The Americana at Brand rises from its 15.5-acre lot in downtown Glendale, Calif., like the setting for a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From my seat aboard the vintage-style trolley that makes a circuit around this $400 million outdoor shopping mall and residential community, I glide down what reminds me of Rodeo Drive to Rush Street in Chicago, skirt the dancing fountain in Vegas, turn onto Newbury Street in Boston and end up in New Orleans, each stop announced by the cheerful ringing of the conductor's bell. The Americana, where I'm spending a weekend, is the newly minted brainchild of the California megadeveloper Rick Caruso, the force behind the Grove in Los Angeles and a family of other open-air retail developments that turn up the design volume on the dreary shopping mall experience, past theme-park kitsch, all the way to something sublime, say, a Diamond as Big as the Ritz.

At the Grove, at Third and Fairfax, Caruso and his in-house team perfected their formula of marrying retail with entertainment, dining, a gently curving promenade for strolling and a world of other trademark touches like valet parking, piped-in music from the Rat Pack era and a concierge desk where shoppers can make dinner reservations or borrow an umbrella in the rare event of rain. More than just a builder with a dramatic flair and a nostalgia for small-town America, Caruso is a producer of alternative realities - where Sinatra is still young, service employees all wear crisply tailored uniforms and the clock stops every 30 minutes, right in sync with a mesmerizing water-jet show at the fountain. And this fantasy strikes a chord with the public: more than 18 million visitors flock to the Grove every year, while sales per square foot, according to Caruso Affiliated, are 75 percent higher than the industry average.

"The whole idea isn't just to shop or eat or go to a movie," Caruso explains. The appeal of his developments, he insists, has more to do, with recovering that which is lost in Southern California's car culture - the sense of community that comes from street life. "There's a desperate desire to actually see people. We don't get that in L.A. When I'm in New York walking down Fifth Avenue or Madison Avenue, there's an energy to it. You feel like you're alive. On Rodeo Drive you could shoot off cannons at 6 o'clock and you wouldn't hurt anybody. The place just rolls up."

With the Americana, Caruso has upped the ante by rolling out a two-acre green as the project's centerpiece, attracting higher-end stores, including Barneys New York Co-op and Tiffany & Company, and building 238 rental apartments as well as 100 luxury condos that come with all the amenities of a five-star resort. If shopping is America's favorite pastime, then why not just move to the mall and call it home?

The trick, of course, is to make a developer's dream dropped into the middle of an existing landscape (downtown Glendale, once a boomtown, has lately grown shabby) feel appealing enough for shoppers to put down their credit cards and even more important, for residents to put down roots. To that end, Caruso and his vice president for architecture, Dave Williams, traveled widely across America and abroad to study how retail and residential communities interact when they've evolved together organically over time. One model that appealed to them was Newbury Street in Boston, which they used to create one of the Americana's "neighborhoods" along Americana Way, anchored by Barneys Co-op. The residential units, housed in a four-story building called the Lido, are set back from the shops to create a sense of openness on the street below; they feature curved balconies to please the eye, stone veneer recesses to capture shadows and a range of colors that create the illusion of separate town houses. The storefronts below are extra-tall - 22 feet - for curb appeal, while across the way in the neighborhood anchored by a Cheesecake Factory, they are only 18 feet high. On the stretch of Caruso Avenue that smacks of Rodeo Drive, home to tenants like Lucky Kid and Kate Spade, the storefronts are even smaller in scale.

"Having varying heights and not creating one consistent horizontal line is necessary to give the project a more organic feel," Williams says, strolling through the development on a busy Friday afternoon. "So it looks like it was built over a period of time, much like a city street." Similar thought went into the Americana's elaborate, ready-made landscaping; more than 560 fully grown trees, including a 45-foot-tall California sycamore on the green, provide shade from the scorching sun, in addition to 230 mature palm trees, from Mexican fan to pygmy date. Each rental complex, as well as the condo building, Excelsior, has a distinctively designed lobby that opens directly onto either the green or one of the Americana's major thoroughfares. That way, a pineapple mojito at Katsuya or a free Sunday morning yoga class on the green is a short walk for everyone. Within the buildings themselves, shared elevators and central courtyards create the familiarity that comes from everyday contact.

"The hope," Williams says, "is that residents will start to feel like they're part of the neighborhood by getting to know their neighbors - that way they'll stay longer. The residences are driven by this whole idea of ‘arriving home.' I'm not just going back to my apartment; I'm going home. There's a subtle difference."

It's one thing to arrive at home and quite another to come home every day to the Caruso lifestyle. My home at the Americana for the weekend is a two-bedroom model apartment in a rental building called the Marc, outfitted with a coffee maker, a refrigerator stocked with small-batch soft drinks and, best of all, three balconies overlooking the green where I start my mornings sipping coffee, and watching the sprinklers come alive and the workers filtering in from the outside world. With the first song of the day bursting from the outdoor P.A. system (appropriately, "Can't Buy Me Love"), I head down to Caffe Primo for breakfast, guessing that the dearth of shoppers is explained by an early-summer heat wave. By midafternoon, however, the trolley is packed, a critical mass has gathered around the fountain to cool off in the spray, and the terrace at the Cheesecake Factory is filled with enervated shoppers eating sundaes and slices of the chain's most famous menu item.

In the evening, with those balcony views, it's easy to appreciate the extravagant dream behind the Americana at Brand. The avenues are full of young, old and everyone in between. The gas lanterns flicker in the dark. The air is full of murmuring and laughter as people filter out of the Pacific Theaters multiplex and into the night. And when the fountain comes to life for Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," think of Fitzgerald's observation that America is "a willingness of the heart.” The Americana at Brand is not for everyone, and it may take an economic miracle to sustain its current level of surface polish. But there is no denying the power of Caruso's lavishly constructed fantasy of home, even if it never feels true to life.