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COLUMBUS DISCOVERS STREETSCAPE CONCEPT

By Edmund Mander

Easton Town Center, Columbus, Ohio, is one of a new breed of centers that relies on outdoor streetscapes.

Former cornfields in Columbus, Ohio, are growing their most lucrative crop yet: a nearly $2 billion midtown.

Easton, a 1,200-acre development in the city’s northeastern quadrant, will add up to 6 million square feet of office space — equal to half of what Columbus already has in its downtown — plus 1,500 apartments, three hotels and up to 4 million square feet of retail.

At its core is Easton Town Center, a collection of fashion retailers, restaurants, comedy clubs and other types of entertainment that has boosted the nightlife in Columbus, while Easton as a whole is doing wonders for the city’s day life, officials say.

“What we’re building essentially here is a small town,” said Marshall Rose, chairman of The Georgetown Co., the New York City-based development firm that is co-developing Easton with Columbus-based The Limited; for Easton Town Center they brought in another partner, Steiner + Associates, of Columbus.

Easton Town Center has been keeping Columbus up at night, with traffic counts showing hundreds of cars turning up as late as 11 p.m. on weeknights.

“We took Columbus and made it into an 18-hour city,” said one executive connected to the project.

A massive replica of a railroad station houses retailers, restaurants and entertainment tenants.Easton Town Center’s developers say it is doing wonders for nightlife in Columbus.

Steiner has just completed a second phase of development, opening a fashion section anchored by Nordstrom — the first in this market — that doubles the Town Center’s retail and restaurant offerings to 1.5 million square feet. Furthermore, Lazarus has chosen this location to launch a new format for its department stores; other recent arrivals include bebe, Benetton and Pottery Barn Kids.

Easton Town Center is a prominent example of a new wave of retail development sweeping the country, in which developers are building outdoor streetscapes to win back shoppers bored with the conventional mall (SCT, August 2001). Combining aesthetics with convenience, these lifestyle centers and urban infill projects not only attract people with leisure activities such as window shopping and outdoor dining, but provide street side parking as well.

The greater Easton project came about by a fortunate confluence of events. The project occupies former farmland acquired piecemeal over several years by The Limited, which had planned to build a massive headquarters and distribution center there. But major federally funded highway improvements, including a widened I-270 beltway that runs nearby, prompted Leslie Wexner, The Limited’s founder, chairman and CEO, to revise his vision. Suddenly, with the road improvements putting the airport just five minutes away and shortening the distance from the downtown to eight minutes, the land was far too valuable to use for warehouses. The timing was good in other ways, too: The recession in the 1990s was obliging The Limited to sell off many of its noncore assets and restructure its business, freeing up land that had been earmarked for another use.

So the company sold a 50% stake in the site to The Georgetown Co., and the two set about creating a giant complex of offices, hotels and residences. By 1996, when Easton had already attracted a variety of companies, including a Victoria’s Secret catalog distribution center and Chase Manhattan Mortgage, the partners turned their attention to retail.

“What we set out to do at Easton was to create anything but a typical mall,” said Adam Flatto, a partner at Georgetown, which in 1996 co-developed a regional mall, The Mall at Tuttle Crossing, with The Taubman Co., on the northwestern side of town.

The retail sensation at that time was CocoWalk, which had opened a few years before in metro Miami. The creation of Yaromir Steiner, CocoWalk opened in 1990 with about 35 tenants, and is regarded as the first urban entertainment center in the United States.

“We felt that we could build on that,” said Rose. So Steiner quit as president of Constructa, the Miami company that had developed CocoWalk, and moved to Columbus to form Steiner + Associates.

Steiner, in turn, called in Development Design Group (DDG), the Baltimore company with which he had worked on CocoWalk, and they set about giving this new “town” of Easton a center. For inspiration, DDG looked back at the traditional American town center, the demise of which many blame on the mall.

“I wanted to create a hometown feel in the suburbs,” said John Clark, DDG’s president. The now pervasive megamall, he explained, has left people with a yearning for the smaller-scale environments of town centers. “The baby boomer has some historical reference to small towns.”

Easton Town Center, part outdoor, part indoor, covers about nine city blocks on a 78-acre site. Many of the streets are lined with two-story red brick buildings, with retail on the ground floor and offices above. There also is a mock train station, a 404,000-square-foot iron and glass structure containing the movie theater, specialty retailers, entertainment tenants and a space for live shows; a building in the style of a town bank; an art deco movie theater housing a Pottery Barn; and a library that, appropriately enough, is occupied by a Barnes & Noble. McDonald’s built its restaurant in the style of its 1950s hamburger joints, and there also is an old-time ice cream shop.

But this is no Hollywood movie set: The back of the red brick buildings are as finished as the fronts. At the center of it all is a small park, where people can relax on benches while children play in the fountains; in the summer there are concerts, and it is the scene of holiday activities in the winter.

Pedestrians on sidewalks and cars parked at the roadside — there also are two parking garages discretely placed at the edges of the development — contribute to an atmosphere reminiscent of the vibrant downtowns of yesteryear, and the picture is completed by street-front restaurants and cafes, some of which are run by downtown Columbus restaurateurs who were invited to open new concepts in Easton.

“I look at it as this Norman Rockwell middle America hometown vernacular,” Clark said. “It’s ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ which we all grew up watching and loved.”

Planners have taken care to restrict the scale of the buildings and the narrow two-way streets that separate them to ensure that people do not feel dwarfed by the project — a common criticism of mall architecture. During the planning stages, DDG even went out and measured the width of streets in other projects. Inside the stores ceiling heights have been restricted to about 13 feet to preserve a sense of intimacy.

“The scale of the whole environment is very, very finely tuned,” Clark said. Easton’s three hotels, which lie at the periphery of the town center, have been placed across the end of the streets so that even the vistas are blocked to prevent them overwhelming the visitor.

While some lifestyle centers have residential units in the mix, Easton’s developers wanted to keep them out of the Town Center; residents expect to have reserved parking, which would have conflicted with shoppers’ needs to park, explained Georgetown’s Flatto (pronounced “flaytoe”). For the same reason, the company also restricted the number of offices; there is a total of about 135,000 square feet of office space, a fraction of the 1.5 million square feet of retail space.

More retail, in the form of power center tenants such as Target, Wal-Mart and Galyan’s, sits just outside the Town Center, but again the scale is strictly controlled; pedestrians can easily walk from the hub of the Town Center to the peripheral retail, window shopping as they make their way and, when they get there, won’t find themselves traversing the massive parking lots traditionally associated with power centers. The hotels are conveniently located between the Town Center and these big-box retailers, helping make the transition between the two seamless.

Looking to the future, Steiner said the companies are considering a third phase of development at Easton Town Center that would bring in some service tenants.

Meanwhile, in the rest of Easton, construction is proceeding on the apartments and offices. About half the office space and apartments are built, and three-quarters of the retail is in place. Two hotels — The Columbus Hilton and Marriott Residence Inn Easton — are up, and a third is scheduled to open at the end of 2002. There also is the possibility of a fourth hotel, executives say.

Consequently, Easton supplies many of its own shoppers, with office workers using its retail and restaurants both at lunchtime and after work. It also serves as a welcome destination for people living in the communities around Columbus that lack town centers of their own.

“It really answers the need of a lot of today’s baby boomers who are pressed for time, are living in the suburbs and are really looking for a place to go,” Clark said.

But not everyone was gung ho about Easton Town Center when plans were first unveiled.

“It took a lot of convincing to get retailers, back then, to buy into this open concept,” Clark said, explaining they were skeptical that shoppers would want to be outdoors. And the unusual architectural environment of Easton Town Center was a big departure from the in-line spaces they were used to occupying in the malls. “Retailers didn’t know how to bring their stores around corners,” he added.

Moreover, Easton Town Center had not been without its hitches since opening, either. Planet Movies, a clustering of a Planet Hollywood restaurant, an Official All-Star Cafe and an AMC 30-screen movie theater located in the “railway station,” proved to be a flop; AMC Theaters, which was a partner with Planet Hollywood on this part of the project, bought out Planet Hollywood’s interest and worked with Steiner to reconfigure the space with new restaurant and entertainment offerings.

But if some retailers hesitated initially over Easton, customers haven’t: In its first year 9 million people visited Easton Town Center, and the nonanchor stores now are doing more than $450 in sales per square foot, Steiner said. Easton has become a destination for people from all over central Ohio, according to Roy Williams, executive vice president for economic development at The Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s probably going to stop the exodus of retail dollars to outside places,” he observed, adding that Easton has introduced a variety of retailers previously absent from the Columbus market.

It also has provided the city another social venue.

“You see whole families who are spending the day there,” Williams said. “It’s so different from what the run-of-the-mill shopping experience is; here’s such a diversity of store types, restaurants and entertainment.”

Some people are citing it as a model for the lifestyle center format, which is cropping up across the country. But this is no lifestyle center, according to Steiner.

“Typically a lifestyle center is a nonanchored specialty store venue,” he said, observing that the definition has become overused and ill-defined. “The term I would like to stick with is the ‘new urban retail.’”

Whatever you call it, the center is a hit with the public, according to Flatto, adding that by December he expects some 20 million visitors will have come this year alone.

“So many factors have converged to make Easton unique,” he said. And while the company is always on the lookout for large parcels in other cities with such ideal locations, no one is holding their breath. “There are very few places you can do this.”

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