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NEW LOOK GIVES MASS. MALL NEW LEASE ON LIFE

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

As part of a wide-ranging renovation, Dartmouth (Mass.) Mall replaced the stage in the center court with a new circular one and added a fountain.

North Dartmouth Mall treaded water for at least a decade.

By the early ’90s, half the tenants had moved out of the then-20-year-old center, and when the 1991 recession hit, unemployment plagued many of its working-class customers. Sales had dropped to $200 per square foot by 1997, the year the current owner bought the center.

“We had the potential to perform better in the marketplace, but we didn’t have the best stores or the right look,” said Tim Colby, senior regional manager with Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT), Philadelphia, the center’s owner and manager. But an $8 million, eight-month renovation, plus a major influx of tenants, has turned its fortunes around.

Today, Dartmouth Mall is doing swimmingly. Sales run about $400 per square foot, and the center is 96% leased. The economic high tide of the late 1990s had a lot to do with that, of course, but new tenants and a new look have also helped change the center’s fortune.

“It’s a big success story,” Colby said.

Dartmouth Mall, with 640,000 square feet, is anchored by J.C. Penney, Sears and Ames and includes a 12-screen General Cinema. It lies in Dartmouth, a city of 26,000 in southeastern Massachusetts, where manufacturing and fishing have historically run the economy. But by the mid-1980s, many manufacturers, such as Goodyear and Morse Cutting Tools, had left, said Jim Mathes, president of the Greater New Bedford Chamber of Commerce. (Dartmouth and New Bedford, a city of 100,000, share a border.) Meanwhile the fishing industry took a dive, and unemployment in Dartmouth rose to 11.5% in 1991, according to the state, and didn’t return below 6% until 1998.

Today the area is still blue-collar, with “pockets of serious money,” Mathes said, but it has a more diverse economy. Even New Bedford’s fortunes have improved, its economy bolstered by better fisheries management and emphasis on new catches such as scallops. New businesses have moved in: Golf ball maker Titleist is a big employer, and cranberry cultivation is in high gear, Mathes said. The region also lures vacationers, thanks to nearby Cape Cod.

But Dartmouth Mall is its own Cinderella story since the completion in November of the renovation.

“This was not a casual coat of paint,” Colby said. The owners have torn out an old dropped ceiling, ripped up a drab gray tile floor and redone the entrances. In fact, there is little that has remained untouched.

The center, as it was, had “no interesting architectural features at all,” said Caroline Quinn, PREIT’s regional marketing director. So PREIT decided to give it some, choosing a maritime theme for the new look.

“The curvature of ships’ hulls, the play of light on water” and other references to the nearby sea can be found in the design, Quinn said. Entrances have 35-foot masts with steel rigging; corridors are paved with tile mosaics of compasses.

The rebuild gave the mall its first food court, and five restaurants had moved in at press time, with two more pending; above them is a color-changing fiber optic cable system.

The center court has a new stage. The old, 16-foot stage was framed with a dark red metal superstructure and topped by a 10-square-foot skylight. All that is gone, replaced by a circular tile stage, a fountain and a much larger skylight. And lighting and landscaping were improved throughout.

“Everywhere you look is something interesting,” Colby said. “It’s a much more pleasant retail environment.”

The mall stayed open throughout the renovation. Quinn said the biggest challenge was keeping tenants and shoppers informed about current and upcoming work so, for instance, people would know which entrances to use; the center published a newsletter to keep them updated.

The center also got a new name, dropping the “North.” Dartmouth township historically had a rural northern section and a more urban southern portion, but over time became more homogenous. PREIT thought the center’s name should reflect that and the mall’s new identity, Quinn said.

The renovation has been dramatic, but several sources credited PREIT’s leasing efforts with resuscitating Dartmouth Mall. The firm launched an aggressive leasing campaign in 1998, using the pending improvements as a major marketing tool. The center didn’t increase square footage and kept the number of stores to about 72. But some existing tenants relocated within the mall or renovated their stores; Sears made $3 million worth of improvements, Quinn said.

Eighteen new tenants filled vacancies, she said, including heavy hitters such as Old Navy, Gap, GapKids, American Eagle Outfitters, Kids Foot Locker and KB Toys. The Children’s Place and PacSun are expected to come this spring.

“The key was for the property to demonstrate that with the right tenanting we’d get the sales performance we needed,” Colby said.

The renovation has delivered, as far as Weathervane, the New Britain, Conn.-based apparel chain, is concerned.

“Before [the center] renovated we were doing very well, and since then we’re doing even better,” said Tom Davidson, senior vice president of stores and real estate for Weathervane, which is remodeling many of its stores, including the one at Dartmouth Mall. Weathervane has been there since the center opened and has another store at Swansea Mall, about 20 miles away. Sales at both reach $1 million annually, Davidson said.

Though Dartmouth Mall hit a “low point,” he said the area’s demographic remained solid, with plenty of families and tourists. Weathervane caters to teens.

Southern New England has plenty of strong centers, he said, but Dartmouth’s newest tenants “gave people a reason to stay.”

The first New England Rave Girl shop opened at Dartmouth in the midst of the center’s renovation. Its parent, G+G Retail, New York, already operated Rave at Dartmouth, which peddles casual clothes and club wear to young women. That store is among the chain’s top performers in Massachusetts and underwent its own renovation in 1999, said Josh Podell, vice president of real estate with G+G.

G+G probably wouldn’t have opened a Dartmouth Mall location for Rave Girl, which sells clothes for 7- to 14-year-old girls, if not for the changes at the center, Podell said. He wouldn’t release the store’s sales beyond saying he was “thrilled” by them.

“It’s amazing how many Cape Cod customers come there,” he said. “We’re drawing from up to 50 miles away, which is unheard of.”

When PREIT acquired the mall, from Equity Properties, Chicago, the center was weaker than the two PREIT considers its main competition, Colby said. Silver City Galleria, in Taunton, is a 1.2 million-square-foot center anchored by Filene’s, J.C. Penney and Sears. Swansea Mall, in Swansea, has 698,000 square feet, with Sears, Macy’s and Apex as anchors and a Wal-Mart pending. Both centers are roughly 20 miles from Dartmouth Mall, Colby said.

Silver City manager James Walsh credited Dartmouth with doing “a great job” but said his center hasn’t lost any sales since Dartmouth’s refurbishing. Silver City’s size makes it a destination regardless, he said.

All the region’s centers — four super-regionals and three regionals, by Walsh’s count — have benefited from increased train service to the coast and to Boston, 40 minutes north, he said, which has helped stimulate a housing boom.

“We think we’re well positioned in the long run,” Colby said. “We now have totally captured our primary market, whereas before we had leakage from it.” The mall’s primary market consists of greater New Bedford, plus towns stretching to Cape Cod.

The opening nearby of big-box stores such as Circuit City, Wal-Mart and Home Depot, has also helped draw customers to Dartmouth Mall.

All these factors combined have helped Dartmouth Mall once again feels like the most popular kid on the block. “For now we have the competitive advantage,” Colby said. “We’re newer, brighter.”

 

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