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THE SUPER-REGIONAL? IT WAS TAUBMAN’S BIG IDEA

A. Alfred Taubman

A. Alfred Taubman, now 80, put a lot of thought into making shopping centers easier to get around. And that’s a good thing, given that he’s the one that made them a lot bigger in the first place.

When The Taubman Co. opened the 2 million-square-foot Woodfield Mall, in Schaumburg, Ill., in September 1971, it was billed as the world’s largest enclosed, multilevel shopping center. (Today Woodfield measures 2.7 million square feet.) Considered by many to be the first super-regional mall, the Chicago-area project cost $90 million ($414 million, in today’s dollars).

Understanding the flow of traffic — whether cars in the parking lot or shoppers in the mall — has helped make Alfred Taubman a leader in the shopping center industry.

“I don’t know if people are interested in the science behind it,” Taubman said of his study of the flow of autos and pedestrians, “but our competitors should be — our sales per square foot are better than others’ because we pay attention to traffic.” His desire was to control traffic from the time the shopper left home to the time he or she returned.

First comes the task of helping shoppers reach the stores. The company is noted for building a perimeter ring road at Southridge, in Greendale, Wis., that was graded to route cars to entrances on both levels of the mall.

“I don’t know if we had the first or not,” Taubman said of the road, which was completed in 1970. “But we perfected the science of it. We did it for traffic and better utility of our lots. It was designed around right turns. We encouraged them to turn right because that’s the way traffic flows.”

The innovations in controlling the flow didn’t end there. “We paid attention to parking counts,” Taubman said. “Parking at the peak was a problem we had to face.” He notes that retailers enjoy 32 peak days a year and can’t afford to leave anything to chance in that narrow band of time. Further, centers don’t always get a second chance if the parking is a hassle.

“If it takes half an hour to find a spot, we may have lost half an hour of shopping time,” he said. “We want them to get in and get out easily, even when we have 7,000 to 9,000 vehicles in the lot with limited exits. We attempted to keep traffic equal on both levels by putting 12 percent to 15 percent more parking on top to equalize traffic. It worked.”

Then there’s the pedestrian traffic to manage. To keep customers moving, Taubman Co. carefully arranged which tenants went where, making sure stores could benefit from synergy with their neighbors.

Taubman would sometimes rig up “laboratories” at his centers for market experiments. He would, for instance, install two identical impulse-item stores, one on an upper level, the other on the lower, monitoring foot traffic and sales volume at each to compare the effects of distance from entrances, exits or anchors.

The fascination with retailing that underlies this attention to flow began when Taubman sold shoes and apparel in stores as a young man. Forced to leave college when funds ran out, he went to work for an architectural firm that specialized in store design. In 1950 he left that job and borrowed the money to start his own store construction company. “I was always curious about store design,” said Taubman, who is the son of a builder.

He began designing and building freestanding stores. In 1953 he built his first center, North Flint Plaza, in Flint, Mich. The center had 26 tenants and a Federal Department Store anchor. Then things started getting bigger. By the late 1950s, he had built Southland Mall, Hayward, Calif., which measured 900,000 square feet and housed three department stores.

Woodfield Mall is still one of the company’s most noteworthy projects. “I don’t know if it’s bigger or better” in terms of retail offerings compared to later behemoths, like West Edmonton Mall and Mall of America, Taubman says. But he remains opposed to using entertainment to boost the size of malls. For him, retailing remains the reason for shopping centers. Noting years ago that malls needed more apparel stores, he decided to help retailers create stores that would make them viable tenants. “If you analyzed it, there wasn’t enough apparel, and that’s what people come to the mall for,” he said. “We became involved in developing stores.”

Woodfield Mall, the first super-regional, as it looks today. At its opening in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg in 1971, it was 2 million square feet.

The first Gap store to open in a shopping center — it was only the second Gap to open anywhere — took space in a San Jose, Calif., mall that Taubman Co. operated. It was very different from the original Gap store in San Francisco, with its eclectic range of merchandise. “We told him to leave the records out and concentrate on the pants,” he said. “That was our first jeans store.”

The firm’s Sun Valley Center, Concord, Calif., rented space to the first Banana Republic store. (In those early days, this chain’s exotic safari wear merchandised among plastic palm trees and second-hand jeeps was creating a sensation in every market it entered.)

“We experimented over the years and have helped develop apparel stores,” Taubman said. “That’s why we’re a different company.”

The attention to retailing and traffic flow has paid off. Taubman is on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, and his name graces such prestigious institutions as the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan; the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; the Taubman Medical Library at the University of Michigan; and the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University.

Today, renamed Taubman Centers, the firm owns or manages more than 30 regional shopping centers in 13 states, many of them among the country’s most productive and profitable retail properties, according to the company’s Web site. The centers posted average sales per square foot of $456 in 2002, compared with a national average of $225 for all regional malls.

Taubman malls are also among the most upscale and attractive properties. Examples of these include Beverly Center, Los Angeles; Biltmore Fashion Park, Phoenix; Cherry Creek, Denver; and The Mall at Short Hills, northern New Jersey.

— EM

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