‘Guru’ of Shopping Centers Seen as Marina Mall Savior
When the Marina Pacifica Mall was born, designers envisioned a village of unique boutiques and classy restaurants perched on a lazy waterfront where gulls would soar and boats would chug by.
Fourteen years later, Marina Pacifica stands as a monument--to the wrong way to build a mall.
The staircases are too hard to find, you can’t get from one end of the place to the other without walking out to the parking lot, the corridors are a human maze, the marquee reveals more gaps than tenants and the display windows are a showcase for Christmas decorations nobody bothered to haul away.
“Ever been to an abandoned amusement park?” said sales clerk Mitch Graeme of Trader Joe’s, one of the few stores that thrives amid a graveyard of retail casualties. “Well, it feels a lot like that. Sort of brings you down.”
But it appears that after 14 years of steady decline, bankruptcy and, ultimately, foreclosure, the mall may be rescued by a corporation known in the field as “the guru of shopping centers.”
Los Angeles-based Triple Five Joshi Development Company, a partner of the Triple Five conglomerate that built one of the world’s biggest shopping malls in Edmonton, Canada, is buying the mall, company officials said.
The deal is expected to close in August, with partial demolition to begin within six months. The attempt to resuscitate what is known in the trade as one of the worst shopping malls ever built, developer Rohit Joshi said, is expected to cost $40 million to $50 million.
About half of the money will be used to buy the mall, along with the right to rebuild it or tear it down. The land itself will be leased.
“I’ve seen it grow to its zenith, and I’ve seen it fall to its knees,” Joshi said of the mall at Pacific Coast Highway and Second Street. “The retailers are there. It’s just that nobody’s gone all the way to finish it properly. We’re excited about it.”
Joshi’s company is one of 350 that make up the Triple Five giant run by four Canadian brothers named Ghermizian. Their most famous achievement is the 5.2-million-square-foot, climate-controlled monster of malls in Edmonton, which has 19 department stores, 15,000 employees and a theme park in the middle.
Joshi’s company, which handles shopping center projects in California for Triple Five, has less grand plans in mind for the mall. Although plans are not finalized, the ideas under consideration include taking better advantage of the water setting for upscale shops or a more traditional shopping center with upscale department stores and specialized shops for men, women and children, Joshi said.
Some of the successful businesses--most of them at opposite ends of the mall--will probably be remodeled. The center, marred by dank, subterranean corridors and confusing stairways, will probably be razed, he said.
If all goes well, construction could begin in early 1991 and be complete within a year, Joshi said.
“There certainly is a lack of good retail available in the Long Beach area,” said Jack Stewart, who is working with Joshi on the project design. “There is a lot of buying power, and it either goes way south (to Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza) or to Westminster or Lakewood.”
The steady decline of the Marina Pacifica has been a thorn in Long Beach’s fiscal side. The city’s sales tax income, a mainstay in the budget, trails other communities in the county by about $11 million a year, providing less money to support basic city services.
But the mall’s decline became somewhat of a local mystery, as well. The center seemed to have everything going for it when it was built by Ernest W. Hahn, the shopping center legend who helped pioneer the mall concept in California. It is in the town’s wealthy east end, with Pacific Coast Highway at its front, the ocean at its back and a market of eager residents starved for a place to shop.
What went wrong?
“Where do I begin?” said Mike Fleishman, a vice president at Bank of America in San Francisco. The bank foreclosed on the mall last spring and is negotiating the sale with Triple Five.
“It turns its back on the water,” he said. “Half of the building is submerged below the car level. All you can see is the back of one-quarter of the strip of shops, and you can only get into it from a very few access points. It’s never been a very good system of telling shoppers what is in it, where that is or how to get there.”
The mall, which was built on an old oil tank farm and several capped wells, was sold in the late 1970s to a Canadian group that added a theater complex. The theaters and several restaurants continue to thrive, but the rest slowly died.
Bankruptcy was declared in 1987. A few survivors lease month to month, but they are still dropping. Most recently, a bookstore and cookie stand went under.
Joshi said he expects to start meeting with city officials within the next 30 days to discuss the design sketches, but City Hall already appears to be laying out the red carpet.
“We’re going to be very cooperative, with a high-quality shopping center,” Planning Director Robert Paternoster said.
“What the Marina Pacifica needs is a top-quality operator. We want a hard-nosed, experienced shopping center operator and developer to bring it alive.
“Most of the people in that part of town with disposable income don’t shop in Long Beach. We would like to capture that back again.”
