Inside the Time Warner Center

The retail complex at the new Time Warner Center lures shoppers with luxe stores in a spectacular setting

Staff Writer

Susan Fine knelt and leaned her face into the cushioned black oval, anticipating pleasure. An Aveda sales adviser gathered Fine's long, wavy black hair off her neck and started to knead.



Fine's dog, Mocha, followed his tail in a circle and then seated himself next to his pampered mistress.



Complimentary massage while shopping for cosmetics? A pooch in the store? Manhattan's brand- new Shops at Columbus Circle may look and feel like a shopping mall, but it's not exactly the mall as most of us know it.



Walk in and see A/X Armani Exchange, Joseph Abboud, Cole Haan, Hugo Boss. Spin around and spend a moment taking in the enormous, 150-foot-high glass atrium that offers a cinematic view of Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park, the gateway to the Upper West Side.



The four-story Shops at Columbus Circle, which opened Feb. 5, is the base of the two towers of the $1.7-billion Time Warner Center. On higher floors, CNN will have its studios, Jazz at Lincoln Center will offer performances, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel offers rooms with a Central Park view for $875 a night. Two below-ground concourses house an Equinox Gym and the biggest supermarket in all of Manhattan, a branch of the wildly popular Whole Foods Market. The retail component has close to 40 stores in all.



"I think it's really impressive," said Fine, 38. And that was before her massage. ("We call it a stress- relieving experience, because we're not licensed masseuses," corrected Shoma Goomansingh cheerfully as she worked on Fine.)



Shoppers can buy "The French Laundry Cookbook" by Thomas Keller and "Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef" by Jean-Georges Vongerichten in the biggest Williams-Sonoma in the United States. But, wait - there's more - they can then escalate upstairs to the fourth floor to be served those chefs' creations in their new restaurants, Per Se and Rare. The food at this mall is not pizza slices and hot pretzels. It's filet mignon; it's a sushi dinner for $300.



Men - and women, too - can smoke, as long as it's in the cigar lounge at Davidoff, furnished with plush chairs and rugs and paintings. The lounge has a separate ventilation system from the mall and storage for the best customers' cigars, customers who might drop $40,000 for a lighter encrusted with 60 diamonds.



But no matter how high-end The Shops at Columbus Circle might aspire to be, no matter how grand its scale, it's still, at its heart, a mall, shoppers say. It draws moms with strollers, curious tourists, New Yorkers on their lunch breaks.



It's also got an occasional construction worker in a hard hat walking among the crowds because, as those visiting now will note, the Time Warner Center is still being polished. The upscale restaurants on the third and fourth floors (which some have jokingly called the food court) have yet to all open. (The first, Per Se, opened Monday.) Jazz at Lincoln Center's three performance centers, totaling 2,000 seats, will open in the fall, and several stores, such as Samsung, have yet to set up. CNN hasn't moved in yet, and so is not yet giving tours. The view of Columbus Circle is dirt and construction equipment; its planned $30-million renovation won't be complete until spring.



Barbara Martin, a 48-year-old hypnotherapist, took the Long Island Rail Road in from West Islip the same day Fine drove in from Westchester. (Note to those driving: A parking garage will soon be operating below ground.) She wanted to pick up a book on tarot at Borders and to meet a friend for a bite at Whole Foods, a warehouse-like supermarket that has 250 seats so shoppers can eat what they buy at the store's sushi bar, juice bar and hot foods area.



Martin said The Shops at Columbus Circle is superior to most malls she's seen on Long Island or Queens. (Except, perhaps, Manhasset's Miracle Mile.)



Martin's friend Tamara Kulukundis, 43, is an artist and writer who lives a few blocks from the Shops. "For us who live in the neighborhood, this is a fabulous place to come," she said, speaking over the cacophony of the juice blenders, toddlers' cries and the roll of shopping carts. "I'm so thrilled this is here." It beats the Coliseum that was previously on the site, with its car and boat shows, she said. Kulukundis was here opening weekend, when she said the line to get into Whole Foods snaked through the center.



Shoppers, of course, will make or break The Shops at Columbus Circle. City dwellers may not, in the long run, be willing to incorporate vertical shopping into lives accustomed to street-level buying. Tourists may - or may not - boost sales if they work the Time Warner Center into their itineraries along with the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Shop owners seem confident: "Half the sales we've made since we've opened have been from people outside of the city," said Stuart Weitzman, owner of his namesake shoe store.



Some shoppers were critical already. "The stores, I don't feel like they flow together," said Alka Thukral, 30, who lives in midtown and works in health care consulting. "It's too much of a mixture of different types of stores." It might thrive in the winter, when people welcome being indoors. But in summer, shoppers will prefer shopping Fifth Avenue or SoHo, she predicted.



Some even prefer Madison Avenue now. Annette Bachner, a television director who lives on the East Side, said curiosity drew her and niece Sally Marder, 48, who lives in Dallas but also has an apartment in Manhattan.



"I suppose they have marvelous personal service here, but I think you need a megaphone to get ahold of a salesperson," Bachner said. She also doubted diners would come to eat at the ultra-expensive restaurants when they have to take - her face showed her distaste - an escalator to get to them. "I am going up in my nice skinny little heels on an escalator?" She thinks not.



That Manhattan-esque disdain for malls (a symbol of suburbia, which most New Yorkers eschew) is one reason Kenneth Himmel, the president of Related Urban Development and co-managing partner of the project, avoids the M-word. He calls it a "vertical urban retail project."



"I'm the guy that's the anti-mall lingo guy," he said. "When someone says they're going to a mall, it usually conjures up a fairly tired, not very inspiring suburban shopping center."



Himmel also said any similarity of the Time Warner Center to the World Trade Center is unintentional, as the design of the twin office towers was planned a year and a half before 9/11.



However, several shoppers made a connection anyway. "In the distance it looks like the Twin Towers. I just couldn't believe it," said Fine before her massage.



Himmel may not need to worry about doubters. On opening weekend, the Shops gave away 30,000 maps to the building, he said. Many people interviewed last week said they had already visited several times.



"I used to live in California. I miss malls," said Jodi Surratt, 37, who's been to the Shops three times since it opened, twice with her daughter, Katie, who is almost 2. She said Borders has an area for children and will soon have story time, and she can let her daughter run around in the mall corridors as if in an indoor playground. And, on top of that, her husband, Wilson, works for CNN, and will be able to walk from their apartment to work.



"I just missed the one-stop mall experience," Surratt said as Katie pasted stickers into her "Blues Clues" book sitting in a booth at Whole Foods. "It's really stupendous."

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