Shopping centers showing mallrats the door

CLEVELAND - A downtown Cleveland mall is implementing one of the nation’s toughest curfews on teenagers, joining a growing national trend among shopping centers that say loud, unruly youngsters drive away paying customers.

The mall, Tower City Center, said it would ban anyone under 18 after 2:30 p.m. unless he or she was accompanied by an adult.

“The office tenants and the customer base would like to see less youth in groups, and we’re hoping that our expansion of the code of conduct will accommodate that,” said Lisa Krieger, the mall’s general manager for retail.

Tower City is the 51st of the nation’s 1,104 large retail shopping centers to impose a curfew on minors, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. But it is one of the few whose policy will be in effect seven days a week; most mall curfews restrict teenagers only on weekends or after 6 p.m., the council said.

The curfew is part of Tower City’s new Parental Involvement Program, which Krieger said was in keeping with “a national trend as retail centers seek to create a family-friendly atmosphere.”

Teens, activists cry foul
The mall began phasing in the curfew on Thursday with an information campaign. It will go into full effect Dec. 1. Employees under 18 will be issued photo IDs to prove they are allowed in the mall after 2:30.

Adult shoppers at the mall generally welcomed the new policy.

“I know the kids can be kind of intimidating, especially for people that are from out of town or from outside of the city,” said Tishara Clement of Cleveland. “A lot of them are just unsupervised and kind of unruly, so I think it would be a good idea.”

“I think [Tower City] started out on a real high note, but over time it has deteriorated,” said Fred Collins, also of Cleveland.

But teenagers asked about the new policy used words like “bogus” to describe it, an assessment shared by Black on Black Crime, a non-profit Cleveland group that said the policy unfairly targeted minority shoppers at the mall, whose clientele is largely African-American.

“We have many pertinent and important questions which our community needs answers to concerning our kids,” said the group’s founder, Art McKoy. He said the organization was considering calling for a weeklong boycott of Tower City.

Some malls reconsider curfews
More than half of the 51 malls that impose curfews have instituted them in the past three years, and dozens more are considering the idea, the shopping center council said. The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., introduced the concept in 1996.

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