Santa Monica Place Mall readies for overhaul
DOWNTOWN — Officials are quietly unveiling their plan to raze the archaic Santa Monica Place Mall and make it an extension of the Promenade.
Santa Monica Place representatives in the past two weeks have been meeting individually with City Council members and top brass in City Hall to gauge their response to their multi-million dollar plans.
“Personally, I’m there to just listen,” said City Councilwoman Pam O’Connor, who met with mall officials last week. “A lot of people are going to care about this and it will require plenty of public input.”
Officials from Macerich Co., which owns the private mall, have met with at least five of the seven City Council members in recent weeks.
“It’s a private project and it’s their decision on how to daylight it to the community,” said Mayor Richard Bloom, adding the public will have plenty of time to debate the plan. “They want to do it right and are navigating very carefully.”
Officials visualize a pedestrian-oriented strip that would extend from Wilshire Boulevard all the way to Main Street. That could only happen if Santa Monica Place, which was built before the current Promenade, is torn down and rebuilt as an outdoor mall. Officials consider Santa Monica Place an obstacle, preventing the flow of pedestrian traffic to the Civic Center and the pier.
Although mall officials won’t elaborate on their plans publicly, Bloom said the ideas floated past him last month are impressive.
“It involves a boat load of money,” he said. “Their plan is breathtaking in its scope.”
The conceptual plans would involve completely rebuilding the shopping center, and creating an open mall setting, extending the Third Street Promenade to Colorado Avenue.
The rebuilt mall — estimated in the past to cost more than $150 million — would have retail and restaurants on surrounding streets of where the current shopping center sits. A park-like setting could be built at Second Street and Colorado Avenue.
Bloom said the new mall would have comparable square footage to what’s currently there and close to the same number of stores. Santa Monica Place Mall sits on 10 acres and has 560,000 square feet of retail.
Randy Brant, the senior vice president of Macerich, declined to comment on the specific plans, or the company’s time frame on when they would unveil the plans.
“We are not ready to go public,” he said. “But I’m very excited about our plans.”
Macerich will have to enter into a development agreement with City Hall because the parking structure and the land surrounding the mall is publicly owned. Bloom said public parking would be provided in the new development three stories underground, and designed much like the garage at the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles.
The new mall is directly related to City Hall’s ambitious plans to redevelop the Civic Center area. Officials plan to completely rebuild the area around City Hall on Main Street.
“I think whatever happens at Santa Monica Place is very meaningful for the community,” Bloom said. “There are some extraordinary opportunities at hand.”
City Hall recently released a draft environmental impact report on the Civic Center plan, as well Santa Monica Place. It includes between 150 and 450 housing units and 85,000 square feet of office space. The Civic Center is visualized as a town square, with botanical and sculpture gardens, open space and bicycle paths, as well as a childhood development facility and a revamped City Hall.
Officials from Macerich met with city officials more than two years ago to discuss similar ideas. When economic realities squashed their grandiose plans, mall officials put the brakes on the concept.
But as the mall’s popularity continues to dwindle with consumers, Macerich has realized its economic reality means a reinvestment in its property, which was last renovated in 1990.
Last year, shops and restaurants along the Promenade grossed over $2.2 billion in sales, while Santa Monica Place raked in $1.1 billion, according to tax figures from the city.
“Santa Monica Place is currently not particularly successful,” Bloom said. “(A redevelopment) has meaningful economic impacts and we have a lot of motivation to improve that property.”
Many say the mall was a bad urban planning decision — it blocks off the ocean, the pier and serves as a barrier at the end of a three-block-long open-aired Promenade. Malls and people’s tastes have changed dramatically since Santa Monica Place was built in 1980. Now people either want a Main Street-type experience, or a massive shopping center like the Beverly Center.
“A good planning decision? No. But it is reflective of the time,” O’Connor said. “People’s expectations about a mall cannot be met on that footprint.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 7, 2004. Read the original PDF.