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Shopping Centers Today -> February 2008
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RETAIL DEVELOPMENT ON THE FAST TRACK
The grand railway station known as the Lehrter Bahnhof saw Berlin's best days and its worst. Built in 1871 on the banks of the River Spree, an easy walk from the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, the station was a link to the rest of Europe through boom and bust and battle - lots of battle.
Allied bombing crippled the station during World War II, but it was the peace that sealed its fate. The station lay just over the line in the newly created East Germany, which all but eliminated train service across the border. The station closed in 1951 and was demolished in 1958.
Today both East Germany and the Berlin Wall are gone, of course, and the site once again boasts a grand railway station: the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, or central station, Europe's largest, with 1,600 train departures daily. This is also a substantial mixed-use project containing 160,000 square feet of retail space and an office component comprising 540,000 square feet.
"Basically, it's a train station attached to a shopping center," said Jörg Krechky, national director of Jones Lang LaSalle's Hamburg office, who heads shopping center investment. "It's a huge scheme."
The five-level glass station opened in 2006, after 12 years of planning and construction. This long gestation hints at Berlin officials' desire to use the project as an engine to spur development of an area that was stifled by the political division of the city.
Development projects sprang up across Berlin in the 1990s as investors rushed to profit from the reunification. But the demolition of the wall left large swaths of land either vacant or derelict, including the rail site, and the city began to eye public projects to seed growth.
Officials hope Berlin Hauptbahnhof will encourage fill-in development to the east and north of the terminal, a short walk to the city's government offices, but the prospects may be clouded by a slowdown in Berlin's commercial property market. Krechky says the Berlin retail market is already near saturation, with 65 shopping centers in a catchment area of some
3.4 million people. The station's retail component has been a boon for the 300,000 travelers who pass through the station each day, though Krechky notes that it has not become a retail destination in itself. It does have one big draw for nontraveling Berliners, however: Most of its shops stay open until 10 p.m., long after most other retailers in famously early-closing Germany have been shuttered.
AROUND THE TOWN
Berlin's retail is decentralized. "Every district has a retail spot," said Jörg Krechky, national director of the Hamburg office of Jones Lang LaSalle. But the best-known shopping districts are in the city's center.
Among these is Kurfürstendamm. At its eastern end Ku'damm becomes Tauentzienstraße, a short street that bustles with department stores. To the northwest is Schloßstraße, one of the hotter venues for new retail. "Five years ago there was one shopping center there, and right now within about one kilometer we have three, and two coming," said Krechky. The drab former East Berlin is also getting a bit of glitz. The eastern portion of the Friedrichstraße shopping street stagnated under the East Germans but has enjoyed a retail resurgence, even welcoming a new Galeries Lafayette department store.
Sonae Sierra's Alexa: The first of many
Berlin's newest mall, Alexa, is helping to reshape the Alexandarplatz, a once vibrant but now largely empty square in the eastern part of the city. Built by Portuguese developer Sonae Sierra, the 600,000-square-foot mall features 178 stores and drew huge crowds at its opening in September. This is only the beginning, Sonae Sierra says. Alexa will be the flagship for the German market, for which the firm says it has some ambitious plans.
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