Wait, so malls in Manhattan aren't a good idea? A year and a half after the Time Warner Center opened to much fanfare, it's a bit troubling to learn that the upper echelon restaurants are empty enough that they can squeeze in a reservation for a nobody on nearly any given night.

Who's to blame for the TWC's continued wavering popularity? Time Warner? Skidmore, Owings & Merrill? Bloomberg? Urban dwellers?

Malls, almost by definition, are about cars and huge parking lots. Also, while Manhattan may not have room for big-box stores, the vast majority of its stores are boxes: discrete squares or rectangles, each with its own door facing a street, not an indoor corridor.

Whew, glad we got the way malls work cleared away in the third graph.