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IN PLOT TWIST, INDIANAPOLIS MALL ADDS LIBRARY

By Dave Bodamer

A 29,000-square-foot library occupies the former top floor of a Lazarus department store in Indianapolis’ Glendale Mall.

One of the newest tenants brought into Glendale Mall, Indianapolis, following an extensive and expensive renovation, isn’t selling anything and doesn’t charge its customers a dime. The landlord is just thrilled.

The recently completed $45 million, 18-month redevelopment of the center, which finished in November, was not a standard mall refurbishment. The ambitious redesign not only brought in a new tenant mix and a reconfiguration of the mall’s common areas, but also saw the owner, Kite Development Corp., take a chance on a highly unusual tenant: a public library. This has not only revitalized the mall but also has generated the highest patronage levels in the library district’s history.

Radical changes made
Even without the library, the 571,299-square-foot Glendale Mall — previously known as the Glendale Center — has undergone some radical changes. Built in 1958, it had no food court and no theater; the center, which Indianapolis-based Kite Development purchased in 1998 from Equity Properties & Development, Chicago, was “ailing,” according to Kite officials. Now it includes a 200-seat food court with six eateries; a 41,000-square-foot, 12-screen Kerasotes Theater with stadium seating; a Lowe’s Home Improvement store; and another tenant from the world of books and academia: satellite classrooms for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

The 29,000-square-foot library was a vision of Al Kite, Kite Development’s chairman. Knowing that the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library system was looking for a new and larger location for one of its branches, he convinced one of the center’s two anchors — Lazarus Department Stores — to vacate its lease and offered the space to the library system.

The library occupies the former top floor of the department store. (The lower floors house a 25,000-square-foot Old Navy that will open in July, while at press time, the rest of the space remained under negotiation.) That end of the mall also will include a 28,000-square-foot Stein Mart.

The mall has gotten the library officials out of a dilemma.

“We were in the middle of a capital improvement plan for the whole district, and one of the branches under consideration was the Broad Ripple branch,” located less than a mile from Glendale, said Maria Blake, the director of communications and promotion for the library district.

“The library was in the middle of a park and landlocked and had outgrown its space,” Blake added.

At Kite’s invitation, the district’s director of facilities management looked at the space and decided it would be a new and different way to do things, she said.

The library does not pay a fixed rent for its space. It pays usage fees, utilities, maintenance, security and CAM fees, but neither the library nor Kite would say how much.

But both parties say it’s a great match. The library maintains the same hours as the mall and draws an average of 2,000 visitors on weekdays and 3,000 on weekends — more than double the number of patrons the library had at its previous location.

The library, other than the district’s central branch, is the largest in the system. It includes special features that do not exist at any other branch, including a large community room that can be used as meeting space for local groups and smaller study rooms. The library also features an adult quiet room furnished with sofas, chairs, ottomans and a fireplace. Outlets all along the walls enable patrons to plug in laptop computers.

Another unusual feature at the library is a Lego Mindstorm center, one of only three in the country, where youngsters construct robots with Lego bricks and run them through obstacle courses by remote control from laptops.

“If you look into the library at any time of the day, you see such a mix of ages,” Blake said. “In the mornings you see mothers with preschoolers and senior citizens from the mall walkers program, and later in the day you see kids coming from school or students from the university.”

A B. Dalton Booksellers in the mall has actually benefitted from the library’s addition. The store’s sales are up 80% since the mall reopened and shoppers browsing through books in the library have then gone to the store to buy them, said Gregg S. Poetz, Kite’s vice president of leasing.

Other improvements
While the library might be the refurbishment’s most innovative component, Kite Development made other important improvements to the center. The addition of the theater space and food court provided entertainment components it did not previously have. Moreover, the addition of the 135,000-square-foot Lowe’s Home Improvement, which includes a 30,000-square-foot garden center, has helped turn the mall into a “community lifestyle center,” as Kite describes it. Glendale Mall’s only department store is a 237,455-square-foot L.S. Ayres, one of its original tenants, which has recently signed a new 10-year lease.

The center also includes about 50 in-line stores.

“We feel like we’re more than a shopping mall,” Kite said. “Basically, the whole family can come out here for the weekend. It’s like a little town if they want to hang out.”

Poetz explained that the center did not make sense in the community as a regional mall.

“This mall was working as a traditional mall and had gotten too big,” Poetz said. “It’s kind of a mix between a traditional mall and lifestyle/power center.

“At one end we’ve got the Kerasotes Theater and the Old Navy and the Lowe’s along with the library,” he added. “Those are more traditional power center tenants. At the other end we have Ayres. In between is a mix of traditional mall tenants with some strip-type tenants.”

Besides the different tenant mix, the center also modernized its look with new color schemes, flooring and entrance areas. The team renovated the interior ceiling and opened boarded up skylights to brighten the mall’s interior.

Paying dividends
All these improvements are paying dividends. Poetz said that before the renovation, nonanchor mall sales were at $125 per square foot, below the industry average of $341. Now sales exceed $220 per square foot and are increasing every month; Poetz said he thinks the center can exceed $300 per square foot — thanks in part to the tenant that sells nothing.

“It’s a win-win for the city and for local residents in that area,” said Bill French, vice president of retail sales and leasing for Colliers Turley Martin Tucker, a broker in the Indianapolis market.

“Kite has made a smart business move by bringing the nonretail uses into the mix. It brings in more potential shoppers.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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