Mall makeover: Willow Lawn returns to outdoor roots

by Rob Walker
For Virginia Business
September 2005

When it comes to mall makeovers, what’s old is positively trendy. These days, developers are building outdoor “lifestyle centers,” and older enclosed malls, such as Richmond’s Willow Lawn Shopping Center, are literally tearing off their roofs to infuse sunshine, blue sky and the feeling of a neighborly open-air shopping community. Willow Lawn’s makeover will bring it full circle. It began as an outdoor mall when it opened in 1956 as Richmond’s first suburban shopping center.

The $15 million to $20 million project planned by Rockville, Md.-based owner Federal Realty Investment Trust will remove a portion of the roof and combine open and closed spaces to provide a shopping experience that contrasts with the enclosed format of indoor malls — a huge sealed environment surrounded by a sea of asphalt.

Most developers want the feeling of an outdoor town square, says Nancy McCann, vice president for marketing with Forest City Enterprises, one of the nation’s leading shopping mall developers and owner of Henrico County’s open-air Short Pump Town Center. “They provide greater visibility” for a different tenant mix that includes more restaurants, cafes and entertainment spaces, she says. The combination creates “a sense of community, a different experience, almost a town square.”

Nationally, developers still are building enclosed malls but at a substantially slower pace while construction of open malls is increasing, says Patrice Duker, media director for the International Council of Shopping Centers.
Projects like Willow Lawn are re-energizing many older shopping centers. “This gives them the opportunity to shift their tenant mix to better serve a changing community,” Duker says, “and it gives the place a different atmosphere. They become more local, more like an old downtown.”

At Willow Lawn, which Federal enclosed shortly after buying it in the early 1980s, renovation includes removal of a strip of shops and construction of new facades on the busy Broad Street side to enhance visibility and access. The center will maintain its size — about 500,000 square feet.

Work on the project began this summer; a grand opening is scheduled for next spring. The reconfigured mall will retain most of its current tenants, including the Barksdale Theatre, Old Navy and Tower Records, while adding new national retailers and restaurants. “We want daytime and nighttime populations here,” says Wendy Seher, Federal’s director of anchor leasing.

Older centers such as Willow Lawn have struggled to retain market share with the arrival of competition in more distant suburbs. But its close-in location on West Broad Street and area demographics — the average household income of nearby residents was $55,140 a year in 2004 — bode well for its future. “The demographics around us have made this a pretty affluent urban area” with a large, varied population, says Theresa Stenger, Willow Lawn’s marketing director.

While trendy transformations help prolong the life of older shopping centers, they strike Charlottesville’s Bob Stroh as ironic since many malls opened as outdoor venues in the first place. Stroh is co-chair of Charlottesville’s Downtown Business Association, which oversees that city’s outdoor Downtown Mall. “We can show you some real bricks and real old buildings here, and a real cannon,” says Stroh of the mall that opened in 1975 when suburban Fashion Square Mall sucked much of the life out of downtown.

Today, Stroh declares the Downtown Mall a hard-earned success with a hotel at one end and the new outdoor Charlottesville Pavilion at the other, a covered entertainment venue. Other entertainment options include an ice-skating rink and theaters. The best measure of the mall’s success, says Stroh, is in the expanding residential development. “It was a battle to get this working but now we can show you a great, authentic downtown experience.”

Federal has other mall redevelopment projects under way, mostly in Northern Virginia. At Mount Vernon Plaza in Fairfax, the company is investing $30 million to unify two older centers along the booming U.S. 1 corridor to create an open, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use mall. The company, with partners, also has redevelopment projects in Shirlington Village and Arlington that will combine retail and offices, as well as theaters and libraries.

Another growing trend in shopping mall development is the addition of apartments and condominiums in and around shopping centers. Willow Lawn’s renovation doesn’t include residential units, because it’s located near many neighborhoods offering a variety of housing. Nationally, the trend is “growing hugely,” says ICSC’s Duker. With rising energy costs, shifts in lifestyle with more people wanting to live near where they work and shop and limitations on land availability, residential units are expected to become more of a fixture near both old and new malls.