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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2003
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NINE LIVES
Over its 46 year-history Parkway Place has evolved with the industry
BY DEBRA HAZEL
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| Clockwise from top: Parkway City Mall, as it looked in 1976, and its successor, Parkway Place, as it appears today. |
It’s a rare shopping center indeed that has tracked the entire history of the industry. And Parkway Place, a 630,000-square-foot mall in Huntsville, Ala., may be just such a center.
Starting as an open-air strip in 1957, the project became an enclosed mall in the 1970s and then opened once again as a state-of-the-art center in October 2002. The center’s evolution has thus tracked that of the shopping center business itself.
“It seems like it’s been there forever,” said Michael Lebovitz, senior vice president of mall projects for CBL & Associates Properties, the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based co-developer of Parkway Place.
A private owner developed the original open-air Parkway Shopping Center. Located on just 33 acres at Drake Avenue and Memorial Drive, it had 25 stores and 1,600 parking spaces. Two years later the center added seven more stores and totaled 282,000 square feet.
Arlen Real Estate (now CBL) acquired the property in early 1974, planning to tear down portions to create an enclosed mall. But Mother Nature got to the mall before the bulldozers did.
“In April 1974 part of the south end of the center was destroyed by a tornado,” Lebovitz said.
In February 1976 Arlen opened its replacement, Parkway City Mall, a 467,000-square-foot, single-level enclosed mall anchored by McRae’s, Montgomery Ward and Parisian. The company didn’t hang onto it for long, though. In accordance with its build-and-sell philosophy, Arlen sold the center to JMB Realty, which operated it for some 20 years, expanding it in 1984 and 1994.
Arlen, meanwhile, had become CBL & Associates, which went public in the early 1990s as CBL & Associates Properties.
But the company was destined for a rendezvous with its old center. When in the mid-1990s CBL began scouting the Huntsville market to build a new mall, Birmingham, Ala.-based Colonial Properties had the same idea. Rather than build competing centers, the two joined forces in 1998 to acquire and redevelop Parkway, with CBL handling the development and management while Colonial took over the leasing (SCT, July 2001).
As happened the previous time CBL (as Arlen) bought the then-550,000-square-foot center, the first task involved wiping the slate clean with bulldozers.
In psychological terms, tearing down the old center wasn’t too difficult, even though its destroyers had created the mall, Lebovitz said.
“The emotion of that was outweighed by the site being really solid real estate,” he said. “Things get old and need to be replaced.”
Montgomery Ward had already closed as part of its liquidation. The mix, which included Foot Locker, Hibbett Sporting Goods and Lane Bryant, needed upscaling to align with the rise in Huntsville’s prosperity, a rise that had sprung from the influx of high-tech industries to the region. Parkway was losing shoppers to other centers in the region; they were going as far away as Atlanta.
“We didn’t have a lot of fashion,” said Craig Wesemeyer, CLS, a vice president at Colonial. “Lerner was the biggest fashion tenant.”
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| Tastes have changed a lot since the late 1970s, when these photographs of Parkway City Mall were taken — and we’re not just talking jackets. |
Parkway Place reopened in 2002 with more than a dozen stores that were new to the market, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Chico’s, Gap and Williams-Sonoma. Dillard’s has joined Parisian, settling in at the other end of the dumbbell-shaped center.
Remaking Parkway wasn’t easy, its developers note. Tenants had to be convinced that Huntsville was a large enough market.
“People have no idea what the Huntsville market is like,” Wesemeyer said. “You were coming out of the ground with a new mall in an unknown area.”
The metropolitan statistical area has about 350,000 people, Wesemeyer explains, “but the shopping area is a lot bigger; our trade area is closer to 650,000 people.”
At its reopening the mall was 60 percent occupied. At press time it was 70 percent occupied.
The new mall is very different from the one it replaced. Tenants appealing to the same kind of customer are now clustered together, a total reversal of the mid-1970s approach of putting similar tenants at opposite ends of the center and compelling the shopper to walk the entire property. Higher-end stores are on the first level, with the stores that skew younger located on the second level near the food court.
Rents have gone from the mid-teens per square foot in the old mall to an average of $25.20 per square foot now.
Architecturally, too, the past and present mall versions could not be more different. “There was nothing compelling to keep,” Lebovitz said.
The old, single-story center retained a 1970s appearance, with tile ceilings and older park benches.
“It was like an old mall,” said Lucinda Hartshorne, CSM, the mall’s general manager both before and after the rebuild. “Now people are calling it a mini-Phipps Plaza,” she said, referring to the upmarket center owned by Simon Property Group in the prestigious Buckhead section of Atlanta.
Tile floors, small box skylights and low ceilings have been replaced by an airy two-story space with a large domed atrium, a substantial food court and a design that will showcase the retailers. Different handrail designs are used throughout the mall to create a feeling of individual neighborhoods. The old mall’s columns have been eliminated to create a sense of openness.
“There’s a floating feeling to it,” said James Heller, president of Cleveland-based KA Architecture, which designed the new center.
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Walls are painted in muted yellow tones, and modern lighting has made a big difference.
“Storefronts just pop out at you,” Heller said. “It’s light and bright.”
Though the old mall had tenant bays that could reach more than 150 feet deep, the new center reflects today’s desire for more store frontage and less depth — perhaps 80 feet.
“It’s a totally different feel, a different ambience,” said Martha Moore, general manager of Piccadilly Cafeteria. “It’s like stepping from the 1960s to 2000.”
Other changes are more operational in nature, said Hartshorne.
“We didn’t have energy management before,” she said. “We now have traffic counters, security cameras.”
Of course, the one thing that hasn’t changed about Parkway Place is that it is always changing. In time, a third department store can be accommodated, and the mall could eventually total nearly 890,000 square feet, its owners say.
“It’s a beautiful new property,” said John Hughey, Colonial’s executive vice president of retail. “Sometimes the reality isn’t as good as the dream. This time it’s better.”
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