Our Towns, Xanadu, Perhaps a Folly for Our Times

February 22, 2009; New York Times; Our Towns, Xanadu, Perhaps a Folly for Our Times; by Peter Applebome.

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.

In 1797, from the depths of an opium dream, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge emerged with an epic poem about a fantastical paradise. He set about putting its 200 to 300 lines on paper, but, as he told it, after being interrupted by someone with business to transact, he was able to reconstruct only a small, mystical fragment. The rest, gone forever.

The poem was not published until 1816, but it went on to become one of the most famous, if somewhat incomprehensible, reveries ever written.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

There have been many Xanadus over the years, none of them up to Kubla Khan standards. In “Citizen Kane,” Xanadu was the estate of Charles Foster Kane, which is never completed and falls into ruin — “the costliest monument a man has built to himself.”

In 1980, it was the dopey movie with memorably bad music, later spoofed on Broadway, about a Greek muse who descends to Venice Beach from Mount Olympus to inspire the first roller disco.

The latest Xanadu, sprouting off the New Jersey Turnpike, looking like the world’s biggest air vent, built with mismatched tiles, will never be called “stately.” And yet, if Xanadu is all about the truly impossible dream, what better pleasure dome for our season in economic hell than Xanadu, the two-million-square-foot retail and entertainment center in the Meadowlands that may or may not open in August?

Forget Alph. Walking through the largely finished shell of the project — Miley Cyrus cavorting on a giant television screen as workers laid tiles below, multicolor LED lights above — is to be transported to the strangest dream world of them all, the vision of unlimited commercial merriment that was the world we lived in just a year ago.

Who knows when or if we will see the 16-story indoor Snow Park, the 286-foot-tall Pepsi Globe Ferris wheel, the simulated sky-diving contraption, the MagiQuest virtual-reality game. You don’t need Coleridge’s opium to spy the outlines of a sprawling history of modern commerce and New Jersey politics in the deals and dodges, toxic history, corporate failures and corporate rescues it took to get Xanadu to the brink of existence only to have it run into economic catastrophe. Calling Tom Wolfe!

YEARS ago, the talk was of an opening in late 2007. Plans to open last November were pushed back to this August. Now officials are wavering on that. It’s hard to tell what’s worse, a humdrum partial opening (officials claim Xanadu is 70 percent leased; others are skeptical) or the stink of a project that keeps getting pushed back into the future.

There are plenty of skeptics. To Jeff Tittle, the head of the New Jersey Sierra Club, Xanadu is a redundant monument to New Jersey’s pay-to-play culture, New Jersey’s Mall to Nowhere.

Howard Davidowitz, the chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a national retail consulting firm and investment bank, said the concept of mixed entertainment and retail at the Meadowlands was a high-stakes idea that might have succeeded in a better economy.

“We’re going to close 220,000 retail stores this year,” he said. “Who’s doing well? Family Dollar. Dollar Tree. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s. Netflix. Consumers have no money. This is the total opposite of what’s succeeding. It’s not viable in this market.”

Project officials said the building would be finished this year, but they were still evaluating when it would open. John Samerjan, a spokesman for the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, said the timing was less important than the compelling logic of a unique attraction in one of the most desirable locations in the country.

“Nobody invests two billion dollars for a one-year window,” he said. “Looking out toward 2010 or whenever we’ve gone through this and the economy upticks, with all that’s going on, Xanadu, the new rail link, the new stadium, we’re going to be in an amazing place.”

And it is sort of amazing, our own “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice,” signs in vast empty spaces with their come-ons — Forever 21, Guess, Adrenalina. It’s not Coleridge’s Xanadu. But, for better or worse, it is ours.

We tend to remember Coleridge’s glorious dream of Xanadu, but in the end, it’s about a place not reached — not even quite remembered. “Beware! Beware!” we’re reminded at the end, the kind of warning we never quite heed, that Xanadu always seems somehow within reach until, alas, it isn’t.

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