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WHO’S AFRAID OF TALL MALLS? NOT KEN HIMMEL

Kenneth A. Himmel has been reaching for the sky since 1976, when at age 29 he and his colleagues at Urban Investment and Development Co. built Chicago’s landmark Water Tower Place. As the first vertical mall in the United States, Water Tower Place was a blueprint for other influential vertical, mixed-use projects that Himmel has worked on since, including Seattle’s Pacific Place and Boston’s Copley Place. Today Himmel, 57, is president and CEO of New York City-based Related Urban Development, a division of The Related Cos., a company owned principally by his longtime friend, Steven Ross. In 1997 Ross approached Himmel about an opportunity for a massive mixed-use project at the Columbus Circle site of the New York Coliseum. Some have called the project — Time Warner Center, which is set to open in February — the most important mixed-use development in New York City in decades. SCT Editor-at-Large Debra Hazel spoke with Himmel in October.

What attracted you to vertical retailing?
With Urban Investment and Development Co., I did Water Tower Place and Copley Place. I was 29 years old and the project manager for a new Ritz-Carlton hotel at Water Tower Place in Chicago. I was exposed to this incredible mixed-use project with vertical retailing and residential. So I got the bug. We built what is still a cutting-edge project to this day. It’s still exciting to go into it.

And what was appealing about that?
Watching the excitement of putting very high-quality retail with the restaurant uses in a shopping environment and letting that serve as a catalyst for a mixed-use project. I was exposed to the very top of that game when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. It had a permanent impact on both my career and my own desire to do this going forward. I’ve never gotten over it. Otherwise, I would have stopped doing it.

What principles have you applied to the Time Warner project?
Here in New York is the ultimate, after all of these challenges. It’s not done by formula. It’s done by rigorous analysis and a lot of creativity, and a lot of experience as to how to put these uses together — how to work with the circulation of a project like this and how to, in fact, define the anchoring of the project. To get people up and down in a project like this — the decision in the New York project was Jazz at Lincoln Center, which draws 2 million people a year. And from day one we knew we would treat destination restaurants as an anchor for this project. In addition to operators, we picked design teams for the restaurants which are world-class. So it isn’t just leasing the space to a restaurant; it’s literally taking the entire floor, designing all the infrastructure, creating the whole platform for each, handpicking the operators, negotiating the deals, handpicking the teams to design them, then going and building them. I have three full-time construction project managers who do nothing but focus on these restaurants.

You have residential, offices, a hotel, Jazz at Lincoln Center. How important is the retail?
It’s interesting. A lot of New York developers who are very successful as residential or office developers look at the retail as a nuisance and an obstacle. I take the opposite approach and embrace it. It’s a lot of brain damage for not as much square footage, but if you do it right, it makes the whole building work better.

How do you sustain a project’s success?
Even when you have a 10-year retail lease, it doesn’t mean they’ll be there for 10 years. You have to be resilient, resourceful, creative. You can’t let it get you down. You have to be enthusiastic. You have to be an optimist. But you have to balance that with a lot of realism as well. Optimism won’t get you where you have to go. Our philosophy is a very long-term view of the world. We know these projects, by definition, are not coming out of the box, most of them, and being instantly successful. You have to stay the course.

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