$1-Billion Complex in Canada : Gigantic Mall Created Its Own Little World

From time immemorial, man has raised monuments--Greeks the Parthenon, Egyptians the pyramids. Here, it is the West Edmonton Mall.

The mall, a glass-domed monument to consumerism, is said to be the largest shopping center on earth. Its developers call it the eighth wonder of the world.

It is a world apart, a world with its own experiences, free of the mundane struggles with weather and boredom. Such a world, urbanologist William Severini Kowinski says in his book “The Malling of America,” has “the ability to make magic.” He says, “You’ve got yourself a house of fantasy.”

The West Edmonton Mall may or may not be a house of fantasy, but it is undoubtedly fantastic and it has set a collection of records as the biggest if not always the best.

At first sight, there is nothing to mark this prairie city of 600,000 people as anything but what it used to be: a former boom town with half-filled office towers and empty shopping plazas that mock the promise of abundant oil.

But 20 minutes by car from downtown stands a different image of Edmonton--5.5 million square feet of neon and marble, of cockatoos and fast food, of miniature golf and Cartier diamonds. And more.

More Subs Than Navy

Under the roofed-over facility, which is about twice as large as the next biggest shopping center, the 2.65-million-square-foot Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, is a full-fledged amusement park complete with Ferris wheels, a hockey rink used for practice by the Edmonton Oilers (champions of the National Hockey League), a life-size replica of a Spanish galleon, rare birds, a huge aquarium, and four 28-passenger submarines built at a cost of $800,000 each. The developers like to point out that the Canadian navy has only two submarines.

There are 836 retail stores (ordinary malls may have 200), selling everything from T-shirts to designer clothing to luxury automobiles. In fact, North America’s largest indoor auto dealership is under the glass here. It sells about 160 cars a month. At one time, the mall also had the largest display of oranges in the world--3,000 boxes.

Rubin Stahl, 52, who developed the mall and is senior executive vice president of the Triple Five Corp., which owns it, said: “We’ve tried to create a life style. What we’ve ended up with is so unique that it is ahead of itself. It’s an entire world to itself.”

There is more to come. In the mall’s Phase III, the section that Stahl opened part of earlier this month with a party for 100,000 of his closest friends, he has under construction a water park unlike any other. It is an artificial lake the size of 11 football fields, and it will have a 120-foot waterfall and machines to provide waves for surfing and water skiing.

Giant Squid Attacks

The submarines will move through a 30-feet-deep channel to be attacked by giant squid and other artificial dangers. In other sections are live sharks and a dolphin show.

And more:

- “The biggest indoor roller coaster in the world,” according to Stahl, 142 feet high and complete with a triple loop.

- A 360-room hotel with “theme floors.” Some rooms will be decorated to recall Hollywood’s glory days. In one, antique pickup trucks will be equipped with beds.

But for the moment, and on any given day, particularly on weekends, a shopper is confronted with dozens of bands, singers, tumblers and other varieties of entertainment.

And there is more than just goods to buy and entertainers to watch. There is food--fast food and fancy food, lemonade and cappuccino. One food fair, as it is called, has 44 separate ethnic food stands, and not far away is an expensive French restaurant where waiters serve sophisticated dishes to diners scattered around a sunken courtyard with fountains and ferns.

Soon to be opened is Bourbon Street, a stylized version of New Orleans’ French Quarter. There dozens of restaurants and bars will provide even more food and drink.

“This is to take the boredom out of eating,” Stahl said in the course of a fast-paced tour of the section.

Bourbon Street is typical of the almost mythical nature of the mall’s attempts to recreate the outside world. The store fronts constitute a cleaned-up and overly neat version of the French Quarter, right down to mannequins dressed to resemble prostitutes.

The West Edmonton Mall is the creation of the Ghermezian family, Iranians who came to Edmonton by way of Montreal. The four Ghermezian brothers and their 85-year-old father are nearly as private, even reclusive, as the mall is gaudy and public.

But while they operate behind a shroud of personal mystery, the Ghermezians and their Triple Five Corp. (named for the number of original investors in their development firm) are among the major economic movers and shakers in Western Canada.

Before they built West Edmonton Mall, the family acquired hundreds of acres of Edmonton land and built other shopping centers, office buildings and apartment houses. They also acquired a reputation for perseverance and hard-nosed business tactics that have stunned even the fast-moving oilmen of Alberta. According to Stahl, he was brought into the West Edmonton Mall project on the strength of his having previously developed 19 shopping centers in Canada and the United States.

In the beginning, this was to be another routine venture, if somewhat larger at a projected 1.2 million square feet. But the developers decided to go beyond the traditional retail format. The result was Fantasyland, as the mall’s amusement park is called, the water park, the birds, the tigers, the sharks, the fountains and all the other attractions.

Stahl has given varying accounts of how the concept of amusement at the mall was born. Stahl told one Times reporter that he and the Ghermezians quickly realized that the initial concept was boring, the worst of all ailments for a shopping center. Later, he told another reporter that the developers and a consultant, inspired by South Coast Plaza’s popular carrousel, turned to the idea when a major department store pulled out of a lease, leaving them to quickly fill up space.

The key question, however, is whether the concept works. Do people come, and do they buy? Stahl says yes. “We provide wall-to-wall people,” he said, “It is a license to print money.”

Financial details are hard to come by, but there is no doubt that people come to the mall, and in impressive numbers. There is parking for 30,000 cars and finding a place for one’s vehicle on a Saturday is difficult. Stahl says that on an average day more than 250,000 people walk the marbled floors of the mall, even more on weekends, and they spend more than $1 billion (Canadian) a year.

This amounts to more than 25% of all retail sales for the Edmonton metropolitan area, and represents direct employment for 15,000 people and indirect work for 20,000 more, significant numbers in a city with an unemployment rate of more than 12% and in a province that is still staggering from a recession caused by the collapse of the oil and construction boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Yet, there are critics and skeptics. Alex MacDonald, chief of staff for Edmonton Mayor Laurence Decore, said in an interview: “There is no doubt that the mall has seriously hurt downtown. It contains nearly one-third of Edmonton’s retail space and a tremendous number of stores were drawn from other areas.”

There is also concern about whether the $1-billion mall is financially sound but Stahl says that both the mall’s management and the overwhelming majority of stores have made money since the first phase opened in October, 1981.

Stahl, who is partial to gold watches, expensive German cars and winter homes in Florida, bristles at the suggestion that Edmonton is too small to support the mall. “Our studies show,” he says, “that the mall is a tremendous tourist draw.”

He said it has brought 5 million people to the city since it opened, and that there has been a 70% increase in the number of tourists.

Jack Chesney, general manager of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, said, “Early indications show that 50% of the dollars spent at the West Edmonton Mall are import (tourist) dollars.”

“It has generated an extremely high profile for the city,” Chesney said. “People know the mall and Wayne Gretsky (the Oilers’ star hockey player).”

The strength of the mall’s attraction is reflected in the way parking lots are packed. A huge section is devoted to campers and recreational vehicles, and it is jammed with thousands of vehicles showing license plates from all over Canada and states as far away as Texas and New Mexico.

If old-line downtown merchants are bitter about lost business, the competition from the mall seems to have galvanized them into action. Department stores have remodeled. A stagnant downtown center has been redone as a flashy indoor mall, with busy specialty shops reportedly doing record business.

There is a multimillion-dollar development plan for the city center, which includes another mammoth mall built by the Ghermezians in conjunction with one of Canada’s largest department stores.

Even the critics temper their remarks with expressions of awe. “I don’t know any of my friends who shop out there,” MacDonald said, “but I can’t deny that what you have is a unique experience.”