Bradford Shopping Arcade - Landmark
From a distance, the Bradford Shopping Arcade somewhat resembles a whimsical little town suspended beneath a balloon. The upper floors are an enclosure built atop stilts several stories high. The upper portion of the arcade has a dome nestled between the ‘stilts’, which are a series of solid, squared-off metallic columns holding shops and stores on their interior.

This massive commercial and residential edifice is especially known for blocking traffic in Old Bradford. The Arcade is an enclosure over a collection of stores both antiquated and shining new, supplying climate controlled shopping conditions year round. It is a massive building, fifteen floors high and covering a full city block.
The lower area of the building is open-air, although it is heated in winter and cooled in summer. This, along with a cleverly constructed ceiling designed by UI and artist Hugh Mancini provides the illusion of being outdoors in lovely weather regardless of what it's actually like outside, making the arcade very popular, especially for dates. This has earned the building’s nickname of “The skybox”, especially used by people who think of the word ‘arcade’ as meaning a place where you play video games.

The Arcade is a place for business, primarily. The constant security presence means it never really gets robbed, although occasionally someone tries to infiltrate the UI offices in the upper area. It is sometimes used as neutral ground by criminal or superpowered factions or individuals, since fighting here is strongly discouraged, and many supers use it as a place to take a break from their adventures, since they don’t have to fear being ambushed by their nemesis here. The landmark isn’t significant to the city save in that it is a vast monument to the city’s can-do-anything attitude.
Proceeding into the structure, one comes to an indoor mall area featuring designer stores, then an office space, and some ridiculously expensive and glamorous condominiums rising up into the structure.
The shops in the lower portion, under the domed enclosure, are sometimes garish. Most are restorations of much older buildings that suffered during or after the Hurricane, so they tend to run the gamut from charming to kitsch, depending on the quality of the restoration.
History of the Bradford Shopping Arcade:

Much of what is now “New Bradford” used to be small kitschy mom-and-pop shops and restaurants, and small, run-down apartments. After most of it was power-washed away by Hurricane Atlas, the developers in Old Bradford finally admitted that they hadn’t liked most of those places as much as they’d pretended to, and started building newer, better buildings there, sometimes to house old businesses and sometimes to house new ones. However, one block of small, quaint stores managed to survive intact - how isn’t known, and many speculate on possibilities from other buildings or debris providing a wind shelter to somebody with some sort of area-effect ‘good luck’ power. But however it happened, the little stores survived, although happened to now be in a very inconvenient part of the new development; the center.

There was a great deal of debate on what to do with the buildings. Since they were still standing, and the owners still living, the elites of Old Bradford had to keep pretending they liked these places, unlike the rest of the neighborhood. But they, really, really wanted to tear them down and build a nice little township sort of place to tie the rest of the neighborhood’s new development together.

The solution came from a UI engineer who innocently said “Why not just build above them?” This was one of those ideas that everyone initially said was ridiculous and could never work, but then came around to after thinking about it a little bit. What followed was a session where the engineer made increasingly wild proposals on what could be done with the place, and everyone else getting increasingly excited about it, so that before long UI was left in the position of having to deliver a frankly ridiculous building complex. Fortunately, UI loves a challenge.

Having now had the remarkably unlikely survival of a block of old shops, and their subsequent survival of urban renewal, the miracles kept coming as the building itself was finished both on time and under budget; the remaining money was donated to area charities. This spate of good fortune didn’t go unnoticed, either, as many people started thinking of the place as lucky. It is possible that this has contributed to the area’s reputation as a safe place to be, even in a city as rough and tumble as Titan.

Since completion, the Bradford Shopping Arcade’s history has been much less remarkable; the stores and restaurants prosper, people go there to enjoy nice weather when the city’s actual weather stinks, and nothing terrible ever seems to happen in the open areas around the shops.
The rooftop gardens are a favorite for sunset parties before residents put on their capes to fight crime for the night...