A New Yorker ponders The Grove

I like to read the critical shopper stories that come out every Thursday in the Style section of the New York Times. They are written by Mike Albo or Cintra Wilson, but Albo does a better job. Each piece describes what a store sells within the consumer and fashion culture that surrounds the establishment and its followers. They usually toss in a healthy dose of the retail building's history to satisfy the paper's uber-informed tone.

The critical shopper from last week has Albo's take on our little consumer fairyland that is The Grove. It is hard to hate the convenient cluster of shops - with music! and a trolley! and a little patch of grass! - but at the same time the place is kind of weird.

Albo writes: The first time you go to the Grove, the immensely successful and completely fabricated commercial center in Los Angeles, you will try to hate it. But then you will watch the old-fashioned trolley passing by, or the dancing fountain as it splurts jovially to the cadence of a Sinatra song, and you will drop your snobby urban integrity and walk around consuming things in a mouth-breathing stupor just like everyone else.

“You want to hate the Grove, but you just can’t,” one Angeleno friend said.

“The first rule of L.A. is to stop hating the Grove,” another said.

“You have to go to the Grove!” everyone else gushed. Keep reading.