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A half-mile-long main street leads to the pedestrian entrance of Newhall Land’s Valencia (Calif.) Town Center.

Emerging Trend

THE MALL MEETS MAIN STREET

By Charles Lockwood

The hybrid mall, which combines an indoor regional mall with outdoor lifestyle shops and restaurants, emerged last year as one of the industry’s most talked-about new formats. Now a new concept takes that idea to another level. Call it the Mall Meets Main Street.

The Mall Meets Main Street forges direct links between a regional mall and a main street/town center, one of the new types of pedestrian-oriented mixed-use projects being developed in some suburban communities. Proponents of the concept say the synergy generates financial and other benefits for developers, retailers and the community.

Probably the first developer to plan and build a Mall Meets Main Street is The Newhall Land & Farming Co. in its new town of Valencia, Calif., 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Starting in 1995, Newhall Land developed a new half-mile-long main street — named Town Center Drive — and directly connected the eastern end of the street to the main pedestrian entrance of its enclosed 790,000-square-foot Valencia Town Center regional mall, which opened in 1992.

Town Center Drive, which is 90% complete, currently has 15 low- and mid-rise structures, including office buildings with ground-floor retail and restaurants, upscale apartments, a hotel with an adjacent conference center, a health club and the Valencia Entertainment Plaza, which has cinemas, restaurants and retailers.

“We programmed Town Center Drive’s national and local retail to complement, not compete with, the middle-market orientation of the Valencia Town Center mall,” said Gary M. Cusumano, CEO and president of Newhall Land, “by focusing on higher-end men’s and women’s apparel, home furnishings and gift shops as well as restaurants and cafes.”

When new and old meet
The Mall Meets Main Street trend comes in two basic formats. The first is a new mall and a new main street/town center conceived as part of a single master plan, such as Town Center Drive in Valencia. The second format is development of a new main street/town center connected to an existing, unrelated regional mall. In Silver Spring, Md., outside Washington, D.C., a project using the latter format is under way. A development group called PFA Silver Spring (a venture of The Peterson Cos., Foulger-Pratt Development and Argo Investments) is constructing a 20-acre downtown revitalization project anchored by a new town square. The square will feature a wide variety of mixed uses and, significantly, it will surround City Place, an enclosed five-story mall catty-corner to the new development.

To open up and integrate the boxy City Place, which is owned by McLean, Va.-based Petrie Dierman Kughn, into the new downtown, the mall is being given a new ground-floor main entrance at the critical corner of Fenton and Ellsworth opposite the town square. Individual storefronts for specialty retail and restaurant tenants are being added to City Place’s ground floor to create a more vibrant streetscape.

“The mall’s service docks along Ellsworth, the downtown’s main shopping street, are being replaced with retail to maintain the integrity of the Ellsworth streetscape by continuing active retail uses for its full length,” said Jim Leonard, project manager for RTKL Associates, Baltimore, which is serving as both the downtown redevelopment master planner hired by PFA Silver Spring and the architect for the redevelopment of City Place hired by Petrie Dierman Kughn.

A tall screen wall with integrated graphics, signage and lighting elements will be erected at the mall’s new corner entrance. The wall, which will cost between $750,000 and $1 million — paid for entirely by the mall owner — will act as a place marker for City Place and create a sense of presence in the downtown for its 100 retailers, Leonard said.

In suburban Owings Mills, Md., outside Baltimore, a public-private partnership made up of LCOR Public/Private (the master developer), the Baltimore County Department of Economic Development and the Maryland Mass Transit Administration (the site owner) will construct a town center on a 45-acre Baltimore Metro station parking lot. The station site is approximately 1,000 feet away from the two-story, 1.2 million-square-foot enclosed Owings Mills mall, which also has a cinema complex, restaurants and mid-rise office buildings on outparcels. Ground will be broken on the town center by winter 2002, and it will include up to 220,000 square feet of retail as well as offices, housing, a hotel, a public library, a college center and structured parking.

While The Rouse Co., Columbia, Md., the mall’s developer and owner, did not have to be consulted about plans for the adjacent town center, LCOR has had conversations with the company about possibly forging connections between the two properties.

“LCOR will build a landscaped pedestrian walkway from the new town center’s main street to the adjacent regional mall to create a seamless transition so that we don’t have two stand-alone projects,” said John Infantino, vice president at LCOR Public/Private. “We’ll also build a new vehicular bridge between the mall and the town center that will connect directly to the new main street, so it will almost seem like the mall is an extension of the main street stores and infrastructure.”

While LCOR has proposed several additional steps, Rouse has not yet taken any action to help integrate its mall into the town center. Rouse did not return calls seeking comment.

Weighing the benefits
What is the value of the Mall Meets Main Street trend for shopping center developers, investors and retailers? First, the synergy of uses and activities between malls and main street/town centers helps both succeed by feeding customers to each other, according to proponents.

“We believe the Owings Mills town center,” said Infantino of LCOR, “will enhance activity at the Owings Mills mall, and we believe the mall’s synergy will bring people to our town center.”

Second, developers can generally receive approvals more easily from a local jurisdiction for a Mall Meets Main Street. Suburban malls tend to be located at the convergence of regional infrastructure, making them logical and less controversial places for intensified development. Communities are also eager to gain the tax revenues and jobs that a Mall Meets Main Street generates, experts say.

Third, many older malls are in trouble. Constructing a new town center on a portion of a declining mall’s surface parking lots can rejuvenate the shopping center; it is quicker and cheaper than de-malling and the land is available.

“Most malls are over-parked,” says Robert J. Gibbs of the Gibbs Planning Group, Birmingham, Mich. “Until 1968, most shopping centers used the ICSC and ULI [Urban Land Institute] standard of 10 cars per 1,000 square feet of gross building space. Now those standards have dropped to four cars per 1,000 square feet. And at some malls, the original developers set aside extra parking for a planned expansion that never happened.”

Connection is crucial
To succeed, the master plan for a Mall Meets Main Street must incorporate several key planning and design features. The most important component is “connection.” “How and where the mall and main street/town center connect, how they work together through programming, sidewalk and street design, and landscaping to pull pedestrian traffic from one use to the other, is vital,” said Cusumano of Newhall Land. “It is the easy pedestrian connections that create a single, unified destination.”

Second, “contextualism is an important means of physically and visually unifying a mall and main street/town center,” said Leonard of RTKL. “In Silver Spring, we have redesigned the City Place mall so that it is perceived as a part of, rather than separate from, the adjacent town square and new downtown being developed around it.” Architectural style, the height and scale of the buildings and landscaping can merge a mall and a main street/town center into a seamless destination.

The challenges ahead
Despite its financial promise, the nascent Mall Meets Main Street trend faces several challenges. First, many suburban zoning, traffic and parking regulations preclude or severely hinder these mixed-use developments.

Second, “the main street/town center component may be co-opted by mall developers and stripped of its mixed-use and civic qualities along with much of the community-orientation of these developments,” warned Chuck Bohl, an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture who has studied town centers for the Washington, D.C.-based ULI.

In fact, many developers already see main street/town centers as retail projects, not true mixed-use developments. So, they build a lifestyle center adjacent to a mall (the so-called hybrid mall that emerged as a new concept last year) and fail to reap all of the synergies and financial benefits that can come from combining malls and genuine main street/town centers, he said.

Third, one of the greatest challenges facing development of a new main street/town center adjacent to an existing mall is forging agreement among all the stakeholders: the developer, mall owner, anchor tenants and local municipality. Many mall owners, for example, are leery of new development trends. They also fear that a new main street/town center will be a competitor — not a synergistic partner — to their shopping center.

This problem of mall owner buy-in for a new main street/town center is particularly prevalent when the mall is doing well, and its owner sees no need to embark on a new strategy. While a proposed main street/town center located on an adjacent, but separately owned, parcel from a shopping center does not need the mall owner’s approval to go forward, the cooperation of the owner and anchors is often so important that the development can be stalled.

Believers in the new concept say that as more Mall Meets Main Street developments are constructed and prove themselves around the country, mall owners will see the synergy and financial benefits — not competition — they provide and they will come to welcome and support this new development trend.

Charles Lockwood, the author of seven books and many articles, writes about architecture culture, cities and real estate.

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