Meditations on Mayfaire
Inspired by WHQR’s interview with the folks who are helping to realize the cross-city bike trail, by a picture of Critical Mass-ers amassing on the front page of Saturday’s Star News, and by soaring gas prices and snarled weekend traffic, I rode my bike north through the UNCW campus yesterday morning (where the trail’s progress has apparently been checked by the Chancellor?), down Racine, and onto the new bike path on Eastwood, to which the cross-country trail will connect, and then to Mayfaire to do some errands.
The new path is really nice! It’s rolling and fully separate from Eastwood itself, shaded in some areas by trees, smoothly paved and divided, well-marked. It’s already a boon for bike commuters, I’ll bet.
But what about Mayfaire? “Everything is there now,” you hear people say. I cut from the bike path across Eastwood onto Clipper (?) (map), which leads back into Mayfaire Hilton, to the “Mayfaire Reserve” (What is it? A conference center? A shriner’s lodge?), and comes up on “Main Street” Mayfaire from the rear, where Harris Teeter, the theaters, and Fox & Hound are doing their best to keep even their loading areas spick and span and luxe-like.
Riding past the townhomes on Viking, past the entrance to Parkside, which is being heavily promoted in the papers as a Landfall-like subdividion with even more convenient access to the shops, I felt what Mayfaire’s master designers must have meant me to feel: that this really was a commons, that their Main Street was the center of town, now, though as a residential area, I gather the condos actuall perched new urban fashion atop Banana Republic and next to Belk’s second floor aren’t filling to the capacity that their planners hoped (Does anyone live there?)
There is no development in the whole northeast of Wilmington, good or bad, that doesn’t in some respect have to do with Mayfaire and its new reign, including the bike path I rode to get there. Including the sales of homes in Bayshore and other developments way up off of Highway 17.
As someone who loves downtown Wilmington and makes an effort to visit and patronize it whenever I can, I have been of course a detractor of Mayfaire and what it represents, with its omnipresent private security guards, its gurgling chlorinated fountains and cobbled walks, its faux ye-olde and scrubbed, crannyless surfaces. It’s a simulation, a thing that exists apart from reality, instead of reality. Like Disney’s notorious living community Celebration, its pretensions to vibrant, leave-your-door-open leisure are just the white enamel on the long, decayed tooth of immersive commerce and non-stop selling.
But it’s hard to stay mad at Mayfaire. You end up going because Paco’s playing on that little lawn they have there. Or because Pomegranate’s credit card machine is on the blink. Or you want to see a movie. And you like the cobblestones after a while. You like the little window railings above the flaneur walkways, even if there’s never anybody in them. What’s wrong with making a place look nice, you say — if you’re going to put all those stores together anyway. What’s inaccurate about Mayfaire’s pretensions to be the center, the cosmos in the cosmopolitan — given how much downtowns and other common areas have always been about commerce, about selling.
And everybody’s there, and isn’t that the litmus test? It serves as the center. And people buy those little parking lot townhomes and walk to Teeters with their european rope-handled shopping bags and their practicing the new urbanism just fine.
On what grounds is the “old urbanism” of downtown superior, or more authentic? It’s seedier and poor people live there? It’s older? It’s disregarded and bar-hoppers are routinely mugged? Are these real? It’s not un-planned, certainly — it’s just not planned very well. Lots of people work a lot to plan the downtown as an environment. They just don’t succeed as well as the environment of Mayfaire has. And maybe that’s because they can’t wipe the slate clean and start over — as many developments like Mayfaire do — because there are people, places, history. Is history what makes a place real? (It may be. A particular history makes a place seem as if it “deserves” to appear a certain way.) Does popularity make a place unreal?
If you go downtown in order to have a more “authentic” experience, as I admit to doing, is that precise eagerness not a kind of jeopardy for “the real”? Are pseudo-squalid places like Hell’s Kitchen any more real than Victoria’s Secret on “Main Street” in Mayfaire? Mayfaire still seems creepy to me, like a Stepford outdoor mall. But then the Chandlers Wharf shops seem even creepier. And their cheesier. And they’re empty.
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