Re-dos Help Rejuvenate
Fading Shopping Malls

by Elaine Schmidt

If you rebuild it, they will come.

Throughout the country, shopping centers are undergoing revitalization and reconstruction to cater to changing retail demands. The Midwest is no exception to this trend.

Malls being renovated include Wisconsin's Bayshore Mall in Glendale and Illinois' Fountain Square Mall in Waukegan.

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Making Retail Fun

"What we see and hear from our clients is the fact that a shopping mall today needs to be an exciting and fun experience," says Tim Van Dyn Hoven, vice president of Brookfield, Wis.-based Hunzinger Construction Co. "It's more than just shopping."

Hunzinger was the design/builder of the $300 million re-do of the Bayshore Mall in Glendale, a northern suburb of Milwaukee. Built in 1958 and reconstructed in the 1970s, the new Bayshore Town Center emerged from construction in time for the 2006 Christmas season as a retail/dining/entertainment destination.

The existence and evolution of shopping malls has been a ubiquitous part of American life since the post-World War II economic boom.

The 1950s saw the construction of strip malls in metropolitan areas across the country, built to serve rapidly growing suburbs. By the 1970s, open-air facilities fell by the wayside in favor of indoor malls that provided climate control and food courts that enticed shoppers to stay in the malls longer.

The indoor mall ruled the shopping world until the mid-1990s, when New Urbanist thinking led to open-air malls called "lifestyle centers" or "town centers." With these centers, developers strive to create the feel and function of a small-town Main Street.

Part of this latest trend in mall construction is the idea of a mall being a destination for more than just shopping.

"Our clients were very big on making this a destination," Van Dyn Hoven says.

"They want people to come and enjoy themselves."

Bayshore has large buildings, including a reworked incarnation of the existing mall and several parking structures that surround several open-air "town" streets and a "town square," complete with a fountain.

Issues included a tight, 47-acre site, 22-month schedule, proximity to a residential neighborhood and the fact that the mall had to remain open through construction.

Keeping the mall open was an enormous task. On the south end of the existing structure, half of the building had to be demolished while half of it remained operational. A corridor in the center of the old structure was the dividing line between what stayed and what went.

"We couldn't close the mall on those stores" because of existing leases, Van Dyn Hoven says. "That would have hurt them-put some of them out of business."

Crews turned that former corridor into a tunnel-like, interior walkway that protected shoppers and connected the south-end stores to the rest of the mall.

At night, after patrons and employees were gone from the mall, construction crews would remove the floor of the tunnel walkway and pour new foundations and perform utility work. All equipment had to be cleared from the space and the floor set back in place in time for the mall to open for business the following morning.

Although patrons were unaware of the overnight work, windows built into the tunnel walls allowed what Van Dyn Hoven called "sidewalk superintendents" to view construction progress from a safe location.

Accommodating Glendale Residents

A residential neighborhood immediately east of the Bayshore site presented additional concerns.

"We decided that in order to be a good neighbor to those people to the east of the mall, we would spend the additional money on foundation without driven piles," Van Dyn Hoven says.

Hunzinger went with a quiet, auger-cast system in which an auger drills down to the required depth. Concrete is then poured through the auger, the auger is removed and the concrete settles down into place.

Calling the project a chess game, Van Dyn Hoven says that utilities were one of the toughest moves.

"We literally built a small city and all the infrastructure that went with it," he says. This included roads, sewer and water, electric and gas service. The new systems had to be in place and functional before the systems serving the existing structure could be taken out of service and removed.

In addition to keeping parking areas open for mall patrons, foot traffic was also an issue.

"People would try and get by our fencing systems to walk through the construction and get to another part of the mall-it was an everyday occurrence," Van Dyn Hoven says. "We had a lot of security to protect the public from themselves."

Waukegan's Once and Future Retail Center

In Waukegan, the former Lakehurst Mall followed a different path to its current incarnation as the Fountain Square power center. Lakehurst, a 1.1-million-sq-ft mall, opened for business in 1971, but as it aged, competition drained business away from it.

The Gurnee Mills megamall, less than 10 mi away from Lakehurst, opened in 1991. More competition came from the Westfield Hawthorn mall in Vernon Hills, about 10 mi away from Lakehurst.

By 2004, Lakehurst was dying and the site was changed from a traditional shopping mall to a power center featuring big box retailers. The mall structures were demolished and a Wal-Mart opened on the site in 2006.

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