American Nightmare

The state of New Jersey took a huge step in resolving the shopping mall-entertainment center boondoggle started a decade earlier at its Meadowlands sports complex just west of New York City. Unfortunately, it does not involve blowing it up.

Xanadu, a name commonly associated with Charles Foster Kane's uncompleted Florida castle and a bad Hollywood musical, was also the name of a huge shopping and entertainment complex begun in the early two thousand zeroes in the shadow of where the Giants and Jets football teams play. The project languished, though, through a series of delays, culminating with a total halt to construction in May 2009 in the wake of the financial meltdown. While developers struggled to keep the Xanadu project afloat, the winter of 2010-11 caused considerable damage to the complex, at part of its outer wall collapsing under the weight of ice and snow.

Finally, the New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority and the Canadian Mall developer Triple Five Group cut a deal for Triple Five to complete the mall, which is being renamed American Dream Meadowlands, by late 2013. Oh yeah, and Governor Chris Christie is promising $200 million in state aid.

What? This mall was a bad idea when it was pitched, it was a bad idea when it was started, it's a bad idea now, and it will be a bad idea when it opens. American Dream Meadowlands is to include, among other things, an indoor amusement park, a water park, a skydiving simulator, a live-show theater, and I guess, stores. It will be designed to provide New Jerseyans with all sorts of wondrous novelty amusements and, I assume, amuse themselves to death.

Oh, and there's also an indoor ski slope.

What is this, Dubai?

The $200 million in state aid is the final insult, ticking off many observers who feel that Christie should be subsidizing infrastructure projects instead of private retail enterprises. Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute - a conservative think tank - is one of the plan's biggest critics. Writing in the Star-Ledger recently, Gelinas opined that Christie was right to question the cost overruns concerning the passenger rail tunnel he pulled the plug on, but she also says he should still be pursuing infrastructure projects designed to accommodate northern New Jersey's increasingly dense population and move people around efficiently. The only person who would consider a mall as public infrastructure, she says, is a teenage girl.

And how many of them will be able to drive to this mall?

As New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel says, New Jersey needs a mall like it needs another chemical waste cleanup site. But Christie is counting on the complex formerly known as Xanadu to pay off, as it should open just before Super Bowl XLVIII at the New Meadowlands Stadium in 2014.

He'd have to believe it will be magic.