeffrey and several board members plan to meet with Marx to talk about these allegations and about how the NAACP and the mall can urge parents not to let their children wander aimlessly in the mall.
Wody is smarting from allegations that his guards are rougher on blacks than whites. He said he stresses friendly public relations with all people.
It's unfortunate, he said, that guards often are busiest with crowd control on Saturday nights - a popular time for teens and a night when many of the youths are black. Of Wody's nine guards, eight are white and one is black.
The perception among young black people at the mall, even those who express sympathy for the guards' difficulty dealing with kids, is that mall guards are less civil to them than to white kids.
Raymond Andrews, 16, a sophomore at William Fleming High School, about a mile from the mall, was at the mall with friends Friday night. He said the guards and the mall are not to blame for kids' behavior.
"Once you start gathering, enemies start getting together," he said. "Next thing you know, somebody wants to fight. I wouldn't say it's the mall's fault."
Last weekend was quiet, but, "I say they'll be back out here, the same people doing the same thing."
Still, Andrews thinks the guards should be more polite. "They're very rude," he said.
Asked if the guards seem to pick on black kids, he said, "Sometimes it can seem that way. They take notice when the black people get together. But I wouldn't say they're all prejudiced."
Rodney Bond, 18, of Roanoke, a black freshman at Chowan College in North Carolina, was back at Valley View Friday night with friends.
He, too, believes guards are harder on blacks. "I don't think they say too much to the white people, but I can see where they're coming from, with all the rug rats making trouble."
Kevin Shepard, 15, who works at Cookies & Yogurt on the weekends, said it gets unnaturally quiet just before a fight breaks out in the teen gathering spot near his shop, Mindboggle and Peanut Shack, a candy-and-nut store.
When there's a big crowd, Shepard said, "eventually two people who don't like each other are going to meet up."
Two years ago, Randall Park Mall, a 170-store center in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, had problems with crowds of teen-agers and shoving matches between rival gangs. In one incident, glass was smashed at a jewelry store and items were taken. When guards asked young people to leave the store area, youths mistook a popped balloon for a gunshot and began a stampede through the mall.
First, the mall beefed up security and barred children under 18 unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Then the mall and its owner, the DeBartolo Corp., a major U.S. mall developer, offered a positive way to deal with teens: It put them on the payroll. Fifteen to 20 at a time give shoppers directions around the mall and distribute promotional literature from the stores.
"Things are somewhat more peaceful," said John Brautigam, marketing manager for Randall Park Mall and 10 other centers. "I think there's a little more harmony there between teens and shoppers, and teens and tenants."
Joe Marx, who started his first mall job at Charlotte's Eastland Mall at 17 and was manager of River Ridge Mall in Lynchburg at 22, is open to constructive ideas. He wants to talk with the NAACP about how the mall can work with the schools on the problems.
He's tired of kids and parents thinking the mall is the place for children to spend hours on end by themselves. "It infuriates me," he said. "I hear that on the sitcoms all the time - `Let's go hang out at the mall.' "
Mall clerks in their teens and early 20s say the problem isn't really the teen-agers, white or black, or the guards. It's bigger than any one group, they say.
There is no appropriate place for kids to have a good time in Roanoke, a Fleming High School senior said. "This is it," she said, looking out into the mall from the shoe store where she works.
"What else is someone my age supposed to do? Certainly not sit home and watch `Dallas' with the folks.
"I don't think it's just a Valley View Mall problem. I think it's a Roanoke City problem."
After several teen nightclubs folded here, Marion Crenshaw, the city's youth planner, has heard that another is in the works. She said teen-agers over 16 often spurn city recreational programs. A dance last year drew younger teens but not older ones, but she's trying again this spring.
She knows they need a place of their own, but, she said, "when you try to get those places for them, they don't attend."
by CNB