and retail properties, it detected a new current in the air at Avalon. “Today’s office environment is going to change,” said McKeehan. “The office occupier doesn’t want to be in an amenity desert. He or she wants to be attached to food, service, and high quality retail. Important is enhancing the restaurant lineup, increasing outdoor dining space, and incorporating the office component as close to the retail as possible.” Hines’s CityCenterDC in downtown Washington is a 2.5 million-sq.-ft. mixeduse development. In 2019 it added The Conrad Washington, DC, hotel with 30,680 sq. ft. of street retail occupied by Tiffany and Co. and restaurants. The 92-acre Fenton project will open in 2022 comprised of 2.5 million sq. ft. of retail, office, restaurant, hotel, and multifamily residential. Its initial phase will include 348,000 sq. ft. of specialty and experiential retail. All these ingredients are essential to energize what McKeehan believes will be the
“We’re going to be at the forefront of what happens next and as for residential, it’s a home run.” – Stephen Congel, Pyramid
primary goal of mixed-use properties in the 21st Century: activation. “Retail tenants today are pushing us to activate, to have unique mixes of tenants and programming,” McKeehan said. ”Malls aren’t dead. There are going to be viable enclosed shopping centers for the rest of my life. But malls all became the same. The ones that survive will have to separate themselves from all the redundancy in the market.”
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andemic pressures led mall REITs CBL and PREIT to file for Chapter 11 protection. Both restructured their debt and emerged from their filings quickly and — like every other owner of large, enclosed
shopping centers — they are radically altering the anchors and purposes of their malls. Nearly all are pursuing an objective that must be obtained in order to achieve prime “activation.” That objective is densification — filling empty anchors and unused parking lot space with apartments, offices, and medical and life sciences facilities that house day-long traffic inside the property. CBL made a bold move in that direction in November with the opening of Live! Casino Pittsburgh in 100,000 feet of space vacated by Bon-Ton at its Westmoreland Mall in Pennsylvania. Visitors can lay bets at the FanDuel sports book and watch up to 16 games on a 45-foot LED video screen.
A Challenged Mall Lives Anew in Quincy, Illinois By Kathleen Brill
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s America’s malls became severely handicapped by COVID-19 shutdowns last year and challenged by surging e-commerce activity, press accounts generally observed that malls in secondary and tertiary markets might not survive. That, however, is not generally true. Each market is unique, and malls in many rural, tertiary markets have served for decades as primary shopping, gathering, and social centers for people living in market radii extending out 75 to 100 miles. In Quincy, Illinois, about 100 miles west of Springfield and north of St. Louis, the Quincy Mall has served as one such center since it opened in 1958. The over 440,000-sq.-ft. property’s J.C. Penney, Sears, and Bergner’s stores and wide variety of shops gave people in the region access to goods and services they used to trek to St. Louis and Springfield to find. When Cullinan Properties bought Quincy Mall in 2006, both traffic and tenant occupancy rates were high. Then in 2015, J.C. Penney closed its store. Three years later, Sears closed as well, and the Bergner’s location was closed and liquidated when its parent company Bon-Ton went out of business. Quincy Mall may have appeared down for the count. Our medical development team at Cullinan knew that Quincy Medical Group (QMG), a leading provider of medical services in town starting in the 1930s, was looking to expand its operations. It approached QMG about the available two-story Bergner’s building at the site for a state-of-the-art Cancer Institute and Surgery Center. Our medical team worked with them to obtain the necessary Certificates of Need from the state and completed construction throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, opening the first floor Cancer Institute last summer and with completion of the Surgery Center in January of 2021. The Surgery Center provides patients a low-cost, high-quality option for outpatient surgery and is one of the first centers in the region to CHAINSTOREAGE.COM MARCH/APRIL 2021
offer cardiac catheterization in an outpatient setting. Its arrival provides an essential service to people in the region, allowing them to seek cost-effective acute medical care without having to travel. The location was very attractive to QMG. Kathleen Brill Being located at a center with restaurants, retail shopping and convenient services is a big plus for its employees, patients and patients’ families. It keeps them fulfilled and keeps them close-by — of utmost importance to a medical facility. Our retail tenants — and especially the restaurants — are overjoyed to have the Cancer Institute and Surgery Center as their anchor. This new traffic stream is appealing to prospective tenants. Medical practices pick their locations carefully and stay for a long, long time. In fact, QMG has filed an application with the state to expand their presence at Quincy Town Center with a 25-bed small format hospital. We are also negotiating with a hotel group and national and local users as we expect more great concepts as we recreate the Quincy Town Center in the coming years. Our occupancy rate was just over 60% when our anchors closed due to their nationwide issues; we expect Quincy Town Center to be over 90% occupied within the next 12 months. More importantly, the rebranding of Quincy Mall is bringing a healthier attitude to the residents of Quincy, Illinois. The launch of the new brand, Quincy Town Center, even drew a crowd of local residents. This was a place where these people went Christmas shopping every year, met the Easter Bunny, where they bought their prom dresses, had their first dates. To them, Quincy Mall was always primary, never tertiary. Kathleen Brill is vice president and director of leasing at Cullinan Properties, based in Peoria, Ill 29