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KING OF QUEENS: MACERICH’S N.Y. JEWEL

By Edmund Mander

Queens Center as it will appear after renovation.

Think of a center with annual sales over $920 a square foot, hosting some of the highest-performing stores in their chains and a mile-long list of tenant applicants, and most likely it will be swanky Forum Shops, South Coast Plaza or Bal Harbour Shops that come to mind.

Surely not Queens (New York City) Center, a four-story enclosed mall built in 1973 that, by its owner’s admission, is small, dark and showing its age?

Think again. Not only are its sales per square foot not far short of three times the industry average, but its 300-seat food court does more than $10 million in sales a year — $1,600 a square foot, against an industry average of $634 per square foot annually. That’s $33,000 a seat per year.

And that’s not the half of it — or even the third of it, according to Ron Bondy, CLS, vice president of leasing at The Macerich Co., which owns and manages the center. While the mall, which is located in the Elmhurst section of Queens, already attracts 23 million visitors a year, Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich thinks it could do better, and is planning a major overhaul and expansion.

“Today we are attracting about a third of what our potential market is,” Bondy said.

And what a market it is. Queens Center might be a tad dowdy — it has been nearly 12 years since its last renovation — but its demographics are beautiful, according to Macerich, which regards the mall as one of its flagship properties. Consider this: In San Diego, 10 malls share between them a population of 2.3 million people and 871,633 households, all within a 20-mile radius. The market is roughly the same for Denver’s 10 anchored malls, too. But Queens Center has 2.1 million people and 817,570 households, within a 5-mile radius, all to itself.

The mall is easy to reach, too, sitting next to the Long Island Expressway and Queens Boulevard, on which more than 450,000 cars pass a day. However, about 85% of its customers come by public transport — something that is easy to do, given that the center is on eight bus routes and has a subway station across the street.

“It’s got a great location,” observed John M. Genovese, senior vice president and director of real estate at Macerich, in something of an understatement.

Little wonder, then, that Macerich wants to spruce the place up. The multimillion-dollar project will enlarge it from 624,000 square feet to nearly 1 million square feet, bring in some smart national retailers, and, thanks to extensive skylighting, will let in some sunlight, too. Nonanchor store space will increase from the current 135,000 square feet to about 430,000 square feet.

“We want to create a first-class suburban shopping center in an urban environment,” Genovese said.

The bulk of the expansion will take place through the construction of a four-level structure on a 5-acre former municipal parking lot across the street. This will be linked to the existing mall via a two-level sky bridge — also containing retailers — with an anchor at each end.

The first phase of the reconstruction, comprising pretty much everything except the new Penney space, is set to be completed in the fall of 2003; Penney’s new store is scheduled to open in spring 2004.

Macerich began planning the renovation in 1997, two years after it bought the mall from the New York City-based ShopCo Group and Lehman Bros. in December 1995. (Queens Center originally was built by Taubman Centers.) Getting approval for the bridge over the road — originally Macerich wanted to eliminate the road altogether — took time. But in the interim Macerich has done much to improve Queens Center’s performance: Total sales topped $282 million last year, representing a 42% increase since the company bought the property, Genovese said.

A core goal of the expansion is to attract a more affluent consumer — people who currently go into Manhattan to do their clothes shopping, for instance — while retaining the mall’s current shoppers, executives say. The mall is getting Swedish fashion apparel chain H&M. Gap Inc. recently opened one of its GapBody intimate apparel stores there, and there also are plans to expand several existing popular national retailers, including Victoria’s Secret, The Children’s Place and a Steve Madden shoe store. Macerich also is enticing some New York restaurants to open branches in the mall.

“We want to be more things to more people,” said Bondy, explaining that the project will turn Queens Center into a true regional mall. “Today I would almost characterize it as a community center.”

But it might also be characterized as “the community’s center,” a hub where people from one of the most diverse areas in the country congregate, executives say.

“The reason it’s so successful is that there are something like 78 ethnic communities that see this as their center,” said Richard Foy, co-chairman of Boulder, Colo.-based Communication Arts, the firm designing the expansion and renovation. As such, the mall serves as something of a melting pot.

“Because we attract a diverse customer, it’s a great opportunity for us,” said Alan Barocas, Gap Inc.’s senior vice president for real estate. The company already has Gap and GapKids stores there, and the Queens Center location is one of the company’s two best-performing sites in New York City’s five boroughs, and is in the top 10 percent nationally, Barocas said.

When it comes to aesthetics, though, the mall’s fans are a lot less flattering.

“It is very unattractive on the urban landscape,” observed Foy, who is particularly disdainful of its glazed blue brick exterior. Glazed blue bricks don’t do much to attract shoppers who are currently going to Manhattan’s Fifth and Madison avenues to do their apparel shopping, executives note.

In an effort to create a classic urban appearance, designers are making much use of limestone, steel and glass.

“It’s going to be sophisticated, high quality and very cosmopolitan,” Foy said. “That’s what New York is.”

All in all, executives want it to be a center whose appearance does justice to its performance, so that when people in the future are asked to name a center with sales per square foot many times the national average and a mile-long list of aspiring tenants, they’ll think of Forum Shops, South Coast Plaza, Bal Harbour Shops — and Queens Center.

 

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