A long-vacant, 9-acre site at the junction of West Avenue, Route 7 and Interstate 95 in Norwalk could be home to a 700,000-square-foot mall built over 30 months at a cost of $285 million.
The developer is Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc., with offices in New York City, which bought the land last year for $34 million and has been both selling its idea and harvesting criticism ”” notably traffic concerns ”” as it prepares to formally introduce the idea to the city of Norwalk in the next two months.
GGP owns and operates 120 properties between Maine and Hawaii, including its nearest malls, Brass Mill Center in Waterbury and The Shoppes at Buckland Hills in Manchester. It plans also to own and operate the mall in Norwalk.
The project has been introduced through a series of informational meetings, the most recent Sept. 24 at Stepping Stones Museum in Norwalk, which would be neighbor to the mall. Douglas Adams, General Growth”™s senior director who lives in Fairfield, and Lawrence Cafero, a 22-year state legislator representing Norwalk and New Canaan and the land attorney for GGP via his position as an attorney for Hartford-based Brown Rudnick, briefed 50 citizens and businesspeople on the plan. In turn, each said, “We are very excited about this project.”
“We believe adding more retail will create a better dynamic for the region overall and help retail in general,” Adams said beforehand. “We bring something with a department store anchor that is different than Main Street. The idea is not to compete with Main Street, but to provide a complement to the retail there.”
Cafero said the existing road infrastructure, which has seen improvements dating to the 1980s, can handle the mall”™s traffic. “There is a lot of excitement about this project,” Cafero said. “The concerns that we are seeing are typical of a development like this: questions of traffic and design. We will properly address those concerns. People want to be sure.”
Cafero said mall restaurants would be national in scale so as not to compete with local fare and cited The Cheesecake Factory as an example of the type of eatery envisioned.
A preliminary traffic study has been conducted but its data have not been released. Adams and Cafero said General Growth remained in the fact-finding phase, with Cafero adding, “We are nearing the end of the fact-gathering stage.” GGP expects to make a formal presentation to the city within 60 days.
Stepping Stones Museum board member Jeffrey Kaplan, who as director of Norwalk-based Seligson Properties is helping develop the 774-unit Waypointe rental units nearby, introduced Adams and Cafero. Waypointe and other housing, according to Cafero, are part of what Cafero described as a 1.8-mile mixed-use district with the proposed mall at its center. Such a district would also contain the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum and grounds and the city”™s Oyster Shell Park.
Citing Stepping Stones and Lockwood-Mathews, Adams said, “Museums are huge benefits. We developed a center in Baltimore at the Baltimore Harbor near the National Aquarium. There is a tremendous synergy.”
Cafero said the mall would incorporate an educational relationship with high schools and with Norwalk Community College, beginning with training for some of the 5,543 predicted construction jobs to build the mall.
Adams said the only mall within GGP”™s 10-mile catchment radius is in Stamford and is of a different design.
The new mall, still unnamed, would be open by design and, as planned, would unite northern and southern neighborhoods of Norwalk that are now separated. Three-thousand pay parking slots are planned and would be implemented, Adams said, so as not to disrupt the city”™s pay parking system.
Adams said the city”™s tax take on the vacant land is $150,000, with the potential to reach $4.7 million from the same acreage if the mall is built.
Cafero ran down a list of plans for the site that have never materialized. Many hinged on offices. “No one is building offices now,” he said. “And offices are not public buildings. This will be a public space.” Envisioned hours are 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., with truck deliveries from 4 to 10 a.m.
Other metrics put forth by General Growth include an estimated 2,485 full-time jobs when the mall is open paying an average $36,000 annually. (An anchor store manager makes six figures, Adams said.)
Mall design has evolved over the years, with the open-design mall gradually replacing what Adams called a “fortress mall,” without windows and with tightly controlled entrances/exits. Malls like the new Ridge Hill in Yonkers, N.Y., a Forest City Ratner Cos. development, have embraced the more-open approach.
“The industry is changing,” Adams said. “We change because our customers change.”
This story has been updated to correct the projected cost to build the mall to $285 million. The previously reported figure, $941 million, is the projected economic impact of the project, including construction costs, construction wages and taxes. This story has also been corrected to reflect that the headquarters of General Growth Properties is in Chicago, and that the nearest malls GGP operates are Brass Mill Center in Waterbury and The Shoppes at Buckland Hills in Manchester.
GGP isn’t New York-based. They are headquartered in Chicago.
Another edit. I believe Brass Mill Mall is in Waterbury and Buckland is in Manchester. Waterbury is the Brass City or some such moniker.