New Pabst Farms Mall To Be...A Mall

I'm not a shopping mall obsessive, but I do know that the new mall at Bayshore is of the 'outdoor' variety, as opposed to the older-style, enclosed mall.

Bayshore Town Center offers the feeling of a neighborhood's retail district, with streets and streetscapes and other amenities designed to break up the boxy, old-fashioned mall where you park your car, and walk into arcades on a floor or two of stores on either side of the aisles.

For example, most of Mayfair is a giant, enclosed mall, with a few newer, stand-alone, big-name stores in or very close to the complex.

But outdoor, it ain't.

Some people apparently hoped that that the million-square-foot upscale mall at Pabst Farms would be of the newer, outdoor design, since everything is supposed to be the latest and greatest when it comes to Pabst Farms retail tenants.

But if you're looking for the trendier, outdoor mall version at Pabst Farms, all of which is being built on top of once open-space through which the underground water supply got its recharging rain and snow melt - - surely at least as important to the live-blood of the region as more subdivisions and intensified shopping - - get ready to be disappointed.

A local Waukesha County newspaper, paper, the Kettle Moraine Index, describes the mall this way:

"Plans for 110 acres at I-94 and Highway 67 include a 1,000-foot-long interior shopping mall flanked by three 140,000- to 180,000-square-foot, two-story anchor stores, two "junior" anchor stores, including a 28,000-square-foot bookstore and a separate 16-screen movie theater."

The news may make it less certain that taxpayers will rush to plunk down a fresh $20 million in taxes to pay for a spanking-new I-system interchange to get retail shoppers in and out of Pabst Farms.