Ohioan Sees Way to Ensure Anchor Stores for Malls : DeBartolo ‘Wants a Retailer,’ Ally Says
Shortly after May Department Stores acquired the parent of the J. W. Robinson’s chain last month, Ohio real estate magnate Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. started to explore the idea of buying a major retailer.
DeBartolo, who is now involved in making a bid for Carter Hawley Hale Stores, wanted to buy a retailer to make sure that there would be stores to anchor his future shopping malls, a close business associate said.
“Eddie wants to buy a retailer,” says Paul A. Bilzerian, a Tampa real estate developer who joined forces with DeBartolo in a failed bid for Allied Stores earlier this month. “He wants to operate the Broadway and Weinstock’s and Emporium Capwell (three Carter Hawley retail chains) and expand them to his other malls.”
DeBartolo, 77, the nation’s largest shopping mall developer, became concerned as some of his best retail tenants were being acquired by companies with real estate interests, Bilzerian explained. May Department Stores routinely develops its own real estate. Allied, one of DeBartolo’s most significant tenants, was acquired for $3.56 billion by Campeau Corp., a Canadian real estate developer.
Bilzerian, who is not involved in the Carter Hawley Hale takeover effort, said he and DeBartolo “held the first of many serious talks about buying a retailer after May acquired Associated Dry Goods (the parent of Robinson’s).”
Visibility in California
A Carter Hawley acquisition would give DeBartolo an important foothold in California, a market that has long interested him. His current properties in the state are the Mission Viejo Mall in Orange County and a mall under construction in Riverside.
DeBartolo launched a $1.77-billion bid for Carter Hawley with Leslie H. Wexner, the ambitious retailer who failed in an earlier attempt to take over Carter Hawley Hale two years ago. Wexner, chairman of the Limited, a fast-growing Columbus, Ohio-based retailing firm, is reportedly interested in Carter Hawley’s specialty chains, including Neiman-Marcus, Contempo Casuals and Bergdorf Goodman.
Associates of both men say Wexner probably suggested the deal to DeBartolo, who has known Wexner since negotiating leases for the Limited stores in DeBartolo malls nearly two decades ago. Though the two are not personal friends, “they have a warm business association and respect each other,” Bilzerian says.
DeBartolo owns 60 shopping malls situated mostly in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states in the Southeast. His other holdings include six hotels, nine office buildings, the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League and horse- racing tracks in Chicago, Cleveland and Bossier City, La. His son, Edward Jr., owns the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League.
DeBartolo grew up in Smoky Hollow, a lower-income neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio, that was home to many of the city’s steelworkers. He worked in his stepfather’s street-paving business until he left home to attend Notre Dame University, where he earned an engineering degree. Returning to Youngstown after graduation, he parlayed the family paving business into the nation’s largest developer of shopping malls.
Associates say DeBartolo is unpretentious despite his great wealth. He drives his own car, and his only residence is a ranch-style home in solidly middle-class Boardman Township, a Youngstown suburb. He has no hobbies and rarely attends games involving his sports teams, associates said.
His work habits are legendary. He arrives at his office each day at 5:45 a.m. and works until 7 p.m. When a snowstorm caused a power blackout in Youngstown several years ago, DeBartolo distributed candles to employees so they could continue working, an associate said.
His presence is felt in Youngstown, a depressed steel town, despite his unassuming manner. Youngstown State University renamed its college of arts and sciences for him in 1984, after an alumni dinner in his honor raised more than $300,000 for the school. The person who made the speech at that dinner was his longtime friend, Thomas M. Macioce, the chairman of Allied Stores, who had welcomed DeBartolo’s help in an unsuccessful effort to fend off a takeover by the Campeau Corp., a Canadian real estate developer.
