The “Dryer Portal” at the House of Eternal Return.

“Most people in real estate today,” he told me, “are approaching the experience economy from fear.” Fisher rattled off some ideas: “Deep house, E.D.M., drone racing, TED Talks, a barbecue competition.”Īs the third-generation representative of Fisher Brothers, a New York real estate development firm, Fisher is well aware of the industry’s anxiety about what’s sometimes called “the experience economy” - the idea that, when it’s possible to buy or watch virtually anything online, the only way to get people to leave their houses and spend money is to offer them a fresh, surprising experience. Fisher could nonetheless envision what it would become: “a place of wonder.” Practically speaking, this means that there will be things like an arcade and an escape room, and that even the more traditional retail tenants - a shop selling sneakers, say - will feature some sort of interactive V.R. The developer Winston Fisher gave me a tour in February, when AREA15 was still a half-built concrete box with construction equipment trundling through the mud. Accordingly, even though it will most likely feature retail tenants, an ice-cream parlor, a gift shop and a food court, AREA15 is being billed as something fresh and exciting - an “immersive bazaar,” an “experiential retail and entertainment complex,” a place where “artists are front and center.” It connotes suburban sprawl, vacant department stores, plummeting real estate values. The word “mall,” in the second decade of the 21st century, has come to be a word for something dying, if not dead.

You might be tempted to call AREA15, a development that opens in December a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, a mall its investors would prefer that you did not.

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