Mall Of America

The only time Daquein McNeil has ever set foot in the state of Minnesota was for an AAU tournament in suburban Minneapolis one year ago. Outside of a trip to the Mall of America, the 6-foot-3, 190-pound combo guard says he doesn't remember much about visiting the North Star State. But despite his lack of familiarity with Minnesota, McNeil is “really excited” to spend the next four years of his life there. The East Baltimore native and Vermont Academy senior committed to the Golden Gophers on Wednesday, becoming the first commitment of the Richard Pitino era. “It feels really good,” McNeil said.

Suspended Minnesota freshman Royce White pleaded guilty Wednesday to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct and theft for an October shoplifting incident and scuffle with a guard at the Mall of America. Defense attorney F. Clayton Tyler said after White's hearing in Hennepin County District Court that the disorderly conduct charge will be dropped if White stays out of trouble for a year. The judge fined him $300 on the petty misdemeanor theft charge. On a separate matter that didn't come up at the hearing, the attorney said White was not involved in the theft of a laptop computer from a University of Minnesota dorm room last month.

Jeshajahu Weinberg, 81, a founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who used his dramatic talents to tell the story of European Jewry, died Saturday in Jerusalem. His creative vision is credited with giving visitors to the museum a glimpse of the reality in Nazi camps and Jewish ghettos in Europe during World War II. On display are more than 30,000 artifacts, including a railroad car used to transport Jews to camps. His innovative work in the Tel Aviv and Washington museums helped earn him the 1999 Israel Prize for lifetime achievement, the most prestigious award the Jewish state bestows on its citizens.

Taking the Kids is a new family travel column that will appear biweekly in the Travel section of The Sun. Its author, Eileen Ogintz, is a former Chicago Tribune national correspondent with 20 years of newspaper experience and the mother of three who has traveled extensively with her children.Bloomington, Minn.--The kids didn't know where to look first. Parents either. There were 20-foot-tall green dinosaurs, life-size yellow tigers jumping through hoops, space ships and astronauts flying overhead, clowns juggling plates, construction workers busy on a crane, trapeze artists swinging through the air -- 7,000 square feet in all of animals and people and vehicles all made out of LEGO bricks, millions of multicolored plastic blocks that move and blink and light up. Even the beams holding the place together are giant LEGO bricks.

SILVER SPRING -- At the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, an art deco shopping center once represented the dream of families who longed for an idyllic life outside the concrete cities.Built in 1938, the Silver Spring Shopping Center was a novelty. It featured a cluster of stores surrounding a parking lot -- Maryland's first car-oriented strip shopping.Today, that intersection could become a major crossroads for Montgomery County and, perhaps, for Maryland. While the stores sit empty, the shopping center rests on the corner of what could soon become a new "American Dream" -- the label a Canadian developer has given a proposed megamall here.

A COMPUTER SEARCH of the words "dream" and "Washington" and "mall" heretofore would mostly turn up references to Martin Luther King's famous civil rights' speech before the Lincoln Memorial. From now on, that same cyber-surf would lead to a much different type of dream: a $600 million shopping complex proposed outside D.C. in Silver Spring.The unabashedly named American Dream Mall is so grand that its plans conjure up the kind of wonderment and disbelief that greeted Jim Rouse's Harborplace or Walt Disney's "World."

Holly Balabanick describes her style as "vintage and classy with a dash of sexy." The 29-year-old Aveda educator likes current fashions that are influenced by previous eras. "I like some of that pouf in my sleeve. My mom collects buttons, so I love buttons that come from the '50s and '60s." The Minnesota native just moved to Fallston after living in Georgia for the past 2 1/2 years, and she says she's loving the shopping choices here (which she was scoping out at Hunt Valley Towne Centre when we "Glimpsed" her)

WHETHER OR NOT you own a small store, it's easy to sympathize with the trepidation of shopkeepers when you look around the retail landscape:Target, a large chain from Minneapolis, just unveiled 13 stores in Maryland and Virginia with a promotional blitz to rival the Grenada invasion.Liquor sellers in Howard County are fighting a plan by mega-discounter Total Beverage to open Maryland's biggest wine and beer outlet in Ellicott City. Their concerns are reminiscent of the fears of area car dealers when CarMax, a used-car operation belonging to Circuit City Stores Inc. won legislative permission to enter this market on a seven-day-a-week basis.

The Canadian developers of two of the continent's biggest, most spectacular shopping malls may develop a 1.25 million-square-foot mall and amusement park in the heart of Silver Spring, according to a proposal announced by Montgomery County officials yesterday.The Triple Five Group of Companies is best known as a minority partner in the Mall of America project in Minnesota and as the lead developer of the world's biggest mall in West Edmonton, Alberta.The company proposed a $500 million complex including a 500-room hotel, an IMAX theater, miniature golf course, a wave pool, a hockey rink and 650,000 square feet of retail space, about as much as the Annapolis Mall or Hunt Valley Mall, said David Weaver, a spokesman for Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan.