Exciting mall news
We start with some sad news. The man who built Polaris, Robert C. Echele, has died.
The former Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. real estate developer who planned the Polaris Centers of Commerce 20 years ago has died.
Robert C. Echele died Monday at his residence in Palm Beach, Fla., after a battle with cancer. He was 65.
In a more cheerful vein, Columbus Monthly has a good article about, Yaromir Steiner, one of the co-developers of my favorite local mall, Easton Town Center:
Stores at the town center earn about $550 per square foot, far above the national average for shopping centers, says Adam Flatto, a Georgetown general partner. The town center also attracts about 20 million visits a year and boasts Ohio’s top-grossing movie theater and several of Central Ohio’s most popular restaurants. “On every measure, it’s been tremendous,” Flatto says.
It also has spawned imitators. Flatto recalls a 1997 conference hosted by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). “When you walked around, ours was almost literally the only open-air project under development,” Flatto says. “Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a proposed development that’s an enclosed mall. Easton was really the catalyst.”
I didn’t realize that Easton was the Fallingwater of malls.
And finally, Indianola Plaza is going to be renovated, and not a moment too soon. Personally, I think a shopping center is dead once they get a thrift store as a tenant. Does that make me a bad person?
