Recently, a retail mirage of sorts appeared just off the Hempstead Turnpike on the Queens-Long Island border, next to the Belmont horse racetrack and the UBS arena, home of the New York Islanders hockey team and the occasional Harry Styles concert.
A haven of red brick and creamy clapboard, with tree-dotted walkways lined by glittering vitrines and spotted by iron benches and picnic tables where one might enjoy a pick-me-up macaron from a Ladurée kiosk, it is officially known as Belmont Park Village.
Unofficially, you might call it a luxury outlet mall.
Created by a real estate scion named Scott Malkin, it is the first American outpost of Value Retail, a mini-mall empire founded on the cornerstone of a British shopping center called Bicester Village, opened in 1995 in Oxfordshire, England. Populated by brands like Armani, Balenciaga, Dior, Loro Piana and Valentino, Bicester Village now has about seven million visitors a year; it is the second most popular destination for Chinese tourists in Britain after Buckingham Palace; and generates among the highest sales per square foot of any shopping mall in the world. And it is but one of 11 similar villages in Europe and China.
Now, the question is whether what worked in Europe and Asia will work in America. After all, Mr. Malkin’s latest project comes to U.S. shores at a time when the mall — evvel a halcyon reflection of the American dream, latterly a symbol of its Teflon banality — has widely and loudly been declared dead. These days, there is no quicker way to establish period bona fides than to set a show (“Stranger Things,” say) in a mall. It practically screams “1980s.”
Yet with Belmont Park Village, Mr. Malkin is suggesting that malls, which have always occupied a very specific place in not just the national landscape, but the national psyche, have not actually been expiring so much as experiencing a kind of extended identity crisis, from which a new order is emerging.
A shopping “street” in Belmont Park Village, with architecture conceived to bridge the Hamptons and 1930s SoHo.Credit…Graham Dickie/The New York Times
