THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512240008
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 201 lines
In the spring of 1998, shoppers from Virginia Beach will cruise off Interstate 264, park in a multi-story garage at MacArthur Center on St. Paul's Boulevard, and walk into a Nordstrom department store without touching a city sidewalk.
Question: How will that help merchants on Granby or Main Street draw a new customer through their front door?
With the naming Thursday of an architect and builder for the $300 million luxury mall and a Jan. 26 groundbreaking, crucial decisions approach on the design of the 1.2 million-square-foot, three-story structure.
The decision: How to construct a building that will serve the popular notion of shopping in an enclosed mall - with convenient parking, plenty of security and protection from the weather - and also revive an old downtown that's starting to come back to life.
``It's a classic dilemma cities face,'' said Michael Beyard, who specializes in commercial development research at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. ``It's really a conflict between what is clearly marketable and what is most desirable in urbanistic design of what a city should be.''
``A downtown isn't successful if only the shopping center works.''
The city and its developer, The Taubman Co., are designing MacArthur Center more like a suburban shopping mall than a downtown shopping street, but with a few urban features.
``The urban design purists say, `Replicate the old downtown streets,' '' said John L. Simon, the senior vice president at The Taubman Co., who is in charge of the project. Simon has developed downtown shopping malls for Taubman in other cities. Simon said shoppers like enclosed malls.
``There is a fine line here. This is a hotly debated issue, as well it should be.''
How the mall connects to surrounding streets will determine whether it helps the rest of downtown, Simon acknowledged.
``We don't want to turn our back to the city,'' Simon said.
The question for the architects and designers is how to build a successful mall that produces the tax windfall for Norfolk - estimated at $40 million over 10 years - while also supporting other downtown initiatives. These include immediate goals such as the revival of Granby Street with new small businesses and long-range ones such as getting more people to live downtown.
It is a decision for which there are no easy or sure answers. At stake is the ultimate success of the mall and the vitality of the downtown, now showing unmistakable signs of rebirth after decades of decay and dormancy.
What makes the decision difficult?
Automobiles. How can downtown streets that were laid out for carriages and streetcars accommodate the automobiles of the 30,000 to 60,000 people who, Taubman estimates, will visit MacArthur Center each day? In older cities like Portland, Ore., where mass transit has been supported, this was less of a problem when a downtown mall was built.
Shopping trends. Enclosed malls are no longer as popular as they once were. Fewer malls are going up, and Americans are visiting them less often and spending less time in them.
At the same time, traditional shopping streets are getting to be the ``in'' thing, and some new malls have been built to resemble traditional downtowns. But the track record is mixed.
``There are some successes around the country where they are not enclosing them,'' said David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which owns the land on which the mall will be built. ``But the state of the art, as far as developers are concerned, is that the mall is still the most advisable alternative.''
The Taubman Co., with its $200 million investment, insists on a largely traditional layout.
``Those guys put up a lot of money and take a lot of risk, and they know what works,'' Rice said. ``It's hard to change it once you know it works.''
The mall itself is part of a strategy designed to help solve social as well as economic problems. Its other parts include the new campus for Tidewater Community College on Granby Street, a downtown trolley and a job training program for low- and moderate-income residents who would work in the mall.
``The mall is part of an economic and social strategy to lift up downtown, not only vacant Granby Street, but the people around it,'' said Stephen Cooper, a project director with the NRHA.
In accommodating Norfolk's history of extensive urban renewal, as well as what they believe customers want, The Taubman Co. and the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority have designed the MacArthur Center mall as essentially a big suburban shopping mall - with a few differences.
Instead of big, sweeping parking lots, it has four-story parking garages that flank the mall.
Like a conventional mall, it will have a long hallway with smaller stores on both sides. But the hallway will have three levels, allowing the mall to fit onto 20 acres downtown rather than 100 acres like Lynnhaven Mall.
The mall's top draw, the luxury Nordstrom department store, will be set back toward St. Paul's Boulevard, sandwiched between two parking garages.
Under the current design, shoppers will not be able to enter Nordstrom from the street. They will have to walk from the Monticello Avenue entrance through the mall or enter from a parking garage. Interstate 264 will feed almost directly into these garages, giving Nordstrom immediate access to the 30,000 to 60,000 people the mall is expected to draw daily.
The mall's front door will face Monticello. Here the mall has a chance of having a more urban relationship to the street, says the developer. The mall's main entrance and entrances to Dillard's and the third anchor store will face this street.
Monticello is one short block from Granby. The hope is that this entrance will draw people into the mall and send them from the mall back onto Granby.
``How you face Monticello will define the urban nature of project,'' Simon said.
But he says it is not necessary to have smaller stores actually open on Monticello Avenue. Instead, show windows without entrances, perhaps displaying merchandise, will face Monticello. The main Monticello Avenue entrance will also feature a cutout for drivers to stop and drop off passengers.
Simon did not say whether Monticello would have on-street parking, another feature that would increase the pedestrian friendliness of the street. On-street parking slows down traffic and creates a safety zone for pedestrians.
Some local and national architects say the mall is too suburban. Without a more urban design, the city will create an isolated island that will draw life out of the parts of downtown.
``The people don't leave the enclosed world of the mall, and, economically, it doesn't spill over into the rest of the city,'' said Roberta Gratz, author of The Living City, and a writer on downtown redevelopment for two decades.
``There is not one project of this sort - and they are all over the place - that ever helped rebuild a downtown into a place that is more than just adjunct streets around a shopping mall. It will never connect to the city itself. I defy anyone to show me one that has worked.
``It will be a suburban mall downtown, and that means that downtown will never be its own place. Period.''
Gratz and others say Taubman should abandon the balancing act.
At heart, this means lifting the roof off the mall and having the small stores and department stores face public city streets, streets with cars. With a radical design like this, the city would break new ground and connect a Nordstrom or a Dillard's to the rest of downtown, they say.
Among such critics are Ron Kloster, assistant professor of architecture at Hampton University. He says the city should re-create the eight square blocks of streets and businesses that existed before urban renewal wiped them away.
``We could re-create Charleston,'' Kloster said. ``We could re-create a commercial and retail village. We could get the same shops in there, but in a mixture of public and private space.''
When you lose the public streets, you lose the intimacy that makes a downtown special, Kloster said.
``You don't get to poke your head in the door and say to a storekeeper, `How are you doing, where's my magazine?' '' Kloster said. ``It's an all or nothing thing.''
Building a shopping district on city streets could also accommodate the city's goal of having more people live downtown. By placing the mall on public streets, the city could place apartments and offices over the smaller stores.
Brian Townsend, a senior planner with Norfolk, notes that in its heyday, Granby Street was essentially a shopping mall by another name. Department stores like Smith & Welton and Rice's ``anchored the street'' while smaller shops and restaurants fed off the shoppers whom the big stores brought to town.
Some developers have built malls that imitate classic city streets, enough that some analysts say this is an emerging trend.
Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Fla., Reston Town Center in Fairfax County and City Walk in Los Angeles are examples of retail developments that mimic traditional cities.
But the financial success of these places is mixed, and department stores, still the backbone of retail shopping, are mostly still in malls.
But it's clear the regional shopping mall is no longer as popular as it once was. Once malls meant safety and comfort. Now malls advertise their police protection and escorts for shoppers across parking lots.
Other forms of shopping now compete with malls, say analysts. They included so-called big-box stores and ``category killers,'' from Wal-Marts to Circuit Cities.
``Regional malls are in their most competitive era ever,'' said Stefanie Elkins, spokeswoman for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York City. ``They are facing competition from retail formats that didn't exist 10 years ago, like the outlet centers, the warehouse clubs and home shopping networks. People are spending less time in malls.''
Since the early 1980s, the average family visits a mall less frequently and spends less time there once they arrive, said an analyst at Stillerman, Jones & Co. in Indianapolis. The firm puts together the National Benchmarks of Shopping, a statistical index of shopping trends.
Fewer than 500 malls were built last year, compared with more than 2,000 a year in the mid-1980s.
The key to the MacArthur Center's success is that Hampton Roads still lacks luxury department stores and smaller shops that its market profile says it will support.
``It's a difficult thing for any city to get a downtown mall these days, especially a midsized city like Norfolk,'' said Beyard, of the Urban Land Institute. ``Norfolk is fortunate to have a proposal to bring a major retail presence back to its downtown, particularly one anchored by Nordstrom. That should be a major regional draw.''
Although compromises on the design are inevitable, Beyard said, ``it should not be an alien creature built off to the side somewhere, sucking the life out of Granby Street.
``I don't think the city wants a shopping center that is completely separate from the existing urban fabric so people drive to it, leave, and don't go to the rest of downtown.'' MEMO: Part of a continuing series on the planned MacArthur Center mall. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot
The MacArthur Center design blends elements of a suburban mall -
like the private drive at Norfolk's Dominion Tower - and elements
of urban design, like the storefront of Prince Books & Coffeehouse,
in the Life Building. It's the automobile that has driven this
difference. Story, A6
Map
The Virginian-Pilot
MACARTHUR CENTER: AN ECONOMIC ISLAND?
by CNB