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WESTGATE BRINGS VEGAS GLITZ TO GLENDALE, ARIZ.

BY DEBRA HAZEL

On the site of a former alfalfa farm in Glendale, Ariz., a suburb in Phoenix’s West Valley, 100-foot-high towers bearing lit signage and super-size, animated billboards will soon bathe the desert in resplendence. The Times Square/Las Vegas-like spectacle is a planned feature of the region’s new sports and entertainment hub, a 22-acre, mixed-use complex called Westgate City Center.

The developers anticipate that a critical mass of shops, hotels, restaurants, theaters and two professional sports teams will draw traffic to the massive development, which is scheduled for completion by 2010.

“The idea is a new city center with an arena and cinema,” said James M. Baeck, a vice president at Baltimore-based Development Design Group, which is master planner and designer of the entire complex on behalf of Phoenix-based developer The Ellman Cos.

The $700 million development, which will ultimately include 6.5 million square feet of retail, restaurant and entertainment space, is located at West Glendale Avenue and Highway 101, less than 1,000 feet from the 18,000-seat Glendale Arena. The newly opened sports stadium is home to both the Phoenix Coyotes of the National Hockey League and the Arizona Sting lacrosse team. Nearby, a new stadium for the Arizona Cardinals baseball team is under construction for a 2006 opening.

Glendale spent $180 million to build the 600,000-square-foot arena, and the city is counting on Westgate’s becoming an economic development catalyst. Glendale is projecting that 15 million to 18 million people will pass through the project each year, says Jeffrey Hecht, Ellman Cos.’ director of communications.

All of the attention will be a welcome change for the municipality. In recent years Glendale got lost in the shuffle as developers rushed to build up the surrounding communities of Chandler, Scottsdale and Tempe. Less affluent but more populous than its neighbors, Glendale mostly missed out on Phoenix’s building boom, which included the openings of several new malls, lifestyle centers and power centers in the East Valley.

“For so many years, people focused on the East Valley,” said Tim Wright, Ellman Cos.’ senior vice president of real estate operations. “But the West Valley contains one-third of the population of metropolitan Phoenix — 1 million people.”

And that number will increase. More than half of the new residential permits issued in the metro area are in the West Valley, and the extension of 101 into a true beltway around Phoenix will make Glendale more accessible to all areas of the market.

Though the West Valley is not as wealthy as such suburbs as Scottsdale, “the demographics are strong enough to support this type of development,” Wright said. Average household income within a 10-mile radius is $62,133 a year, the project’s developer says.

Glendale won’t have to wait on the sidelines much longer. The development’s first phase, which opens next fall, will be a $110 million, 500,000-square-foot mixed-use center called The Village at Westgate City Center. The Village will contain 280,000 square feet of street-level retail with 220,000 square feet of loft office space on top. A 77,000-square-foot, 20-screen Loews Cineplex, a Mastro’s Steakhouse and a Virgin Megastore will anchor the project’s retail-entertainment portion, which is currently 50 percent leased.

The Village will provide a new downtown for Glendale and in fact the entire West Valley. The city itself does have an old town area, but “the old part of Glendale really isn’t the epicenter,” said Dennis E. Campbell, a principal of Phoenix-based brokerage Campbell Management Group. (Campbell is not affiliated with the project.) “The Village at Westgate is designed to be the new epicenter of the West Valley.”

The Village’s design is not what many would expect in the Southwest. The city of Glendale required that the architecture be art deco rather than a more traditional Southwest style. “They decided it was to be something fresh and new and more dynamic,” Baeck said.

The retail space and the restaurants will be situated along a 400-foot-long, curved, man-made lagoon that spans 80 feet at its widest. Much like the lake in front of the Bellagio Las Vegas resort, the Village’s lagoon will be the site of a light and water show, synchronized to music. Two-story retail buildings will front the plaza.

The arena opened in December and is already a hit, Baeck reports. The stadium was to be booked with concerts and other events about 50 to 70 nights of the year; instead, it is booked for 140 nights. The Cineplex is scheduled to open in October 2005, in time for the January 2006 National Hockey League All-Star Game, which will be held at the arena. Next up will be neighborhood and power centers. And several 300,000-square-foot office towers, hotels and town houses will be developed over time. Ellman plans to sell portions of the project to residential developers.