Teens make malls the new public square

A chance to meet friends, possible romantic trysts and the occasional affray await. As long as the teens keep moving or keep buying, area malls welcome the traffic

DURHAM -- As the day gets older, the average age of the crowd at The Streets at Southpoint gets younger.

On a recent Friday morning, like most mornings, the mall belonged first to the walkers, who began arriving before the stores opened, for laps through the temperate corridors. By midday, mothers wheeled strollers along the indoor avenues. Lunchtime brought the power buyers, who darted in to pick up a needed something during the work break, and the leisure shoppers, who had time to meet for a meal and an afternoon in the stores.

Then, as the sun descended, so did the age of the clientele. On Friday and Saturday nights, teenagers invade the malls of America, filling the corridors, crowding into the food courts, congregating in the common areas. Too old to want to shop with their parents and too young to have credit cards of their own, they come to the mall for the same reason their parents did in the 1970s. It's why their grandparents cruised drive-in diners and movie theaters. It was what occasionally drove their great-grandparents from the farm into town.

To see and be seen.

"Where else is there to go?" said 16-year-old Laura Paskoff, who was at The Streets at Southpoint mall that Friday night with four friends. "You get on the phone and try to think of something else to do, but then it's like, well, there's nowhere else. OK, we'll go to the mall."

Summertime brings these young customers to the mall on weeknights as well, for shopping or a movie or just to alleviate the boredom. Camps, athletics and church activities still leave a lot of summer hours to fill.

In Raleigh, the city's parks and recreation department runs specialized summer day camps for teens from June to August. It also sponsors a Wii game tournament for middle-schoolers with weekly competition from July to November.

But even the parks and rec camp counselors sometimes fall back on the mall as a destination.

"We do scavenger hunts there sometimes as part of summer camp," said Dana Youst, teen program director. "And we've gone there for dinner when we've left for conferences or trips. It's easier to have them eat at the mall where there are 10 places to eat than pull off the side of the road and take 10 or 20 teenagers into a restaurant."

Paskoff and her friends -- and their parents, who allowed them to come to Southpoint -- knew that the previous Saturday night, at Triangle Town Center in Raleigh, a clash between groups of teenagers had resulted in a 15-year-old getting stabbed, an off-duty police officer being injured, and the mall being closed early for fear of a riot. Six people ages 16 through 18 were arrested, and a 15-year-old was detained.

Similar frays have occurred or been narrowly averted by fast-acting security workers at malls throughout the Triangle. When asked about these incidents, most teenagers said they didn't worry because the fights are usually limited to a handful of people who know one another, and they're always short-lived.

Come one, come all

Patrick Anderson, senior general manager at Southpoint, said mall security, along with off-duty officers from the Durham Police Department and the Durham County Sheriff's Office, enforce the same general code of conduct for all mall patrons. While he has seen teenagers misbehave, he said, "I've seen conduct from some 40-year-olds that's less desirable than that of 15-year-olds."

Sandra Geist, marketing director for Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, takes a similar view.

"We invite them here, so we don't have an issue," she said. "They're part of our customers. They spend money at the mall, and we appreciate that. We don't see them as a problem."