From Shopping Malls to Lifestyle Centers

On why structured parking is allegedly problematic for regional retail in general, which is causing problems at West End.  This installment will look at the overall evolution of regional retail – from downtown, to the regional malls, to lifestyle centers like West End. 

Downtown 2.0: The Mall

With the massive movement of people to the Twin Cities suburbs, shopping followed, including attempts to create a downtown. Southdale was the first attempt in the Twin Cities ‒ and indeed, in the entire United States ‒ to recapture the spirit of downtown, albeit in a drastically different form. Early on it was full of regional retailers like Dayton’s as well as everyday retailers like a Red Owl grocery store. There were plans for a library, town hall, and police department that never were implemented, and over time it evolved into exclusively regional retail as the everyday stores closed. It’s always been a place where people pretty much exclusively drove their cars to. Even Southdale’s architect, Victor Gruen, was not happy with what he had wrought.  Instead of building a new downtown to combat car-centeredness, he had created nothing close to a downtown that was the epitome of car-centeredness.

Meanwhile, cities saw the success of the suburban malls and tried to replicate it by bringing malls to the city: Gavidae Common, City Center, the Conservatory, Town Square, Calhoun Square, to name a few.  The land that was eventually occupied by the Lake Street K-Mart was originally cleared in anticipation of something akin to a mall. There was even an ill-fated plan to convert the south end of Nicollet Mall into an indoor shopping mall.  In 1985 the city granted a development contract to La Societe Generale Immobiliere, a French development company. After a decade of bickering and lawsuits, in the end, nothing was built.

Of the indoor urban malls in the Twin Cities that were built, none have been as successful as hoped, and some have been complete disasters. I was told by a friend that did shopping center development that the Conservatory had a fatal flaw in that there were no sight lines between floors. But there is a more general flaw affecting them all: the success of suburban malls is tied intrinsically to free, abundant surface parking – an element that could not reasonably be duplicated in the cities. I wrote in part one about all the reasons people hate parking ramps; multiply that by 10 if you charge for parking. Even validated parking is no substitute for free parking. Meanwhile, not enough people actually lived downtown to support this regional-type shopping from foot traffic alone – possibly not even now, and certainly not then.

Paid ramps can and do work if the destination is unique enough, like a Wild game. The problem with having a Gap or Applebees in a downtown mall is, at the end of the day office workers either want to “get out of Dodge” and back home to their families in Burnsville, or they want to hang out at the unique bars, shops, and restaurants in historic buildings like in Lowertown or the Warehouse District. It’s not on the radar to go to Applebee’s or shop at the Gap in a suburban mall-like setting. When it comes time to go to Applebee’s or Gap on the weekends, why drive downtown and have to pay for parking in a ramp when you can park for free in a surface lot at Burnsville Center?

Uptown in particular has attempted to shoehorn suburban-style regional stores such as the Gap, Columbia, North Face, and Famous Dave’s into its high streets. In the long run, these weren’t able to compete. In my opinion, the biggest issue was a lack of free parking. The second-biggest issuewas it was a royal pain to get there, since it is miles from a freeway. Uptown has nowhere near the density to support these regional shops from just local foot traffic.

The Decline of the Malls and the Rise of the Lifestyle Centers

Back in the suburbs, there have long been signs that the mall format, while initially successful, is fading. Although forecasts of disaster for the Mall of America proved to be anything but correct, predictions that it would be the last regional mall to be built in the area proved true. And then the decline of existing malls began as wealth moved farther out, anchors closed, and commerce moved online.  Apache Plaza was demolished in 2004; Brookdale in 2010.

The remaining traditional malls have adapted by filling with nontraditional anchors and selling off excess parking. With a fitness center, DMV, housing, and soon to be a library, Southdale is getting much closer to its original vision. Even the Mall of America knows times are changing. It has always had options to expand, to the site across 24th, but those expansions have been long in coming. The new airport runway made the site essentially undevelopable, so in compensation they obtained a site across Lindau Lane once the city got involved in a complicated land swap deal. In the mid-90s came the concept of an $800 million “Hyperport”. Although vaguely defined, it seemed something like Epcot, a place for corporations to showcase their wonderful technology.  From the Twin Cities Business Journal (paywalled) article:

At the center of the project would be a satellite-computer network called the HyperCore Power Plant, which would be an information and communication center providing speedy Internet access. The developers envision companies, from Sony and Boeing Commercial Space Co. to Silicon Graphics, providing products for the plant.

As I recall, this would have also included a small hotel with a waterpark, as well as offices and substantial retail. But, fortunately, nothing happened. It seemed like a good idea at the dawn of the information age where everyone was excited about the future. But the concept of Hyperport would have aged laughably, given that the internet in your pocket is now so ubiquitous even kids have it.

IKEA finally opened in 2003, primarily due to a contract that “Mall of America Phase II” had to be underway by a certain time or the Mall owners would lose development rights. After some hotels and offices came a modest retail expansion on the original property, intended to lure luxury retailers (who never came, and it now seems mostly vacant). Now the Mall owners are trying to shift more towards 50% retail, 50% entertainment. Their new waterpark proposal is an example of that shift, with the only new retail being a few shops selling hot dogs and swimming suits to waterpark visitors.

 

The Lifestyle Center

With no new malls being built, and existing ones shifting away from retail, the problem remained of where to put still-viable retail stores. Rather than build enclosed malls without anchors or have American Eagle and Forever 21 locate in a typical strip mall, we made another attempt at building faux downtowns: the “lifestyle center”, where retail shops line I haven’t found a good written source as to why this form developed as opposed to some other form factor, but myself and others have considered some ideas:

• Traditional mall stores consider themselves too conceited to locate in a strip mall next to a dollar store or dry cleaners.
• City officials want something more “cute” than yet another strip mall for their city.
• Consumers have nostalgia for something that existed where they or their parents grew up, but never existed where they now live in the suburbs
• To the extent people still shop at mall stores, they’re less likely to spend all day marathons doing so. If you want to shop at American Eagle and Forever 21 it’s nice to walk between them in comfort, but if you just want to try on a pair of jeans from Forever 21, it’s rather inconvenient to get in and out of a regional mall even if they were built without anchors.
• There’s the oft-repeated phrase that the younger generations crave “experiences” rather than “stuff”. So I guess marketers and planners create an “experience” for them so they can dine in a 5 year-old building that’s a parody of a 100 year-old building, next to a 5 year-old street that’s a parody of a 150 year-old street.

Whatever the reasons, Arbor Lakes  in Maple Grove marked the beginning of the Twin Cities’ transition away from the regional mall . The first phase, which Wikipedia describes as “a simulacrum of a traditional American Main Street designed in neotraditional style,” opened in the late 1990s, and while not technically a true lifestyle center (that would follow with phase II in 2003), it contains major elements: the neotraditional (or fake historical if you’re less kind) architecture, the contrived “Main Street” (and I insist on using scare quotes), the sea of parking in back.

Following Arbor Lakes Phase II, another prototype lifestyle center – Woodbury Lakes – was built. The next two broke with the pattern; the troubled West End was built with parking ramps and Central Park Commons dispensed with the integrated anchors and instead plopped down “Main Street” in the middle of what is otherwise a regional power center (a cluster of big box retail). And there are more of these types of retail developments on the horizon, as a new lifestyle center is planned in the Rosedale Center parking lot.

Homage, Tribute, Parody, or Mockery

I’ll digress now and state how much I absolutely hate the fake historical architecture. Although all lifestyle centers use it, this style isn’t limited to  lifestyle centers. Some of the worst offenders in the metro are the Stillwater Mills building, the downtown Minneapolis Target Store, and the previous version of the Block E building in Minneapolis. Here’s a picture of the Arbor Lakes “Main Street”.

We see second story windows that go nowhere, multiple elevation changes and false fronts that attempt to convey different physical buildings, a cornice on buildings only a few decades old. I count seven different exterior finishes; it looks like the builder got a deal on remnants at Home Depot and then slapped them on at random. It’s fully possible to build a building that’s true to its time that doesn’t come across as looking like a communist block flat. Just use time-tested, quality materials in a way that’s not intended to deceive. Here’s an example of what I mean– an interesting design that ‘s true to its era even down to the modern lanterns instead of fake history Victorian style acorn globes.

There seems something architecturally dishonest about the overall form of lifestyle centers also, building a “Main Street” in a cornfield. I’m not sure what form would be better but don’t do something like the Twin Cities Premium Outlets in Eagan, which manages to combine the worst element of strip malls (being exposed to the elements) with the worst element of regional malls (the long walk to parking) with having to deal with a parking ramp and the complete lack of character. This whole fake history point may be the subject of a future article, but I thought I’d mention it briefly here because it’s so integral to lifestyle centers.

Part Three of this series will take a detailed look at each of the Twin Cities lifestyle centers and try to gauge their convenience in objective terms. Part Four will conclude with a look at the parking issues in Stillwater.