LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Readers lament loss of chess at mall

Re: Park Royal drops curtain on 50 years of chess games The decision by Park Royal management to disband chess playing by community residents is an ill-considered and unimaginative decision displacing social capital for purchasing power. A healthy community needs physical places for people to come together and interact.

Years ago, in a folk dance class, I swung elbows with a Ron Sher, a developer in Bellevue, Wash.

Sher, a son of a mall developer and partner with his siblings in the largest retail leasing brokerage in the U.S., purchased the failing Crossroads Shopping Centre in central Bellevue in 1988. Sher took inspiration from urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, and the importance of a public space, a “third place,” outside of home and work where people could hang out, visit, and comfortably congregate with others. Counterintuitively, Sher actively encouraged the mall to be used for non-commercial activities, impromptu or organized. One end of the food court was anchored by a giant chess set and became somewhat of a public living room. Major retailers returned to the mall and reintegrated into the thriving community gathering place that Crossroads had become. Today Crossroads Shopping Centre hosts free live music concerts and openmike nights on its market stage, organizes family nights once a month, and offers language translation, yarn arts, private events and more in a community room.

In an era of online shopping, malls need to reimagine their spaces as public places to cultivate community. Park Royal can begin by doing a community-benefit analysis, not a cost-benefit analysis, and be pleased that chess players have found a home at Park Royal.

Elaine Engstrom, Coquitlam I read with disappointment and concern the article regarding Park Royal shopping centre pulling the plug on the chess players in the mall.

It might be of interest to the management at Park Royal that over the past 50 or so years our family — longtime loyal mall users — has spent thousands of dollars annually so we should be considered when they are analyzing their cost-benefit policies.

I am mystified why the mall spends huge amounts marketing to encourage people to come to shop and then makes a decision to evict one of the more charming groups.

I am asking management reconsider their decision and make every effort to find an appropriate place in the mall so this tradition can continue to be part of the charm.

If this new look mall does not have a place for the chess players to gather it is not a place I will choose as my first choice for shopping

Heather Jensen, West Vancouver It is understandable Park Royal management needs to oust this community. Chess embodies values such as logic, reasoning, quiet reflection and self-actualization through abstract problem solving. Shopping is more likely to be about impulse purchases, loud music and self-actualization through connection with material objects with a lot of bling. Clearly, the values reflected by the chess playing community are antithetical to “retail therapy.” Kudos to Park Royal for recognizing the threat and moving to “check mate” the chess players.

Actually, I am fully behind the chess players; the above is a satirical commentary.

Raymond Lee, Vancouver