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Shopping Centers Today -> March 2003
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THE MALL AS MUSEUM
Landlords turn to arts as way to boost centers’ traffic and sales
BY IAN RITTER
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| Simon Property Group hopes that Czarist treasures in an old Montgomery Ward store are drawing more shoppers to its West Ridge Mall than the retailer did. |
While many shopping centers are looking for the next new thing to boost sales, a mall in Kansas is trying to do it with things that are old. Really old.
Simon Property Group’s West Ridge Mall, Topeka, Kan., is the latest of several malls to install a museum.
West Ridge’s Kansas International Museum opened its first exhibit, “Czars: 400 Years of Imperial Grandeur,” last October in the 1.1 million-square-foot mall, considered the retail center of the city. The museum and its exhibit of treasures from Russia’s royal family are based in a 112,700-square-foot space that had housed a Montgomery Ward store that closed in March 2001. The exhibit runs through March 15.
Mall officials are banking on the museum’s doing a lot more for the mall than the defunct department store had done in its latter days.
“We feel with the increased traffic, it’s going to snowball into increased sales that will snowball into increased sales per square foot that will translate into more leasing activity for us,” said Arlin Meats, the mall’s manager. Meats said he expects the exhibits to draw visitors from around the state and a five-state area that includes Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
This kind of museum-mall marriage might seem unusual, but the Kansas International Museum is hardly a first. The Washington, D.C.-based Association of Children’s Museums says 20 of its member institutions are also based in retail centers. The Bellevue (Wash.) Art Museum moved into the 1.3 million-square-foot Bellevue Square mall in 1981 and remained there until it relocated to a stand-alone site across the street in January 2001. There are also a number of specialty museums located in shopping centers. A museum dedicated to New York Yankees great Roger Maris, for instance, operates in the 990,000-square-foot, regional West Acres Shopping Center, Fargo, N.D. In one case, a museum has even completely taken over a center: Las Vegas’ Liberace Plaza, which pays homage to the late eccentric pianist (the museum displays what it says is the largest rhinestone in the world), resides in a former strip center.
The nonprofit Kansas International Museum, which leases the former Montgomery Ward space and first moved into the mall last June, was created by the company that manages it, Topeka-based Cultural Exhibitions and Events. Cultural Exhibitions, which puts on exhibits across the United States, was formed shortly after an earlier Russian czar exhibit came to Topeka in 1995. That exhibit, whose displays were similar to those in the current one — a Fabergé egg, for instance, and other riches that the leaders of imperialist Russia enjoyed — reportedly drew 500,000 people to Kansas’ capital city. Cultural Exhibitions executives said they chose Topeka as the museum’s founding place because it is their city of residence and because there was a demand for it.
Cultural Exhibitions expects the turnout for this exhibit to at least equal the 1995 showing, but would not disclose the number of visitors so far. The company plans to feature one exhibit as large as “Czars” at the museum per year, along with a smaller one of shorter duration. Tentatively planned exhibits include a Japanese show and a partnership of some sort with the Smithsonian Institution.
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The traffic the museum generates can mean only good things for West Ridge Mall, which posts sales of $300 per square foot, said Meats. He calculates that traffic will increase at the mall (which currently receives about 8 million visitors annually) by up to 10 percent per year. His logic is that people attending the museum will also want to shop or to grab a bite at the mall’s food court before or after the exhibit. Busloads of students now visit “Czars” and then shop and eat at the mall afterward, he said. The museum’s management, for its part, sees the partnership the same way.
“It gives us the opportunity to capture some people going to the mall who wouldn’t normally come to the exhibit,” said Eric Davis, chairman and COO of Cultural Exhibitions.
Shopping centers offer museums great visibility, with thousands of people becoming aware of them just in passing by, said Robert “Mac” West, principal of the Washington, D.C.-based Informal Learning Experiences, a consulting firm to museums.
“There certainly are wonderful opportunities for shopping centers and cultural organizations to get together,” West said, “especially when [the centers have] got empty storefronts.”
The Bellevue Art Museum was an asset in Bellevue Square, notes Kemper Freeman Jr., the center’s owner and a past chairman of ICSC. The museum, which was housed on the mall’s top floor, increased traffic at the center, which has about 18 million visitors a year, he said.
“On the years they were in tune with the market [with their exhibits], they were a lot of help,” Freeman said.
And shopping centers are great places for museums, asserts Freeman, because many mall patrons are people who would probably not venture into areas clustered with art galleries and museums.
Conversely, when “Czars” opened at West Ridge, Vicki Hosman, the mall’s marketing director, said she saw a prime example of how the museum helped the center. When dignitaries from the Moscow museum that owns the “Czars” collection attended its opening at the mall, they had more on their minds than the exhibit.
“While we were going through the museum,” Hosman said, “the Russians went shopping.”
 | Current Issue November 2008 |