BUSINESS : City Looks to Mall Upgrade for a Lift : New, upscale stores, including Nordstrom, at Santa Anita Fashion Park should boost tax revenues, Arcadia official says. The wing will open on Friday.

The new Nordstrom at Santa Anita Fashion Park in Arcadia opens Friday amid hopes that the new mall wing will attract higher-income shoppers and make good the city’s $3-million investment in the mall renovation.

“Getting Nordstrom was a real coup,” City Manager Bill Kelly said. “We’ll hopefully . . . return the city’s investment many times over.”

In 1992, the city donated $3 million of the expansion’s $34-million cost to procure parking for the new wing from Santa Anita Park racetrack. The weighty investment is expected to pay itself off in sales taxes within three to five years, Kelly said.

And if Nordstrom may be a gold mine for the city, many of its new neighbors in the mall are presuming “gilt” by association. The 136,000-square-foot store has attracted a host of specialty boutiques to its wing, such as Ann Taylor, Maternite and Williams-Sonoma.

Offering everything from hair care to walking and hiking gear, the stores are counting on capturing a more affluent market, attracting a consumer who has, until now, traveled to Glendale, Burbank and as far as Costa Mesa in search of the finer things money can buy.

“You would always have to drive out to South Coast Plaza or the Glendale Galleria, so we were really excited about the mall having more upscale stores,” said Nancy Corradini, an Arcadia resident and owner of Papyrus, a specialty paper and stationery chain that is also opening a store in the new wing.

The new Nordstrom, she said, was critical to her decision to open the store in Santa Anita Fashion Park. “The Papyrus franchise would not consider the store in this mall without Nordstrom,” Corradini said.

The decision to expand and go upscale with the fashion park grew out of research showing that its consumer base was affluent enough to support ritzier retailers.

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Elaborate demographic studies that surveyed the most common ZIP codes of shoppers and measured the average income of those areas found that in the mall’s surrounding trade area of Pasadena, Alhambra, Sierra Madre, Monrovia and Duarte, the average household income was $57,000.

“We have a lot of higher-income people in this area and we hope to serve them well with this wing,” said Cheryl Berkey, a marketing researcher for the Hahn Co., the mall’s managers and co-owners.

The wing’s top level is dedicated primarily to fashion. The lower floor showcases lifestyle and leisure shops such as Ritz Camera, Doubleday Books and the Walking Store.

Focus groups helped decide the mix of shops, and the focus is on family, including a new Disney store.

“When we look at the demographics here, there are a lot of young families that come out of the hills and Pasadena,” said Laurel Crary-Globus, district manager for Maternite. “When you look around this mall and see strollers, it’s like, yes, we really need that upscale look.”