Saturday, July 14, 2007
Quiet night at the mall gets teens talking
Traffic was sparse, but some young people at Valley View Mall felt the sting of a new curfew.
Photo by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times
Valley View Mall security guard C. Adams checks the IDs of a group of youths heading into the mall Friday after 6 p.m.
Related
Valley View Mall Youth Escort Policy
On Fridays and Saturdays after 6 p.m., anyone younger than 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.
How will they know?
- Proof of age will be required if age can’t be easily determined. Anyone who doesn’t have an ID will be asked to leave.
What about work?
- Teenagers younger than 18 who work at the mall will be allowed. Proof of work status will be required.
Who can escort?
- One parent may escort all of his or her children. One parent/guardian may escort up to three youths, at least one of whom must be his or her own child.
What happens?
- Anyone violating the policy will be asked to leave. If someone refuses, he or she can be prosecuted for trespassing.
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At 6:30 Friday evening, 17-year-old Byron Hart strode into Valley View Mall to collect his paycheck.
He came face to face with a security guard.
Their eyes met.
Byron looked panicked. He pulled a Hollister Co. card from his wallet, explaining that he worked at the shopping center.
He knew about the curfew that began a half-hour earlier, the one banning anyone younger than 18 from being in the mall without an adult after 6 on Friday and Saturday nights.
"I didn't think it would be this strict," he said after being allowed to collect his check and an employee ID that hung around his neck, misspelling his first name as "Bryon."
Newspaper ads, news conferences and signs posted at the Roanoke mall seemed to spread the word about the curfew. When it took effect Friday, mall traffic was sparse. Stores such as Hollister-- normally buzzing with teens -- felt like a ghost town, albeit one with loud music, cushy chairs and pictures of hard-bodied models.
Teens can still enter anchor stores, such as Macy's, but inside the mall, they're expected to stay with their parents. Mom is not supposed to browse Christopher & Banks while the kids wander to Abercrombie & Fitch.
Mall managers believe the curfew will eliminate unsupervised crowds that intimidate patrons. Teens feel they are being punished for the actions of a few bad apples.
Yet mall manager Louise Dudley said public feedback has supported the curfew.
But as officers patrolled Friday -- standing in front of entrances, department stores and at the escalators outside Auntie Anne's pretzels, ID-checking drove some young adults away.
Chalsea Shinault, 18, estimates that she was carded five times in a half-hour. The final straw was when she said an officer followed her down an escalator.
"There's no point in staying," she said, pushing open a door. "They're going to end up running so many people off this mall."
Nationwide, 48 of 1,200 malls enforce curfews. Minnesota's Mall of America started the trend in 1996. The year before activating the rule, there were more than 300 fights and incidents. That number dropped to two in the first year after the curfew.
Managers of other malls are also happy with curfew results.
Lingering crowds prompted Durham, N.C.'s Northgate Mall to launch a program four years ago requiring teens to be with adults after 6 p.m., seven days per week.
At the time, the mall's marketing director, Paula Harris, was accused of discriminating against the "hip-hop generation." But after the policy, she said no retailers complained of lost business.
"We are not a school or a rec center or baby sitters," Harris said. "We want you to shop when you get here."
Valley View's policy prompted some teens to launch a protest -- going online and asking their peers to boycott.
Lauren Shelley, a 16-year-old Roanoker, started a Facebook page urging teens to shun the mall. The site suggests trying on clothes at Valley View but buying them online -- something she did last week.
"I'm an honors kid. My friends and I don't cause any problems," Lauren said. "It just made me really mad."
Courtney Lazore, 16, started a similar page and received e-mails from people of all ages. The site, protestvv.firez.org, even caught the attention of the National Youth Rights Association.
"If the ban doesn't go away," she said, "at least we tried."
Meanwhile, a Hollister employee said the store was the slowest she had seen on a Friday night. An Abercrombie manager reported the same. However, mall manager Dudley said business was incident-free and calm.
Yet 18-year-old Evan Wofford, tired of being carded, left early with his friends, not even sure where they were going.
"Valley View Mall's going to lose a lot of business because of this," he said.
