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THEIR TOWN

Residents of Bowie get a new lifestyle center — and a downtown

By Donna Mitchell

Bowie New Town Center, a 274-acre mixed-use project in Bowie, Md., will feature a 560,000-square-foot retail component developed by Simon Property Group.

If all goes well this year, the residents of one of Bowie, Md.’s fastest-growing new neighborhoods will get their very own downtown of sorts by the time autumn comes around.

The Bowie New Town Center will be a mixed-use planned community with 274 acres of retail, residential and office components.

Shopping center developer Simon Property Group of Indianapolis broke ground on the retail portion of the project — a 560,000-square-foot lifestyle center called Bowie Town Center — last October. It is expected to be completed in time for a fall opening and this year’s Christmas shopping season.

The Town Center project was a by-product of improvements that were made years ago to Interstate Highway 50. The refurbished highway connects Washington, D.C., to Annapolis, Md., and that opened up the corridor to development, said Roderick Vosper, Simon’s vice president of regional development and lead developer of the Bowie project. Those developments helped fuel the upscale residential market and bring an influx of white-collar professionals to Bowie and the surrounding communities within Prince George’s County.

During a recent boom in the 1990s, Bowie saw more than 1 million square feet of retail and office space added outside of its downtown. Three subdivisions built on the outskirts of Bowie have been annexed by the city, and municipal officials are close to adding a fourth subdivision, said Jim Cronk, planning director for the City of Bowie..

The project started in 1996, when Simon Property Group acquired the 93-acre parcel of land as part of its merger with DeBartolo Realty Corp. The project was originally intended to be a regional mall. But Bowie’s city officials asked Simon to consider alternatives to putting an enclosed regional mall on the site.

After researching other open-air shopping centers in the Washington, D.C., market, Simon decided to bring that type of concept to the Bowie site, and secured site-plan approvals for the project, Vosper said.

Bowie Town Center is the only new development this year for Simon, which expects to spend in the area of $90 million for the project, thanks to a syndicated construction loan arranged by Minneapolis-based US Bank. Cleveland-based Key Bank and Toronto-based Scotia Capital also participated in the financing.

Serving the community
The reinvention will give Maryland’s Prince George’s County an upscale shopping center that serves its increasingly professional, high-income population. Located on the fringe of the older section of Bowie, and ensconced among the new posh subdivisions, Bowie Town Center will be the community’s open-air Main Street-style shopping village. The shopping complex will also serve the growing populations of surrounding Mitchville, Largo and Glendale, also in Prince George’s County, said Cronk.

“The residents thought they were ready for something like this to happen. They were tired of having to drive out of the county for that,” said Cronk. “Now we and other parts of the county are getting more attention from the retailers.”

“We’ve had both upper- and middle-income [households], people that live from the center to the edges of Bowie come in on this project,” he said. “They wanted something that would not just be an outside design just plunked into our community. They wanted something that complemented what was already there.”

Bowie Town Center’s two major streets converge at a traffic circle.

The 560,000-square-foot retail complex has a central intersection, with a main drag that runs 1,400 feet. Sears and Hecht’s will anchor the street on both ends. Its junior anchors include Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond and Old Navy. The project will also include a neighborhood center anchored by a Safeway supermarket.

Bowie Town Center may be a lifestyle shopping center, but its open-air setting, bike paths and streets give it the feel of a real downtown area. The complex’s other major street, called Town Center Boulevard, has its own entrance from Maryland’s Route 197. Running from north to south, it intersects with Emerald Way, the vehicular street that connects the two anchor stores. The two streets converge at a traffic circle, and shoppers will be able to park their cars right along the interior streets in front of the stores, just like in a downtown area.

“Having done a lot of research and visited projects that are similar in concept, we are convinced that the inclusion of vehicular traffic does a lot to energize the feel of the center,” Vosper said.

The middle of the town center — at the intersection of Emerald Way and the boulevard — will be closed off to traffic for community events like art shows and festivals.

Sophisticated new design
“It’s a very sophisticated design, and we hope to ratchet up the levels of quality retail tenants to reflect the kind of community that it is, which is affluent,” Vosper said.

When it came to the actual look of the buildings and touches that would give the complex a lived-in, historical feel, Simon Property Group turned to ID8, RTKL’s Baltimore-based graphic design group.

Architects at RTKL headed to local museums to research Bowie’s railroad and horseracing past, said Ken Maynard, an associate vice president at RTKL and architect on the Bowie Town Center project. The ID8 group came up with paintings, silk screening and 3-D designs. The artwork might even include a sculptural frieze or two.

It also helped invent the look for the pavilion building, which will be the shopping center’s food court, and one of its standout structures. The pavilion, planned as an all-brick building, will be constructed to look like an old rail station. It will feature large arched openings and windows, murals depicting the horseracing tradition of Bowie and Prince George’s County, and exposed arched steel trusses.

With a total seating capacity of 600, the pavilion opens out onto a small outdoor park, with designated areas for outdoor dining and a children’s play area.

Patrons of Bowie Town Center will also be able to go to the movies, thanks to a Hoyt Cinema, located on the other side of Route 197. Approachable by a pedestrian bridge, the cinema opened several years ago, said Vosper.

Despite Bowie Town Center’s downtown feel, and the buildings’ multistory appearance, all shops are single-level. There is no residential-over-retail or office-over-retail configuration, said Vosper.

Each component of Bowie New Town Center will have its own section within the development. Almost completed, the residential area will combine town houses, apartments, senior housing and a small portion of single-family houses.

The development of Bowie New Town Center’s office element is trailing the residential and retail portions. According to Cronk, Massachusetts Mutual of Springfield, Mass., has developed one-third of the available office space — a 150,000-square-foot building that it owns and rents out to tenants. As of February, another 120,000 square feet owned by MLS Properties of Hunt Valley, Md., was still being marketed to possible tenants. The remaining space — still undeveloped — is owned by the City of Bowie.

As for the retail portion, it experienced some setbacks of its own. Zany Brainy, the educational toy retailer based in King of Prussia, Pa., was supposed to open at Bowie Town Center. But since the company could not meet Simon’s opening date, the developer decided to lease the space to specialty shops and restaurants. Also, an extremely rainy spring and summer of 2000 interrupted the site-clearing schedule, and subsequently put a crunch on the construction schedule.

“It’s gotten us scrambling to get the project open in the fall. But we’re confident that it will. We will deliver,” said Vosper. “We’re excited, and hope to be breaking new ground relative to lifestyle centers.”

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