New Mall Tenants to Fill Space, Stomachs

Moving ahead with plans to create a pedestrian-friendly retail corridor, the Northridge Fashion Center on Monday announced opening dates for a series of new tenants including a Topz restaurant, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and a Zany Brainy store selling educational toys.

Most of the new businesses will be in the center’s largely vacant north end, which was formerly occupied by a Broadway department store.

“We’re really trying to create an open-air retail, entertainment and dining experience to compete with the street retail that’s so popular, like CityWalk and the Third Street Promenade,” said Carol Jacobs, general manager of the Valley’s largest shopping mall, which has sales figures of about $327 per square foot.

Most of the businesses that Jacobs announced on Monday fall into the dining end of the triad.

Juice Heaven, offering smoothies and juices for the health-conscious, opened Monday, the first tenant in the pedestrian corridor that stretches from Borders Books and Music, which opened in October, to the Pacific 10 Theaters, which opened in December.

Construction also began Monday on the Topz restaurant, which will be the Encino-based chain’s third eatery and will feature “healthier fast food.”

That restaurant is planning a July 1 opening, said Mark Avila, president of the Topz Restaurant Group, who said other restaurants are planned for Warner Center and Toluca Lake.

Slated for August openings are Ben & Jerry’s, the Jewelry Collection and Zany Brainy, Jacobs said.

On the Border Mexican Grill and Macaroni Grill, both owned by Dallas-based Brinker International, one of the nation’s largest restaurant companies, are slated to open in September and December, respectively.

In May 1996, the then-owners of the mall, Dallas-based MEPC American Properties, announced plans to buy the mall’s old Broadway department store as part of a plan to convert the northwest end of the shopping center into an entertainment complex, with a 20- to 24-screen movie theater and trendy restaurants.

Chicago-based General Growth Properties, which operates about 130 malls across the country, purchased the center last July, in the middle of plans to develop the north end, Jacobs said.

While some features of the planned complex have changed, most notably the size of the movie complex, Jacobs did not want to classify the current plans as scaled back.

“The plans are different than what was originally planned in 1996,” Jacobs said. “I don’t know why or what happened.”

Including Borders and the theater complex, the north end is about 234,000 square feet, or about one-fifth of the mall’s total square footage of 1.5 million.

Work on the north end was completed in February, but Jacobs said she was not concerned that its retail space has been largely vacant since then.

“We’d like to have everything open right now, but it’s just a case where we’re choosing the right tenants to put in, and to make decisions that will be the right decisions for years to come,” Jacobs said.

“We think by August, all of it will be leased, or a good percentage of it,” she said.

Jacobs said more tenants will be announced in a month.

“I’m extremely confident that [General Growth] will sign the retail tenants to make that the place to go to this summer,” said Avila, noting that outdoor promenades in the west end of the San Fernando Valley are scarce.

“We felt it would be one of the flagship areas for us.”