Mall gets a $15M upgrade

Kerry Feltner//November 1, 2013//

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To offer a more upscale shopping experience, Wilmorite Properties Inc.’s the Mall at Greece Ridge is slated to complete its first major facelift in more than 40 years, a nearly $15 million project, in early 2014.

Marrying old and new, the mall will offer customers access to a renovated 32,000 square feet of space featuring five new restaurants and two new storefronts. More than 90,000 square feet of the old Bon-Ton Stores Inc. location was demolished to add parking and in-creased options for vendors looking to expand their presence on Ridge Road.

Despite the 75 percent reduction in total building area, the sales productivity of the new tenants is expected to be almost four times higher than what Bon-Ton had, with a goal of growth totaling approximately $12 million in sales.

The renovation added approximately 100 construction jobs and is expected to add 210 to 230 full- and part-time jobs with the new restaurants and retailers.

Benucci’s Italian Restaurant, a dba of Zoe’s Market Inc.; Bar Louie America Inc.; Red Robin International Inc.; Hoopla Frozen Yogurt LLC; and Moe’s Southwest Grill, the brand of Moe’s Inc., are the five new restaurants leased. Chico’s Brand Investments Inc. and the Loft Inc. are the two additional retail stores.

Bar Louie, Chico’s and the Loft are currently open. With all seven new restaurants and retailers, Greece Ridge will have 140 total stores.

Apart from the 1994 project that connected Greece Towne Mall and Long Ridge Mall to create the current mall, the property has not been upgraded on a major scale. The Greece Towne section dates to 1967, and the Long Ridge section opened in 1971.

Bergmann Associates Inc. began designing the remodel in 2012, although Wilmorite had plans for the Bon-Ton space beginning in 2010. Bon-Ton closed in February 2012. The mall generally sees roughly 10 percent turnover of stores in one year.

In 2010, officials at Wilmorite realized the Bon-Ton space was not going to be viable after seeing closures of the store in both Buffalo and Syracuse. While they considered other department stores, most, such as Macy’s Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp., were already at the mall.

"We wanted to be proactive about that rather than reactive, so we started a plan as to what our options would be to replace the Bon-Ton at Greece, and there’s not a lot of options for obviously another department store," said Dennis Wilmot, senior vice president of retail leasing and development for Wilmorite Management Group LLC.

The Bon-Ton "was right on Ridge Road, and we thought it presented a tremendous opportunity to create a street of shops that offered some restaurant options but also a platform for some retailers," he said.

The upgrade
The $15 million upgrade was divided between parking and concourse work. The parking lot’s new features include street lamps, a roundabout and crosswalks. The internal concourse includes street lamps, creating the streetscape theme; an entrance with updated colors, glass windows and stonework; a concrete fountain; flooring; leather furniture and carpets for seating areas; lighting vents; restrooms, including a family restroom; a 1,392-square-foot play area; and 25 murals.

"You can’t have everything that you want, and you need to balance the expense of what you think is necessary to execute the plan with the practicality of it’s not an open checkbook," Wilmot said. "That’s as much an art as a science, and that’s the key to success."

Walking into the new entrance, the idea was to create a streetscape. Black and red accents, park benches and storefront kiosks, including Sugar Mountain Bake Shoppe, line the entryway, with different awnings over them and even windows above, creating an illusion of a second story.

"I think that it still fits with our demographic, it’s what they were looking for and it’s just exciting to have that new, fresh look out there instead of Bon-Ton," said Melanie Fazio, marketing director for the Mall at Greece Ridge. "It’s really eye-grabbing, especially from Ridge Road, which is the main throughway to get here. So that’s the whole point, so to see it from Ridge is really impactful."

One important detail of the renovation was to give stores their own presence at the mall by allowing them to be staggered along the entrance.

Wilmorite’s overall goal for that part of the mall "wasn’t adding square footage to the building. It was really more trying to get a look and a feel for what they wanted in terms of a tenant mix," said Andrew Hart, regional business segment manager at Bergmann Associates and project manager of the renovation.

"We really didn’t want to keep the whole Bon-Ton shape. It just didn’t work for what we were trying to accomplish, so we pushed everything back quite a bit."

The evolution of mall layouts has been ongoing since 2000, Wilmot said. Previously large department stores would anchor the hallways with smaller shops between those stores. Now department stores are replaced, and in their large spaces, multiple stores and restaurants line the wings of malls.

The renovation allowed the team at Bergmann Associates to try new aspects of design that it had not tried before in a mall project.

"We’ve never done murals before; we’ve never done those types of kiosks before, either," Hart said. "Typically, the kiosks are out in the middle of the hallway and kind of clog up the middle hallway. Now we’ve pushed them off to the side."

Wilmorite gave the firm room to be creative in the process.

"They basically pointed at Eastview and said, ‘OK, we’ve done this in the past. We want to provide something cool for the town of Greece and something great for this mall.’ So we were able to work with it, and they kind of gave us carte blanche to do the creative stuff," Hart said.

Redesigning the facility
When deciding how to go about the redesign, several factors came into play. Wilmorite used customer surveys, examined past successes such as the development of Eastview Mall, considered what retailers would want in a location and generally thought it was time for the town of Greece to have more of an upscale place to shop.

"It was fun to see it go from that to where it is, because what a difference," said Jim Hofford, general manager of the Mall at Greece Ridge. "It was just a big white box. To see more people walk down to that area, it’s just really refreshing."

When considering which retailers to bring in, Wilmorite assesses a host of factors, including demographics, comparable retailer sales, overall mall performance and, in this renovation, what retailers or restaurants customers would want to see. The mall surveys revealed a desire for more women’s clothing stores, which led to Chico’s and the Loft.

Restaurants such as Benucci’s are familiar to Rochester. That familiarity gives Wilmorite a good idea of how residents would respond to their addition, based on the success of the restaurant’s Pittsford location.

"It’s on a case-by-case basis," Wilmot said. "If we think the retailer or restaurant can succeed, then we’re going to pursue that deal. But if we have concern as to whether or not they’ll be able to execute their plan, then … we would hesitate moving forward. There’s a mutual expectation that they will meet or exceed (sales) goals."

The murals seen from the entranceway in the new wing of the mall are a tribute to New York with photos from New York City to Niagara Falls covering large bulkheads. Local photographer Sheridan Vincent took six of the photos for the bulkheads.

The history of Greece also was taken into account with the children’s play area. The Braddock Point Lighthouse toy structure is one local detail.

The murals and their representations of the state have not been lost on shoppers.

"The best part is I was walking the mall when it was open and people were just looking up at those murals, just stopping what they were doing and just looking straight up," Hart said. "And that’s exactly what we wanted to do is get some buzz in that section of the mall, get people to come down here and see it and be part of it."

With the new development and vitality in the entry section, Wilmorite hopes other retailers will want to lease in the mall and at the vacant CircuitCity.com Inc. building near the new renovation.

"What happens is when you create a new vitality and energy in a wing of the mall, you get more people down there, which makes it a more attractive spot for competition from retailers to locate there-whereas before, because Bon-Ton was doing so little business, you got very little foot traffic down in that area," Wilmot said. "If no one is shopping down there, the retailer really has no interest to go there. That’s going to change now that we have these new stores."

Bergmann Associates hopes the design spurs other tenants to improve their sections of the mall.

"A lot of the mall, it’s older and it’s not nearly as attractive as the new part that we just did. So my hope is we can continue this beautification effort to other sections of the mall and make it a much more attractive place to shop," Hart said.

Of course, the ultimate success of the new retailers and restaurants is not guaranteed.

"The challenge is we have a significant investment in the success of this project, so there’s always risk involved. And if the project is unsuccessful, then there’s ramifications long-term," Wilmot said.