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Shopping Centers Today -> April 2004
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NEW YORK CITY TO GET ITS FIRST LIFESTYLE CENTER
BY DONNA MITCHELL
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| Work begins this summer on The Shops at Atlas Park, at a former industrial site in the borough of Queens. |
The borough of Queens will provide the site of Gotham’s first lifestyle center, to be built around a 2.3-acre park, among birch groves.
New shopping centers are rare enough in densely developed New York City; projects featuring parks are rarer still. But this center, called The Shops at Atlas Park, is going up in the borough’s Glendale section on a former industrial site surrounded by residential neighborhoods.
A & Co., a consulting firm that specializes in mixed-use projects, is managing the development. A & Co. is an affiliate of Manhattan-based Atco Properties & Management, which owns and manages commercial, residential and industrial properties, including the site on which the Shops will stand.
Inspired by the century-old, residential structures nearby, the developer says it wants to make the Shops an enduring city landmark in an area already distinguished for its architecture.
The Shops will consist of eight buildings — four of them renovated factories, the rest custom-built — surrounding the park on a 12-acre site formerly called Atlas Terminals. The site (Atco owned it for 80 years) was the home of textile and other kinds of factories that closed up and moved on as the city’s once-thriving industrial base disappeared over the years.
“The economics of the land compel a dramatic change,” said Theodore M. Amenta, a principal at A & Co. “This is an industrial property, but industry as a part of the U.S. economy has declined drastically. The highest and best use [for the property now] is mixed-use.”
A & Co. says it expects to start work this summer and open in the fall of 2005. The center will have 300,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, a 25,000-square-foot cinema, and 75,000 square feet of offices. High-end retailers Coldwater Creek, Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon and Spa, and Jos. A. Bank have already signed on, as has Cold Stone Creamery.
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“If we were to get averages of a market as complicated and dense as this, we would miss certain subtleties,” Hemmerdinger said.
A lot of effort is going into the center’s design to help it live up to those surrounding neighborhoods. The well-to-do Forest Hills Gardens neighborhood features English Tudor-style homes built around 1906, and landscaping by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and his older brother, John Charles, the sons of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York’s Central Park.
“The Olmsteds’ work was a standard we wanted to match,” Amenta said.
The park will be comparable in size to a Parisian park or an Italian piazza. The fountain will have no rim, making it accessible to chill seekers on hot summer days. Honey locust trees will sit in four-foot-deep soil beds rather than planters, giving the impression of a long-established stand with roots running deep below. What will actually run deep below, however, is a 1,500-space parking garage, Amenta says.
Amenta plans to create a smaller, second park northwest of the first. Its trees will be pruned so that their branches, when bare, will look like gnarled, upturned hands. During the summer, the leaves will form a cooling canopy.
Some of the Shops’ buildings will have slate roofs and Venetian plaster on the exterior walls. Covered walkways, called loggias, will run along the fronts of two of the buildings to protect shoppers from inclement weather as they browse shop windows.
A & Co. says it is sparing no expense — the developers anticipate a $100 million development cost. But they expect the investment to be repaid many times over, predicting that the Shops will be around for a long time to come.
“This,” said Amenta, “is a project made for the generations.”
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