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Shopping Centers Today -> June 2003
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VICTORIA GARDENS TO LURE SHOPPERS WITH LIBRARY
BY IAN RITTER
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| Victoria Gardens will provide Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., with the downtown it never had. And there’s nothing out of place about a library in a downtown, officials note. |
Shoppers won’t be able to buy anything at the library that will be anchoring Victoria Gardens, a mixed-use lifestyle center, but developers expect the facility will nevertheless sell a lot.
The library is going into the 1.3 million-square-foot, $250 million center that Forest City Enterprises began building with partner Lewis Retail this month in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., a city in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
In a relationship that began at ICSC’s Spring Convention in 1999, Forest City and the municipality agreed to make the 56,000-square-foot library and a cultural arts center an anchor in Victoria Gardens, along with a 16-screen AMC Theatre, Macy’s, Robinsons-May and another, yet-to-be-named tenant. The library and the cultural arts center, which includes a 500-seat theater, will inhabit a building owned by the city.
Both developer and city say they will benefit from having the library at the center, which is due to open in the 2004 holiday season.
“It’s going to bring in another trip, and those trips will either be regular customers or customers from a 25-mile radius,” said Colm Macken, senior vice president and chief development officer of Forest City California, the division overseeing the project. “We look at it as being a fifth anchor. It is going to bring families and children in — three, four, five days of the week.”
From Rancho Cucamonga’s perspective, the downtown development will provide an ideal spot for a much needed second library, said Robert Karatsu, library services manager for the city.
“It just seems like the mall in itself will be a destination in the area for people to come and visit,” he said. “We have our own little audience that’s going to follow us, and we’re going to bring in shoppers at the same time.”
Unusual as this choice of anchor may seem, though, this is not the first time a library has served as a shopping center anchor. In 1999 executives at Kite Development Corp., invited the city of Indianapolis to put a library into a 29,000-square-foot, second-floor space formerly occupied by a Lazarus department store at the Glendale Mall. Here, too, the move served the needs of both developer and municipality — the former was able to fill a second-story spot that retailers had shied away from, while the library got a location buzzing with people. “We knew it would be a gamble, and it’s paid off well,” said Indianapolis-based Kite’s president, Paul Kite.
Sales per square foot at the 665,625-square-foot Glendale Mall have increased by between 30 and 40 percent since the library’s installation and a subsequent overhaul of the center, Kite says, though he would not give specific numbers.
“It brings in a lot of repeat traffic,” Kite said. “Most people that use libraries use them on a regular basis.”
Being in a mall is also good for the library, says Karen Cohen, manager of the Glendale branch. The branch is open during mall business hours (until 9 p.m.) on weekdays, as well as on weekends and during holidays, and about 1,500 people come through every day, Cohen says. The Glendale branch issues more new library cards and has a larger book selection and computer center than any other in Indianapolis’ public library system, she says.
Interestingly, the presence of a library in the mall does not hurt the sales of the B. Dalton Bookseller at Glendale, both Cohen and Kite say. The bookstore’s sales have in fact increased, because people buy titles there that they have learned about through the library, Kite says. No bookstores have been announced yet for Victoria Gardens, but Rancho Cucamonga’s Karatsu, said he wouldn’t be worried if one goes into the development.
“We have a great relationship with the Barnes & Noble in town,” he said. “They send people to us, and we send people to them.”
Victoria Gardens, which is going to give the city’s 137,000 residents their first downtown retail center, is flanked by Foothill Boulevard and the I-15 freeway. Forest City and Upland, Calif.-based Lewis Retail are also building 400 residential units there. About 500,000 square feet of office space is planned for a future date.
Up to now, Rancho Cucamonga, which was formed as a municipality in 1977 by merging the three unincorporated communities of Cucamonga, Etiwanda and Alta Loma, has lacked a town center. The area, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, was known as a vacation destination for Nat King Cole and Yul Brynner, among others, and musician-composer Frank Zappa had a recording studio there in the early 1960s.
“The downtown areas for the smaller communities couldn’t serve the entire community,” Linda Daniels, the city’s redevelopment agency director, said. “The mall is creating an identity of Rancho Cucamonga in its entirety.”
It will also stem the hemorrhaging of sales. “They’re leaving the city for high-end fashion,” Daniels said, explaining that people are doing their shopping in Los Angeles and neighboring Orange County.
This is not Rancho Cucamonga’s first attempt at building a downtown center. In 1983 the city began talking to The Hahn Co. about building a similar project. (Hahn had built the famous Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego.) The negotiations lasted until 1999 (by which time Hahn had become TrizecHahn), when the project finally fell through.
“We shook hands and moved in different directions,” recalls Daniels. “We realized, after 15 years, it wasn’t going to happen.”
Among the reasons Forest City was chosen for the project, Daniels says, is the company’s appreciation of the need for a centralized downtown that combines retail and civic space. Similar projects Forest City is working on include the development of the $300 million, 1.5 million-square-foot Simi Valley (Calif.) Town Center, about 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles, with Corti Gilchrist Partnership and the Finley Group, and the $380 million redevelopment of the 1.5 million-square-foot San Francisco Centre.
For all its newness, Forest City aims to make Victoria Gardens look like a downtown that has been around for decades and has grown over time. The project has been parceled out to different architectural firms, each of which is taking its own approach. One firm, for example, is designing buildings that look like they went up in the 1920s, while another is using a 1950s look. And in such old downtowns, there is nothing out of place about a library.
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