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Shopping Centers Today -> October 2003
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STEINER TO REINVENT 50-YEAR-OLD WISCONSIN MALL
BY DONNA MITCHELL
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No one wants to see Bayshore Mall end its successful run — not owner Corrigan Properties and certainly not the city of Glendale, Wis., for which the mall is the largest taxpayer. All agree that if the mall is to stay successful, it must change.
So before the center marks its 50th birthday next spring, Bayshore Mall is getting a new lease on life. Dallas-based Corrigan brought in as a partner Steiner + Associates, famous for its Easton Town Center retail-entertainment destination, Columbus, Ohio, to nearly double the enclosed 530,000-square-foot enclosed center and make it a partly enclosed, partly open-air retail-entertainment project. As such, it will serve as a downtown destination for Glendale and be renamed simply Bayshore.
Bayshore Mall opened in 1954 as a strip center serving the affluent community on Milwaukee’s north shore, in a highly desirable location just off Interstate 43, says Michael Mesenbourg, CSM, vice president of Corrigan. (Today the trade area, consisting of more than 300,000 people, boasts an average annual household income exceeding $100,000.) Despite its age and relatively small size — its two current anchors, Boston Store and Sears, make up half its retail gross leasable area — the center is productive, pulling in $375 per square foot in sales annually.
But it could do better, insists Mesenbourg. It must make room for tenants waiting to lease space there and enlarge its role from mere retail to leisure destination.
“There is a point when — no matter what the location — size and age will catch up to the place,” said Mesenbourg. “We just wanted to protect our territory.”
There are two enclosed malls, Northridge and Grand Avenue, within 5 miles, but they don’t present a lot of competition for Bayshore, Mesenbourg says. Northridge has been totally vacated and will be torn down, and Grand Avenue is undergoing a major renovation.
Thus, when Corrigan went looking for ideas for the mall’s new look, it turned to Steiner, setting Easton Town Center up as a model of the leisure destination it wanted Bayshore to become, says Mesenbourg.
Corrigan’s other partner is the Glendale Community Development Authority, which plans to provide up to $45 million in tax increment financing in hopes that Bayshore will become the de facto Glendale downtown. (TIFs use real estate taxes generated by a project to fund infrastructure or other improvement costs.)
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| Bayshore will reopen as a 1 million-square-foot retail-entertainment center. |
When the project re-emerges as the new, 1 million-square-foot Bayshore, the south portion will be set up like a town center, with restaurants and stores arranged around a square. Plans call for a rotunda leading to the enclosed north portion and serving as the major junction between the indoor and outdoor sections, says Mesenbourg.
The mall will incorporate a third anchor, an existing 83,000-square-foot Kohl’s that sits on an adjacent property, and Corrigan is also considering about a dozen restaurants, a comedy club, a movie theater and a women’s health clinic as future tenants.
The developers might add residential units over the retail portion, said Mesenbourg, but they’re weighing the decision against the issues of security, garbage collection and move-in days, which can conflict with retail operations.
The rebuilding is costing $150 million, says Yaromir Steiner, founder of Steiner + Associates, which will demolish as much as half the old mall to make way for the expansion.
Corrigan, which has owned the center since 1956 and renovated it several times, would have expanded it sooner, had it not been landlocked by businesses, I-43 and other roads, a cemetery and residences. Here’s where the city has been an invaluable help. Eager to facilitate the project, Glendale used its powers of eminent domain to buy property covering about five city blocks, to the tune of about $18 million, according to Richard Maslowski, Glendale city administrator and executive director of the Glendale Community Development Authority.
“They understood that in order for Bayshore to continue to do well, it needed to expand,” said Mesenbourg. “The Bayshore Mall currently is the city of Glendale’s single largest taxpayer. Any expansion and redevelopment of the center will expand the city’s tax base.” Glendale estimates that the center will generate about $5 million in real estate taxes annually up from $817,000 currently Maslowski says.
The developers hope to start demolition in November with construction scheduled to begin in the spring of 2004.
“It is amazing that a property can be 50 years old and still find new life and be rejuvenated,” said Mesenbourg. “Now we’re looking out into the future.”
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