Janss Mall Tenants Welcome Plan to Revitalize Center : Thousand Oaks: The $23-million project would include an eight-screen theater and a major department store.
Chuck Fieweger can tell the Janss Mall needs a face lift because his customers keep walking in the wrong door.
More and more, shoppers park their cars behind his Thousand Oaks Stationers, dash in the back door for a quick purchase and zoom away without ever setting foot on the tree-lined walkway outside the front door.
Whichever door they come in, Fieweger makes a sale. But when customers zip in and out the back, they don’t browse through the other stores in the mall, many of them mom-and-pop businesses struggling through the recession.
And that bothers Fieweger, a 25-year tenant who remembers when the Janss Mall was the biggest shopping center in town throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
“There’s a lot of empties now, a lot of small merchants moving out,” Fieweger said Wednesday. “Restructuring the whole mall could help bring more traffic here and give us a chance to compete.”
Eager to see the open-air mall once again draw droves of strolling shoppers, most merchants welcomed the Janss Corp.’s announced plans to revitalize the dust-colored complex, which sits between Moorpark and Wilbur roads, just off Hillcrest Drive in central Thousand Oaks.
At a public meeting Tuesday night, Bill Janss, president of the corporation that owns and manages the mall, offered several suggestions for revitalizing the center, which began losing business when the giant Oaks mall opened less than a mile away in 1978. The vacancy rate now hovers around 20%, Janss said.
An eight-screen movie theater to replace the current duplex, a food court with outdoor seating, a two-story parking garage and a major department store such as Mervyn’s could all “reposition the mall to serve this community,” Janss said. “We probably wouldn’t go head-to-head with the Oaks mall, but would (cater to) more value-conscious consumers.”
While plans are still sketchy, Janss said, refurbishing the mall would cost about $23 million and add about 100,000 square feet of commercial space, boosting the total to 385,000 square feet. The proposed parking garage, which would be set in a natural hollow so the top floor was even with Wilbur Road, would create 1,860 new parking spaces, he said.
About 25 merchants and neighbors of the mall attended Tuesday’s meeting, and most responded enthusiastically.
“He’s going to put this place back on the map,” Stephen Vemi, who has owned the mall’s Village Shoe Repair for 12 years, said Wednesday. “We’re going to lose money in the first year or so (as construction disrupts business), but every penny is worth it.”
Sipping an oversized cup of coffee from Frank’s Charbroilers in the Janss Mall, longtime resident Hugo Roche agreed.
“We need to reinforce the center of town--that’s what makes a good city,” he said. “You look at cities that are kind of blah, and that’s because they don’t have a downtown.”
But Joel Steinberg, who owns the mall’s Brown Bag Deli, was decidedly less enthusiastic about renovation plans, which call for tearing down the building that he shares with Holiday Hardware and several other tenants. Although Janss promised to relocate merchants whose food stores will be demolished, Steinberg was not convinced.
“When you talk about projects of $25 million, the little guy hardly gets considered at all,” he said. “Small merchants will be cast aside.”
Longtime residents, who said they rely on the Janss Mall for personal service and lower-priced goods, expressed similar concerns, warning Janss that they did not want their neighborhood shopping center to become a monolithic regional mall.
“When they get built, most of the malls have red-tile roofs and are sand-colored or mud-colored,” Barbara Gilmore said at Tuesday’s meeting. “Somehow, they’re not user-friendly. We need the intimate, smaller places that seem to draw people.”
As she walked past the mall’s montage of old photographs depicting Thousand Oaks as one huge grassy field dotted with cows, Christina Houlberg agreed that the mall should retain its people-friendly atmosphere.
“I’m not excited about the idea of a double-decker parking lot--that would be too San Fernando Valley,” Houlberg said. “We love this mall because it’s outdoors.”
