Orange County’s ‘Event’ Mall : South Coast Plaza, Suburban Answer to Rodeo Drive or 5th Avenue, Marks Its 25th Year

An hour before stores open, shoppers gather in small knots inside South Coast Plaza. They peek through windows as Cartier clerks arrange solitaires in display cases or inspect teams of gardeners as they meticulously wipe dust from every leaf in the indoor planters.

Soon the doors open to the shops of what is billed as the richest mall in the continental United States. Newport Beach matrons, foreign tourists and bored teen-agers stroll the expansive corridors, along the way dropping an average of more than $2 million across the polished counters each day.

“It’s become an Orange County answer to 5th Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, not just for shopping but for browsing,” said political consultant Harvey Englander, who visits the complex at least three times a week. “Going to South Coast is an event.”

The mall that capitalized on attracting a unique collection of stores in an enviable suburban site next to a major freeway quietly marks its 25th anniversary today. From humble beginnings amid sprawling farmland, the plaza has attracted a roster of the nation’s leading boutiques.

It has six major department stores and introduced such well-known shops to Southern California as the FAO Schwarz toy store, designer stores Charles Jourdan and Mark Cross and housewares haven Crate & Barrel.

Across Bear Street is the equally upscale, though less successful, Crystal Court mall, which opened five years ago as an extension of the already-sprawling South Coast Plaza. Crystal Court is anchored by the department stores JW Robinson’s and the Broadway and has a raft of specialty shops. And across Sunflower Avenue is another extension, South Coast Plaza Village, an open-air shopping center.

South Coast Plaza can become quite congested. Parking places are prize commodities on weekends. The complex is so expansive--and its designer shops so expensive--that it is easy for a shopper to return home with sore feet and an empty wallet. South Coast Plaza is not for everyone.

Situated off the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa, the plaza in its early years was well placed to draw off the abundance of wealth of coastal Orange County. Recently it has also capitalized on its central location to attract customers from Los Angeles and San Diego. The plaza aggressively seeks to have itself included on packaged tours.

As a result, about 17% of the mall’s 18 million shoppers each year are American and foreign tourists. By contrast, Disneyland had an estimated attendance of 11.6 million last year.

Much of the credit for the mall’s success goes to Henry T. Segerstrom, the publicity-shy managing partner of family-owned C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, which farmed the land for decades before diversifying into development.

Suggesting that the plaza has brought in probably “the best selection of stores in the U.S.,” Donald Fisher, chairman of the Gap Inc. of San Francisco, credited Segerstrom with avoiding fad stores and choosing “the kind of quality stores that are going to be around tomorrow.”

As its own display of faith, the Gap is relocating within the mall to a new store triple its current size. The plaza is fully leased.

Gerald Mathews, executive vice president of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, said the plaza is a “very alive center” that simply attracts more customers with more dollars to spend than other malls.

A Los Angeles Times survey of county residents found last year that nearly half of them shop at South Coast Plaza, Crystal Court or South Coast Plaza Village, in contrast with 32% who shop at MainPlace/Santa Ana mall. Nearly 40% of South Coast Plaza’s shoppers are college graduates, they have a median income of $55,000 and half of them spent at least $122 on their last visit.

Sales growth has been spectacular in recent years. For 1990, the most recent figures available, the plaza and its two companion centers had taxable sales of $692 million, up 3% from $672 million in 1989. The next-closest rival was the largest mall in the nation, Del Amo Fashion Square in Torrance, with 1990 sales of $441 million.

South Coast Plaza officials have not yet released 1991 sales figures but said sales rose slightly, despite the recession. Segerstrom said in an interview last week that the plaza is holding its own against discount retailers.

“We are sensitive to the changing nature of retail competition, off-price merchandising for example, and South Coast Plaza has its commitment to quality,” he said. “We’re not in competition with off-price merchandisers.”

Shoppers spend an average of three hours per visit at the plaza, The Times survey found. They spend two hours, 40 minutes at other malls. For many, the plaza has become kind of a second home.

Political consultant Englander said he has frequented the mall since his arrival in the county in 1978. He bought his fiancee a present from the Giorgio Beverly Hills store and regularly lunches at an Italian restaurant at South Coast Plaza Village. For their first anniversary together, Englander said, he arranged to have Giorgio deliver a silver pendant to the restaurant to surprise her.

“What we love is to go there on an afternoon. We send the three boys to McDonald’s, and we go to Armani Express for something edible,” he said. “We’re very loyal.”

Englander, like most of the county’s big spenders, tends to stay on the rarefied west side of the H-shaped plaza, where the most upscale stores are found.

One store manager recalled overhearing a security guard telling a man who was toting a “Will Work for Food” sign that “this is not the image of South Coast” and encouraging him to move along. The itinerant replied, “What do you mean, image ? I’m trying to find food.”

Tram driver Bruce Larsen, who loops between South Coast Plaza and the Crystal Court 90 times a day, said he found out just how demanding customers can be during his first week on the job. He recalled telling a passenger who demanded to be taken directly to May Co.’s anchor store that he could only let her off at a designated stop on his route. “You mean I have to walk?” she asked indignantly.

Then there was the lady with the silver hair. Marty Flinn, who managed a now-closed Sherman Clay piano store near the plaza’s tony Jewel Court for several years, said a woman arrived encrusted in silver--hair, outfit, even the color of her dog. She immediately spied a silver-leafed piano in the store and snapped it up for $10,000--even though she had no intention of learning to play it.

“It was just because it was silver,” he said.

Another time, a man took an interest in an special Steinway piano built in Hamburg, Germany. He paid $40,000 cash, delivered in an attache case.

“They were all very wealthy,” Flinn said of South Coast Plaza customers. “You knew you were going to have a good day when you saw the Rolls-Royces lined up in the parking lot.”

Some ladies are so familiar to the parking valets that they greet them every day by name. The attendants say they know their regular customers’ car keys so well that they don’t even need to tag them; they instead place them on a special place on the counter.

Some shoppers “come every day and buy a scarf or a new outfit,” attendant Robert Grimshaw said.

Jo Ellen Qualls, a vice president at the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store, said she has one customer who comes in every week and plunks down $20 to $200 on a gift for a friend. She has done it for 40 years between the plaza store and the Tiffany store in New York.

On the west side of the mall, the talk is of fashionable parties and shoppers conspicuously tote bags from designer shops like badges of honor.

Such shoppers rarely intermingle with shoppers on the east side. Instead of such names as Chanel, Porsche Design and Emporio Armani, the east side has Gap Kids, Sesame Street and Wet Seal. On busy days, children and strollers are everywhere.

Lauren Elzig of Temecula, whose 6-year-old daughter, Mariel, was taking her third spin on the east side’s vintage carousel, said South Coast Plaza is now “a lot more elite” than she remembers from her girlhood days, when she rode her bike to the mall from her family home in Santa Ana.

The east side also has its share of teen-agers. Moses Sanchez, 17, said he used to hang around the mall to pass out party invitations until guards hassled him.

His friend, Tyran Merrill, 17, of Santa Ana, was buying a $153 pair of Nike Air Max sneakers at a Foot Locker store, then went down to May Co. for a pair of mustard-colored shorts. He found a pair five inches too large in the waist and bought them for $25, explaining that regular sizes are not baggy enough.

“It’s close. It’s more convenient,” he said of the plaza.

It was not so convenient when it was built. The San Diego Freeway, the artery upon which South Coast Plaza depends, was barely finished when the center opened in March, 1967. And the neighborhood was nothing but the lima bean fields.

Larry Ober, a partner in four South Coast Plaza stores, remembered the first time he laid eyes on the site.

“All I could see was a bean field,” he said. “My feeling was, ‘Where are the customers going to come from?’ ” He soon found out.

The center was a success from the day it opened, Segerstrom officials say. Moreover, it has been a steady generator of income that has driven the surrounding high-rise office and hotel complex that Segerstrom also developed.

The enclosed mall was a relatively new phenomenon at the time. Postwar Southern Californians, blessed with some of the nation’s best weather, had grown up on outdoor shopping centers in the suburbs. When South Coast Plaza was built, the county already had a mall: Fashion Square in Santa Ana, which was refurbished into the present-day MainPlace.

At first South Coast Plaza was shaped in the letter I, with a May Co. and Sears store at each end. In the 1970s, the addition of a Bullock’s store changed the outline into a T. And it gained its distinctive H shape when Nordstrom and Saks--both reportedly after much wooing by Segerstrom--decided to open stores.

The Nordstrom store, the Seattle-based retailer’s first venture in California, was so successful that a new store twice as large was built just years after the original opened in 1978. Mathews of Saks Fifth Avenue said that his store was listless at the plaza for a time but that a change of managers has resulted in sales gains this year. It is now one of the fastest-growing stores in the chain, he said.

Given the plaza’s success, retailers in a long line are clamoring to join. Mall officials will not say how many have expressed an interest but added that there are always plenty of choices when a store becomes available. By contrast, many Southland malls are struggling to keep retailer bases intact.

Stores invited into the mall often find demands they would not find elsewhere. For one, plaza officials are scrupulous about unique storefronts. The result has been an abundance of marble in jewelry stores and bold graphics on high-fashion apparel stores.

“We hammer new tenants to get them to come up with innovative storefronts,” Segerstrom spokesman Malcolm Ross said.

The goal is to create a pedestrian boulevard. Retailers rave at the mall’s cleanliness, from the morning leaf-cleaning squads to the plaza’s marble-tiled restrooms that are inspected each half-hour.

“It’s a replay of the street scene, without the honking horns, without the traffic,” said Werner Escher, who is in charge of drumming up the mall’s tourism business.

Once they are established, retail tenants have to keep a constant eye toward boosting their sales if they expect to stay at South Coast Plaza--or to keep from being moved to less desirable locations when their leases expire.

Sherman Clay’s Flinn said his company decided to move to larger quarters in Santa Ana after 10 years at the plaza rather than face a whopping rent increase and a new space farther from Jewel Court.

When the Brentano’s bookstore was moved from a store position near Bullock’s on the mall’s west side to an upstairs space near Sears, sales dropped precipitously. The store’s attorneys decided, however, that there was little they could do, because the Brentano’s lease had expired before the move, manager Jeff Delaney said.

“There has been a significant decrease in sales since we moved over,” he said, later adding: “We are happy with this spot. This mall has been good to us.”

As for the plaza’s future, Segerstrom officials dream of yet another wing, linking it with Crystal Court. At a minimum, Ross said, such a plan would involve finding another department store to anchor the project, a virtual impossibility, given the state of the economy and retailer bankruptcies.

Those kinds of changes do not scare Segerstrom executives.

“They don’t rest on their laurels. They are not afraid to make changes,” said Wayne Wedin, a mall consultant in Brea.

South Coast Plaza Expansion March 15, 1967: South Coast Plaza opens with 70 stores 1973-1976: Sixty more stores open 1973: South Coast Plaza Village opens across the street with 45 stores 1974: Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel opens 1978: South Coast Repertory Theater moves into permanent building. 1986: Crystal Court opens with 60 stores. 1986: Performing Arts Center opens 1987: South Coast Repertory Theater adds a wing, gaining 11,000 square feet. * Wells Fargo Bank and Sumitomo Bank buildings, 1973 * Imperial Bank Tower and Downey Plaza, 1979 * Great Western Bank and Bank of the West towers and the Commerce Bank building, 1982. * Center Tower, 1985 * Plaza Tower, 1991 Source: South Coast Plaza, South Coast Town Center and South Coast Repertory Theater

North America’s Largest Shopping Centers

Three of the 10 largest shopping centers in North America are in California. South Coast Plaza ranks third.

Million Rank Mall Location Square Ft. Stores 1. West Edmonton Mall Edmonton, Canada * 5.2 800 ** 20,000 2. Del Amo Fashion Center Torrance 3.0 371 12,500 3. South Coast Plaza Costa Mesa 2.9 300 14,504 (includes Crystal Court and South Coast Plaza Village) 4. Galleria Houston 2.8 390 5. The Court and the Plaza King of Prussia, Pa. 2.5 350 12,700 6. Lakewood Center Lakewood 2.4 252 12,000 7. Woodfield Schaumberg, Ill. 2.3 220 11,000 8. Roosevelt Field Mall Garden City, N.Y. 2.3 155 10,000 9. Sawgrass Mills Sunrise, Fla. 2.2 225 12,000 10. Ala Moana Center Honolulu 2.1 200 7,800

Parking Rank Spaces 1. Mall Canada 2. Fashion Center 3. Plaza Crystal Court and South Coast Plaza Village) 4. 11,000 5. and the Plaza Pa. 6. Center 7. Ill. 8. Mall 9. Fla. 10. Center

* Includes 3.8 million square feet of retail space

** Plus overflow

How Orange County’s Malls Stack Up

Rank Mall Location Square Ft. Stores 1. South Coast Plaza Costa Mesa 2.9 million 300 2. Brea Mall Brea 1.3 million 170 3. Fashion Island Newport Center Newport Beach 1.2 million 185 5,815 4. Buena Park Mall Buena Park 1.2 million 170 6. Westminster Mall Westminster 1.1 million 173 5. MainPlace/ Santa Ana Santa Ana 1.1 million 170 5,500 7. Mission Viejo Mall Mission Viejo 999,390 132 5,040 8. Huntington Beach Mall Huntington Beach 940,000 102 4,113 9. Laguna Hills Mall Laguna Hills 868,797 79 10. Mall of Orange Orange 828,886 96 11. Anaheim Plaza Anaheim 778,869 58 12. Tustin Market Place Tustin 761,778 45 4,016 13. The City Shopping Center Orange 625,628 106 5,700

Parking Rank Spaces 1. 14,504 2. 6,115 3. Newport Center 4. 5,500 6. 6,403 5. Santa Ana 7. Mall 8. Beach Mall Beach 9. 4,400 10. 4,700 11. 4,546 12. Place 13. Shopping Center

Source: International Council of Shopping Centers, Los Angeles Times Marketing Research

Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times