The Mall of America has become an international phenomenon, but other than its brute size, we can’t understand what makes it so special. Nested between highways near the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, this super-sized complex is the second-biggest shopping mall in North America. The largest is the West Edmonton Mall, in Alberta, Canada. (Are malls particularly alluring in such often-frozen places?)

How big is Mall of America? Very. It has over 520 stores and an amusement park in the center. Three Providence Place malls could fit in its gross area of 4.2 million square feet. And bear in mind that Providence Place is considered a large retailing center.

But the serious shoppers of southeastern New England have no reason to envy their soul-siblings in southeastern Minnesota. Providence Place has many of the same big-name mall stores — Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Williams-Sonoma, Foot Locker, etc. — and restaurants, both of the food-court variety and more upscale, such as Napa Valley Grill. Much of the retailing space at Mall of America is taken up by T-shirt shops and copies of the better-known stores. The enclosed amusement park, though a novelty, offers the usual rides on its cracking concrete floor.

As for the aesthetic experience, Providence Place beats Mall of America hands down. Mall of America is a drab windowless warren of stores, whereas Providence Place offers glamorous panoramas of Providence’s rivers and historic neighborhoods, and is itself attractive, for a mall.

Given the reality that the Mall of America is at bottom a conventional shopping experience, it amazes us to learn that people fly into the Twin Cities’ airport from all over, including Europe and Asia, just to shop there. Like most suburban malls, it seems to have little to do with the metropolises it seeks to service. Minneapolis and St. Paul are each a good 25-minute drive away, assuming that there’s no traffic.

A big ugly thing, plopped down in the prairie — that’s what the Mall of America looks like to us.