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The Shopping Gene Wolfgang Puck may be the solution to Tucson's woes. By Susan Zakin I nearly died of thirst a few weeks ago. I had been foolish enough to go to downtown Tucson on a Sunday. The place was like the sinister ghost town in the Robert Rodriguez movie From Dusk 'til Dawn. Even the Walgreen's was closed. The only sign of life was a Christian evangelist gesticulating wildly before a scattering of blasé homeless men on the sun-blasted brown grass outside the main library. Maybe it was the dehydration. But I had a vision. No, not of a plastic Jesus, but of something closer to my own heritage. Shopping. Shopping is clearly the answer to downtown's woes. I've even figured out a way to do it. Have you been reading about La Encantada, the giganto upscale mall being proposed for a pristine strip of desert in the foothills? Hundred of neighbors say they'd rather have cactus in their backyards than another damn mall and I don't blame them. I've come up with a better solution. Put La Encantada downtown. Make it part of the Rio Nuevo redevelopment project, which is foundering because of the usual combination of greed, special-interest politics and lack of sophistication. This brilliant solution could transform our sprawling almost-a-city. I'm not sure which stores would finally end up in the mall Westcor, a Phoenix-based shopping-center developer, wants to build. But they're talking about an AJ's, which I'm told is a stupendous gourmet supermarket, and Williams-Sonoma, the upscale cooking equipment shop. That's a start. The only decent thing about the greedfest of the last 20 years was the invention of the gourmet deli and various food-related accoutrements. But why stop there? How about not one, but two Wolfgang Puck restaurants? Puck, of course, is the chef and owner of Spago and other newer and more chic restaurants in L.A. We could have a regular Puck place, pricey and celebrity-studded, and then we could have one of Puck's fast-food joints. They have one in Santa Monica and another at the L.A. airport. Why not Tucson? Then let's have a Patagonia store. The upscale outdoor clothing and equipment company has just the kind of panache Tucson could use, if it's going to go strictly commercial. I'd like to have an REI, too. These are the biggest, best-stocked outdoor clothing stores on Earth. There are two REI stores in Phoenix, even though anyone willing to live in Phoenix clearly doesn't care about nature. There should be one here. Let's have one of those Sharper Image places, too. I'd never buy anything there, but I love going in and sitting in those massage chairs that vibrate like one of those motel beds you put a quarter into, but cost about as much as buying the motel. While we're at it, let's have Abercrombie & Fitch, too. On the other side of the scale, I hear that Krispy Kreme donuts are coming to Tucson. Let's require the Krispy Kreme people to move downtown. Believe me, if what I hear about those things is even half true, downtown won't be a ghost town anymore if people can get Krispy Kremes there. What clearly isn't the answer is Rio Nuevo, at least the version the city of Tucson currently is considering. Rio Nuevo seems rapidly headed south, and I don't mean toward the border. The budget is ballooning to $757 million, twice the original estimate, and the project's wish list is full of what one only can call pork. But the biggest problem with Rio Nuevo isn't money. It's taste. Most of Rio Nuevo is designed for doubleknit Six Flags Over Jesus morons who go to Imax theaters and aquariums in the desert. In short, people with no taste. What went wrong? For one thing, the city probably chose the wrong consultants to work on the project. They didn't choose the firm of Moule & Polyzoides of Pasadena, Calif., a prestigious New Urbanist firm with the experience to do the job right. Instead, they chose Hunter Interests, an Annapolis, Md., company whose strong suit was finance, supposedly. Hunter basically adopted the city wish list that was put together hurriedly when Tucson was facing a state-imposed deadline to get funding. The "citizens" committee that made the list included the usual real estate Mafia good old boys. Is the city going to salvage this mess? I hope so. Otherwise, Tucson will have another white elephant on its hands. At least that's what my market research shows. Admittedly, this isn't terribly scientific. First, I asked Alvaro Mano, of the University of Arizona architecture department, what he thought Rio Nuevo should look like. "If you do cities for the people who live there, the tourists will come," said Mano. "If you build cities for tourists, they become tourist traps. They are horrible places." Then I asked my cousin Benita. About five years ago, when she was a mere girl of 65, I took Benita camping at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Mexico's Piñacate desert. We finished off our trip with a shrimp-and-beer filled night at Rocky Point, where a Mexican gentleman of a certain age flirted with Benita on the malecon. She gleefully reported this to her husband of forty years the minute we got to a phone. Benita probably understands more about this region from that trip than half the people who moved here "because the weather's good." Benita's first reaction to Rio Nuevo was to accuse me of making it up. "An aquarium? In the desert?" she kept repeating. I assured her that this was indeed real, not some grotesquerie from a Carl Hiassen detective novel. Her genteel, ladylike version of the puking motion generally employed by UA college students was the functional equivalent of dozens of focus groups. I'm not against selling out. But when a city sells out and fails, one simply wants to turn one's head away. It's too embarrassing.
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