Mall Revamp Is Peachy but Not Too Keen
Designing an attractive, functional shopping mall is a tall order. Witness the gaudy peach, pink and salmon examples scattered throughout San Diego County.
Loading docks and hundreds of parking spaces represent a significant obstacle to good design. The challenge grows even more complex if, instead of starting from scratch, you begin with an obsolete 1960s mall that includes a bulky, dated department store.
The Jerde Partnership, best known locally for its design of Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego, more recently tried to make over the ailing Chula Vista Center. The $42-million job was aided by Chula Vista redevelopment officials and included a 143,000-square-foot addition. It was completed two years ago, but there are still plans for expansion.
In many ways, the architects have succeeded in improving the environment for retailers. Business at this 727,000-square-foot center at Broadway and H Street has increased, and architects and individual storefront designers have livened the retailing atmosphere within the project.
But the made-over mall has its shortcomings--mainly clunky facades around the outside of the project and lost opportunities to better blend in surrounding streets.
Homart Development Co., a Chicago-based firm specializing in building and renovating large shopping centers, purchased the financially withering Chula Vista Center in 1986 for $21 million, with the idea of transforming it into a viable regional mall.
At the time, the center consisted of JC Penney and Broadway department stores connected by a pedestrian promenade lined with smaller specialty shops, plus a distant Sears store, separated by parking lots and 5th Avenue.
With the help of the city, the developers closed a section of 5th and made it part of the mall. They extended the pedestrian promenade in an arc around the Broadway and added 600 feet east to Sears. Voila . Roughly a quarter-mile of shops strung out between the three larger stores.
In the process, a circular, second-level food court was added, and the old portions of the mall were given a face lift to match the changes.
New steel-framed pavilions mark the entries to the department stores so shoppers can easily find their way around. A few of the older stores have new display windows that liven up otherwise mundane walls facing parking lots.
A clock-elevator tower in the food court--the new heart of the project--gives the mall the equivalent of a town center, a place where shoppers can rendezvous.
Barrel-vaulted trellises over both the old and new pedestrian promenades add a comfortable sense of protection while maintaining the open-air environment so appropriate to Southern California. Comfortable wooden benches and planters that double as benches help make the concrete promenades more hospitable.
But while all the work made a big improvement, it hasn’t eliminated basic flaws, and has added a few of its own.
The architects opted for a new exterior of cheap-looking pastel stucco walls, detailed with geometric patterns and ornamental tile insets. Not only do the facades seem sugary enough to melt like cotton candy, but they tag the mall as a period piece, a contemporary of all the other pink-, peach- and salmon-colored shopping centers completed during the 1980s in San Diego County.
The Broadway, a tall, bulky building covered in tan concrete panels, with a dark brown top that carries the store’s logo in the familiar script, also undercuts the renovation. The store’s parent company--Carter Hawley Hale--was not cooperative during the renovation, Homart executives said. JC Penney and Sears were redone with pastel facades that matched the renovation, but the Broadway wanted an awful shade of mustard. After protest letters and calls from several parties involved, the store gave in and covered their hot-dogging mustard with a subtler pastel.
That still left the bulky top of the store, which at 60 feet is the mall’s tallest feature. Several options for disguising the dated exterior were explored, but the store claimed none were economically feasible. Instead, the top portion was cleaned and left in its original form. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Storefronts, especially in the new section of the mall, generate shopping excitement, but nothing like the entertaining ones in Horton Plaza. Where Horton Plaza has its wacky cinnamon bun shop that blows enticing aromas out to shoppers and a french-fry outlet with giant fries exploding from its facade, food outlets at Chula Vista Center opted for the same anonymous look used in countless other malls.
The one exception is a robot machine named Kola Kron that dispenses soft drinks.
A couple of clothing stores in the new wing mimic the columns and pediments of ancient temples. Overall, the palette for new stores is glass block, pseudo marble and other slick, shiny materials--a trifle glitzy but mostly appropriate for a retailing atmosphere.
Closing 5th Avenue was undoubtedly essential to unifying the mall. But this significant north-south auto thoroughfare should have become a grand auto-pedestrian experience.
Instead, motorists entering the mall from the north or south on 5th meet cul-de-sacs that force them to turn right or left and park, or turn around and leave. Low landscaping and a parking lot on the southern side of the mall cut off clear views into the project. The street should transition into colorful, landscaped pedestrian walks extending into the parking lots as an invitation to shoppers.
On a larger scale, the city missed a golden opportunity to utilize these 56 prime acres in ways that would relate to and revitalize surrounding streets. Residential uses were reportedly proposed by the developer and vetoed by the city. Along I Street, a residential thoroughfare south of the project, apartments or condominiums could have smoothed the transition from the mall into the surrounding neighborhood.
Isolated by its large parking lots, the mall also doesn’t contribute new life--i.e., pedestrian traffic-- to commercial strips along Broadway and H Street. These edges of the site could still be utilized for low, mixed-use projects that would pump new life into these streets.
Homart is negotiating for an eight-plex cinema to be built on the second level, next to the food court, as well as a fourth department store for the southern side of the site.
But before anything new is added, city and Homart officials should put their heads together and reconsider how the project might yet contribute in a more positive way to the commercial and residential streets at its edges.
