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Showplace

Seattle’s upscale Pacific Place has a banner first year

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

Seattle’s Pacific Place doesn’t have department stores, but boasts a roster of upscale retailers including Cartier.

Seattle’s Pacific Place may not have the cachet of Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive or New York’s Fifth Avenue, but at one year old it’s already putting new gloss on the city’s downtown.

Pacific Place is a $180 million, five-level shopping center that opened in October 1998 at Sixth and Pine streets. There are no department stores to be found in the 335,000-square-foot space, but a handful of large tenants — such as Barnes & Noble, Tiffany & Co., Cartier and an 11-screen General Cinema — serve as anchors.

The developer, Pine Street Development LLC of Seattle, trumpets the center as a linchpin of downtown’s renaissance.

And having leased Pacific Place to a roster of high-end tenants such as Crane & Co. Paper Makers, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma Grande Cuisine, the developer has also described the project as the Northwest’s answer to Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive and the high-end shopping of San Francisco and Chicago.

“Certainly the ground floor of our project has those tenants,” said Matt Griffin, managing partner of Pine Street Development, referring to the jewelers and a Bally shoe store.

Pacific Place enjoyed a successful debut year, with sales running $500 per square foot, not including the cinema, Griffin said. The center is 95% leased, he added.

“First of all, here in Seattle, we’re graced by a very strong economy,” Griffin said, noting “... all the things many of us hoped for in downtown Seattle are coming together,” including a strong office market and growing entertainment choices.

Nordstrom is another magnet, drawing people to Pacific Place’s neighborhood.

The Seattle-based department store, known for its stylish shoes and extensive customer service, moved its flagship store to the former Frederick & Nelson department store building, diagonally across the street from Pacific Place. It’s connected to the center by a pedestrian bridge.

Pine Street Development, meanwhile, is renovating Nordstrom’s former building, next to Pacific Place, to install 80,000 square feet of additional retail and office space, Griffin said.

Nordstrom doesn’t release sales figures for individual stores, said spokeswoman Brooke White, but the 99-store chain averages $362 per square foot, she said.

“We have been very encouraged by the response by the community” to the new flagship and to Pacific Place, she said.

Pine Street Development’s mention of Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive in its marketing material last year stemmed from pride that Tiffany, Cartier and others made their regional debuts there, Griffin said. Almost a third of the center’s tenants, including The J. Peterman Co., Club Monaco, MaxMara and Illuminations, are new to the Northwest, according to the developer.

Seattle is gaining wealth; residents “deserve a chance to shop at these stores,” he said.

And because these stores are the first in the region, Pacific Place “has been a focal point and a draw,” said Susan Zimmerman, formerly with brokerage firm CB Commercial, before it was CB Richard Ellis, which leased Pacific Place. Today she’s a leasing agent with Kidder Mathews & Segner.

Pacific Place clearly charmed at least one retailer. “It’s such a wonderful concept the way it’s done. You don’t think ‘mall’ when you’re in it. It’s all open, clear to the atrium top,” said Detra Segar, director of Tiffany & Co.’s Seattle operations.

Pacific Place’s physical core is a crescent-shaped, five-story atrium topped with a skylight. “... In Seattle, where we’re light challenged, it’s particularly nice,” Segar laughed.

New York-based Tiffany enters new markets once it has an established customer base there among mail order customers or people who visit the store’s other locations, Segar said. Tiffany hadn’t found a suitable Seattle location until Pacific Place, she said. The project was right because of “the whole resurgence of business in the downtown area,” she said.

Still, despite the upscale brands, Pacific Place doesn’t feel like Fifth Avenue. “We sort of have a broader range,” Griffin said. “We’re always looking for a broader mix than that.”

The center’s not as upscale as Los Angeles or New York high-end retail, said John Miller Jr., vice president of one of the largest brokerage firms, CB Richard Ellis, in Seattle. Rather, “it seems to me to try to target all [economic] levels [of customers] and does a pretty good job of it ... my kids go down there and they like it so far.”

Pacific Place may not bring to mind an elite, world-renowned shopping district, but it has given downtown Seattle some new life, observers said.

Five blocks from the city’s open-air public market, Pacific Place is proving a destination for people, and helping revive downtown.

“It’s doing really well. Downtown is doing really well right now,” said Lucinda Payne, director of marketing for the Downtown Seattle Association. “[Pacific Place] plays an important role in a big puzzle.

“For Seattle to have a Tiffany, a Cartier ... a Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble and J. Crew, all in one center, is pretty darn exciting and has provided a shot in the arm for us,” Payne said.

Downtown began a decline about 15 years ago, said Kemper Freeman Jr., president and owner of Bellevue Square, a 1.3 million-square-foot mall in suburban Bellevue, some 10 miles from downtown.

Freeman blamed the deterioration on a lack of attention from city leaders, who emphasized office space at the expense of retail. Department stores such as JC Penney and Frederick & Nelson left. And Bellevue and other suburban shopping centers pulled sales from downtown, Griffin said, until recent years.

But four years ago, Planet Hollywood opened in downtown. The new Nordstrom building is another enhancement. So are improvements to the convention center and construction of three professional sports stadiums, Freeman said. Homes for basketball’s Sonics and baseball’s Mariners are already complete and the Seahawks’ football stadium is now in the works.

Finally, “Pacific Place has played a big role,” Payne said. “It gets [residents] to put their toe in [to downtown] again.”

It’s difficult to gauge Pacific Place’s effect on other area shopping centers.

Freeman had no statistics measuring changes in traffic or sales at Bellevue Square since Pacific Place opened. Bellevue currently has sales of $500 per square foot, Freeman said.

He and Jana Koeberle, Bellevue Square’s assistant director of marketing, described Pacific Place as a welcome addition to the market.

“We view downtown Seattle as important to the development of Bellevue,” Koeberle said. “We’re really pleased with all the development going on in downtown.” Pacific Place has at least 10 stores in common with Bellevue Square, which has allowed those companies to advertise more in the region, she said. Some are: J. Crew, Ann Taylor, Victoria’s Secret, Papyrus, The Body Shop, Coach and Gymboree.

“It raises the sophistication of shopping in the Northwest,” Koeberle said. “... I think they work pretty well together.” Regardless of any ripple effect on Seattle shopping, Pacific Place seems to be serving downtown well.

“[Downtown] Seattle has become a shopping center in itself,” Griffin said. “It rivals any of the ones in the area... We’re seeing people downtown who haven’t been downtown before,” though he couldn’t offer concrete statistics or market studies.

Miller agreed, observing that downtown sidewalks have swelled with people.

Pacific Place’s cinema seems to pull people into downtown, he said. “I don’t know if people would go there just because of shopping, because parking is tough,” Miller said. Pacific Place includes a 1,200-space parking garage but downtown still suffers congestion and a lack of parking, he said.

Still, he predicted Pacific Place will succeed.

“I think it’s going to be healthy,” Miller said, “just like Union Square in San Francisco.” (See story, page 21.)

The best thing about Pacific Place, Griffin said, is “for those of us who grew up in Seattle, to come downtown and see the sidewalks just packed with people.”