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| - I admit, I have a soft spot for this mall. I grew up just a stone's throw away (well, actually a short drive down Route 19 away) from this place in Upper St. Clair and this was the closest that Truman Show-like community had to a town center.
"SHV" was, is and will be there for you. It starts when you are being pushed around it in on a stroller marveling at all the people and signs - more stimulus than any such kid can see elsewhere in the suburbs. Then it's the place where you're 7 and playing hide and seek in the clothes racks to amuse yourself as your parents take forever to buy clothes. Then it's where you go on your first date. Then it becomes the place where you and your spouse go to get away from the regular home routine after you drop the kids off at soccer practice. Lastly, it'll be there when you become one of those old people who stroll around in circles to get climate-controlled exercise.
In what I just said, there's a commercial waiting to be written.
This isn't the fanciest of malls. Looking for glitz and glamor? You won't find it at the lawn mower section of Sears in SHV - or at the Red Robin in the food court either. Try Ross Park Mall if you want that. SHV does have a Coach, but as modern as the place gets is Brookstone. At the same time, this isn't a mall where you'll find things that aren't normally in malls like an armed forces recruiting center (ahem, Century II Mall) or completely outdated stores like a place called "90's Nails" (cough, Parkway Center Mall). This is a very middle of the road, Middle America, mall. This is the type of place Mitt Romney would love to pretend to shop at. You've got your Macy's, your Sears, your Gap, your Hot Topic, your Hollister, your movie theater, your food court, and, in a concession to 2010's America, SHV will soon have a Target as well. In other words, this is "typical mall U.S.A.". If you open up Webster's dictionary (or go to Wikipedia) and look up "mall", SHV should be the picture. Nothing wrong with that since sometimes you don't want something fancy and sometimes you don't want to slum it. You just want a no nonsense suburban mall and SHV is that in capital letters.
To me, the best feature of SHV is the fact that it is SIMPLE. This means a lot. Since the 70's, malls seem to have thought that the best way to get business is to trap people inside the mall by having a layout that is like the hedge maze from "The Shining". In SHV, you will not find corridors angling off in bizarre directions. You will not find split levels. You will not find oddly placed courtyards, roller coasters, fancy showcase fountains or anything else designed to trap you and make you linger. The place is as simply laid out as it gets. You have two anchors at each end with one two level corridor in between. In the middle, you've got Sears on one side and the food court on the other. How easy is that? In the Pittsburgh area, only Monroeville Mall (a once twin of SHV) is as simple. Every other mall is like a maze. There must be a legend out there about someone getting forever lost in all the various nooks and crannies of Century III Mall (before they simplified it by shutting parts of it down, of course). What's more is that the corridors are wide and airy. You see, the place was designed before some consulting group told mall architects that you needed to make a place narrow and crowded in order to entice more people to come in and make it more crowded (I'm talking about you, Ross Park Mall).
Another great thing about SHV is the demographic. It is purely a family mall - well families and old people. This is not a mall where teenagers go wilding. Somehow, the very fact that this mall has a reputation for being a family and retiree-oriented mall has made it "uncool" for the trouble makers to even bother hanging out at. In fact, by simply going there, you're being uncool. As a middle aged person looking to just do some shopping without having to deal with teens causing trouble in an attempt to be "cool", that's totally fine by me.
The other great thing about SHV is that it's clean. Also, it feels remarkably well kept and up to date, despite it having been built in the 60's and last renovated in the early 90's. Yes, the sign looks like something out of Miami Vice (which was already out of date when it went up in 1993) and the pink hues are more 1988 than 2012. However, the designers have done a good job in giving the place a timeless appearance. That's more than I can say for its twin Monroeville Mall which, let's face it, has somehow ALWAYS looked old. Don't believe me? Watch "Dawn of the Dead" - the place looked old back in the 70's. Then there's Century III which, until its renovation job in the 90's brought it into the 80's, looked like it could use a few disco balls to complete it's look. Like Mercedes cars, it may need a tweak ehre and there but, when you're a classic, you're a classic.
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