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REGIONAL REBIRTH

Ten years and $40 million later, Alabama mall gets expansion

By Kathryn Dube

After a $40 million expansion, Quintard Mall, Oxford, Ala., reopened with 720,000 square feet of GLA, more than doubling its prior size.

A $40 million renovation and expansion of Quintard Mall in Oxford, Ala., has fulfilled the owner’s long-held ambition to turn the 30-year-old center into a regional mall.

Birmingham, Ala.-based Grimmer Realty has more than doubled Quintard’s gross leasable area (GLA), to 720,000 square feet, and “the new Quintard Mall,” as it is now marketed, has risen from 37th place to 14th in Alabama in size. It has three anchors — J.C. Penney, Sears and Dillard’s — and 65 other retailers, plus an AmStar 12 Cinemas with stadium seating theater and a food court area.

Greg Stambaugh, Grimmer Realty’s vice president for leasing, said he is more than satisfied with the results. The mall achieved sales of about $450 a square foot from November through the holidays, and he projects annualized sales will top $250 a square foot. Public officials should be pleased, too: The company estimates that sales tax revenues in the first year after the reopening should rise to $9.7 million, up from $4.2 million before the expansion.

Quintard is attracting shoppers from a five-county area across northern Alabama and central Georgia, mall executives say.

“We are drawing from an area 50 to 70 miles away,” said Park Grimmer, president of Grimmer Realty. We’re even getting shoppers from western Georgia, who can get an extra hour of shopping” since Quintard is in the Central Time Zone.

Shoppers include college students, contractors, laborers and farmers, according to Carol Maner, the mall’s general manager.

“It’s a rural area, and we’re the only mall along I-20 between Birmingham and Atlanta,” she said, adding that Quintard’s primary trading area has a population base of 150,000, while there are 275,000 in the secondary area.

“This is an area that was starved for retail. We couldn’t give them what they wanted without the expansion,” Grimmer said. “The enthusiasm of the community has been overwhelming; they were ready for this 15 years ago.”

That is especially rewarding, given some of the environmental, legal and other obstacles encountered during the expansion.

“It proved to be more of a challenge than anyone in the community realized,” Maner said.

Quintard Mall was started by James B. Grimmer, father of Park Grimmer and a pioneer in the shopping center industry, in the late 1960s; the elder Grimmer had helped develop the first mall in the Southeastern United States, Eastwood Mall in Birmingham, Ala. Grimmer Realty remains a family business, with James B. Grimmer as CEO, his son, Park, the president, and daughter, Susan, the vice president.

Quintard Mall was the area’s first enclosed center.

The elder Grimmer developed Quintard Mall for the Pace and Kerr families on a sizeable tract of land they owned in Oxford near the intersection of U.S. Highway 78 and Quintard Drive. Grimmer Realty also handled leasing for the mall, and at its August 1970 opening, Quintard Mall had 32 tenants occupying 291,550 square feet of GLA.

Quintard was the first enclosed mall in the area, with J.C. Penney, along with its automotive center, and Britt’s department store its original anchors.

In 1983, Grimmer Realty formed Quintard Mall Ltd. to purchase the mall. Prior to the purchase, Sears left its space in downtown neighboring Anniston and moved into the former Britt building at the north end of the mall.

A modernization completed in October 1985 improved the landscaping and added an irrigation system. Inside, the original concrete floors were replaced with terrazzo flooring, and the owners added skylights, a dropped ceiling to make the mall seem more intimate, service courts and new mall entrances.

Sears expanded and modernized its store between November 1996 and June 1997, adding a second level and boosting the store size from 82,000 to 122,000 square feet; this brought Quintard’s GLA from 291,550 to 337,550 square feet.

The mall’s renovations attracted more shoppers, putting Quintard in second place in the state for sales per square foot, right behind Riverchase Galleria in Birmingham.

This inspired the owners to plan an expansion. But little did they know of the hurdles that lay ahead; the biggest challenge was environmental issues raised by their plan to channel and bridge Snow Creek, which ran alongside the mall to the rear, where the expansion was planned.

Grimmer describes Snow Creek as a long drainage ditch approximately 104 feet wide and 1,700 feet long. The goal was to cover Snow Creek with concrete sides, bottom and top so that the mall could be expanded over the creek in the middle rear of the mall and additional parking could be added. By the time the work was completed, the creek was covered from its northern property line at Snow Street to its southern border at U.S. Highway 78. Because 60% of Snow Creek is storm water from neighboring Anniston, Quintard Mall also had to build a retention pond for creek overflow.

Four agencies had to be satisfied before environmental permits were granted for the Snow Creek work: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Engineers hired by Quintard Mall first worked with FEMA on the permit application; after more than a year of effort, FEMA handed the project over to the Corps of Engineers, and environmental permit work was started all over again.

“We were looking for the expansion to be completed in the early to mid 1990s; I never thought it would take this long,” Park Grimmer said, adding it took from 1987 to 1994 to obtain all necessary environmental permits. “We were in Washington often.”

Another challenge came on the anchor front. Mercantile Stores had agreed in the early 1990s to locate a Gayfer’s Department Store at Quintard, but before the expansion could begin, Dillard’s bought Gayfer’s. This delayed the expansion another year while a lease was negotiated with Dillard’s to anchor the expansion, joining the existing anchors of J.C. Penney and Sears. Dillard’s opened on Oct. 25, 2000, a week prior to the grand reopening.

Another cloud hung over the project, as rumors circulated about the closure of Fort McClellan in Anniston, an army base housing about 3,000 to 4,000 people. McClellan did indeed close in the fall 1999, but it proved to have little impact on Quintard Mall, executives say. Quintard has, in fact, derived business from workers at Anniston Army Depot, a government-owned manufacturing site that employs about 3,000 to 4,000 workers.

Site work on the covering of the creek and mall expansion got under way at last in the fall of 1998, and construction started the following spring. Although the majority of work was completed in time for the November 2000 grand reopening, work on the south end of the creek project wasn’t set to end until this spring.

Grimmer hired HKW Associates of Birmingham, which specializes in strip center and mall architecture, to design the Quintard project.

“We had an existing building that had served the community well, but was in need of a face-lift,” said Fred Keith, president of the firm. “The existing mall was a product of the 1960s and 1970s. There was a lack of natural lighting, and the floors and ceilings needed updating.”

Issues with the creek were not the only obstacles facing the architects; they also had to plan the work so that the mall could remain open during the project.

“Another challenge was matching the existing brick exterior and making sure there was a smooth transition from the old to the new sections,” Keith said.

Now that it is finished, he expresses pride in the work, especially in the food court and center court atrium.

“It has brought a grandness and spaciousness that was missing,” he said. “The dome and skylight over the center court glows prettily at night. It looks really nice from the outside.”

Before the renovation, Keith said the existing skylights didn’t allow anyone to see the sky because the original sandwich panel material occluded light. HKW Associates added more skylights to the mall and designed them with glass that allows for light but little heat. They also replaced the terrazzo tile flooring with porcelain ceramic.

The existing entrances were replaced with new ones facing Highway 78, Snow Street and Quintard Drive.

Lois Harrison, a landscape architect with Grover and Harrison of Birmingham, redesigned the exterior and interior landscaping to ensure that the old and new parts of Quintard Mall had a cohesive appearance.

The renovations have been well-received with retailers at the new Quintard Mall. “Since day one, sales have been nothing but outstanding,” said Scott Wood, manager of J.C. Penney. “The design is very eye pleasing and accessible. With 40 to 50 new retailers, it raises eyebrows and gives people a reason to shop and stay in town.”

“Business has been fabulous,” said Vickie Croft, manager of Bath & Body Works, located in the expansion area.

“It’s way more than what we planned for. We’re real happy to be here.”

 

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