Retailing: Fortunes on the Mall

Oklahoma-born Gerri Von Frellick reached Denver 16 years ago with a $2 bill and $643,000 in debts, the wreckage of his overextended Texas construction company. Since then, Von Frellick, 51, has amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune by becoming one of the nation’s more venturesome developers of shopping centers (two in Denver, one each in Dallas, San Antonio, Amarillo, Texas, and Boulder, Colo.). Last week, in the Denver suburb of Englewood, more than 5,000 workmen labored in three shifts around the clock to finish his latest and largest creation, 75-acre, $50 million Englewood-Cinderella City, in time for its scheduled March 7 opening. On the other side of town, Perl-Mack Construction Co., Denver’s largest builder of tract homes, was putting the final touches on 73-acre, $20 million Northglenn Mall, due to open a week later.

Though Northglenn will be the Denver area’s fourth major new shopping center in two years, that splurge only symbolizes the vast change that has overtaken retailing. In the past ten years the number of shopping centers in the U.S. and Canada has quadrupled to 10,900. Last year they accounted for an estimated 39% of retail sales. And shopping-center experts predict that nearly 80% of North America’s new retail space will go into the 650 shopping centers being built and the thousands more being expanded this year at a cost of $4.3 billion.

Zoos & Pumpkins. By combining glamour and one-stop convenience, the shopping centers have become the focus not only of retailing activity but of much community culture and recreational life. In addition to restaurants, banks, a post office, movie theaters, skating rinks and often a free auditorium for club meetings or amateur plays, the centers entice auto-borne families with a busy schedule of attractions. There are fashion shows and symphony concerts, pumpkin-judging contests and senior proms, reptile-club snake exhibits and “petting zoos” (for animals tame enough for tots to touch). Porpoises sometimes frolic in the 80-ft. pool at the King of Prussia Plaza near Valley Forge, Pa., and esprit runs so high that clerks don antique costumes and vie for prizes at the annual summer “sidewalk” sale.

Much of that country-fair atmosphere originated with the trend toward enclosed, generally glass-roofed malls. Inside, developers plant tropical gardens dotted with benches, fountains and even aviaries. New Jersey’s Delaware Township even changed its name to Cherry Hill, after that of its shopping center, whose verdant mall draws sightseers and customers from cities 100 miles away.

Rivals by Invitation. Shopping-center growth is now concentrated among ever larger “regional centers” dominated by two or more major department stores. “Six or eight years ago, 40 stores made a good-size center,” says Detroit Developer Alfred Taubman. “Today, we want a minimum of 80 stores and average from 125 to 150.” That puts a premium on compact use of land. To squeeze a potentially rival department store (Stix, Baer & Fuller) into their Crestwood Plaza near St. Louis, Developers Louis and Milton Zorensky erected a building on stilts above the parking lot. In a sharp departure from the norm of the ’50s, department stores themselves provide the impetus nowadays for most regional centers; they pick the site, arrange for zoning and utilities, invite one or two competing stores to share the center with them, and then call in a developer to locate the other tenants.

Now, many planners feel that shopping centers are approaching what Los Angeles Architect Victor Gruen, a pioneer in the field, calls “a new wave of innovation.” With realty taxes, land and construction costs constantly escalating, says Vice President Andrew L. Murphy of Allied Stores, “the future of the shopping center is vertical.” He foresees the demolition of many of today’s thriving centers and their replacement by towering retail-office-apartment complexes. Some centers are already growing into such minicities. Developer Raymond D. Nasher has begun work on a “platform city” in Atlanta, and he expects to expand his handsome NorthPark center in Dallas into a similar amalgam of rental housing, hotels and parks. A Cleveland developer this week is announcing plans for a $300 million “Metro City” shopping mall in suburban Euclid; it will include 1,000 apartments, a 400-room hotel, a motel, and a 22-story office building.

Inexorably, the shape of tomorrow’s shopping centers will come to resemble that of today’s downtowns. The resemblance will have some of the old drawbacks, too. Though only a few centers now impose a charge, developers are virtually unanimous that free parking will disappear long before the year 2000.