The Citadel’s Getting All Dolled Up
Steve Craig opened his first outlet mall in October 1990 in the desert stagecoach stop of Cabazon, just a few weeks ahead of the opening of a similar mall behind the crenelated walls of the Citadel, in the old Samson Tire & Rubber plant in the City of Commerce.
Over the years, the Cabazon center grew to roughly 200 stores in a pleasant open-air setting along the 10 Freeway on the route between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. The Citadel, which had been developed by Trammell Crow Co., reached a sort of retail equilibrium with 42 shops situated in a clutch of squat stucco buildings huddled behind the old tire plant’s front wall, facing the Santa Ana Freeway.
Whenever Craig, 47, contemplated their divergent histories, something seemed to gnaw at him. The Citadel had “never reached its size potential,” he told me this week, “especially considering the market we’re in.” The shopping part of the complex looked like an afterthought, a retail amenity for what Trammell Crow developed principally as an office park and a hotel.
For all that the Citadel offered in ancient ambience -- it was said to have been based on an Assyrian palace of the 7th century BC -- the nondescript buildings inside the wall could have been located anywhere in the L.A. basin. In an era when Las Vegas and Disneyland have established the value of giving visitors a unified design theme to grab hold of, Craig seems to be saying, the Citadel’s developers missed a good bet.
Craig Realty Group, Craig’s Newport Beach-based firm, took over the Citadel’s retail management in January 2002. In early July, he expects to complete his purchase of the entire 35-acre property from the City of Commerce, which a few years ago acquired it from Trammell Crow.
The day after closing, Craig plans to start a construction project that ultimately will turn the Citadel into a 100-plus-store Assyrian-themed outlet mall with a prime location from which to compete with centers in Cabazon, Camarillo and Lake Elsinore that draw millions of shoppers from all over the region.
In a sense, Craig’s plan reflects the mainstreaming of outlet shopping: During their explosive growth in the 1990s, factory stores tended to concentrate in exurban or rural districts distant enough from customers to avoid competing directly with established retailers selling the factories’ goods at full price. Not only do manufacturers and retailers now factor in the off-price outlet segment as an important part of their entire marketing strategy, the malls themselves appear to be attracting a community of devoted frequent shoppers, as opposed to a-few-times-a-year visitors.
This is a big change from the original point of outlet shopping, which started in the 1940s when East Coast apparel makers opened “factory direct” stores near their plants to offload overruns and seconds.
In keeping with their ostensible purpose of delivering found bargains to tourists who pulled in off the highway leading from one place to another, these stores were ordinary to a fault, innocent of anything that might resemble atmosphere or creature comforts. Craig recalls that on a fact-finding mission to a pioneering outlet center in Kittery, Maine, a few miles from the headquarters of catalog retailer L.L. Bean, he discovered that the building didn’t even offer a customer restroom. Patrons lined up at a neighboring McDonald’s, instead.
By the 1980s, outlet retailing had become an end in itself, instead of an afterthought. A wave of department store bankruptcies and mergers forced apparel makers to secure second-tier retail outlets so they would have flexibility in disposing of seasonal goods approaching their sell-by dates.
The recessions of the ‘70s, meanwhile, had ingrained the bargain-hunting trait in American shoppers. Some manufacturers started deliberately segmenting their markets into full-price customers and knockdown shoppers. And the success of a few outlet complexes told developers that assembling a critical mass of shops in one place would generate more traffic for all. (Although outlets are the fastest-growing category of retailing, the sector is still small, generating about $15 billion a year in sales. By contrast, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. recorded $244 billion in sales last year all by itself.)
Draconian Decor
The Citadel stores seemed to have been originally designed as a mixture of all the worst elements of this trend. The retail space looks like a holdover from an older and grimmer time, perhaps a period when it was thought that customers wouldn’t believe they were getting a bargain unless their shopping environment was reminiscent of Orwell’s “1984.”
The interior decor of several stores is from the bare-concrete-and-exposed-ductwork school popularized by Costco Wholesale and Home Depot Inc., although some, such as Ann Taylor, have dressed up furnishings. Others are trying to make the best of the cards they’ve been dealt; while I was touring the space with Craig one afternoon this week, another store’s manager stopped us to say he would be shutting down for a day so his company could slap a brighter hue of paint over the dark San Quentin green on the walls.
Craig doesn’t believe that in designing the Citadel’s retail section Trammell Crow tried to be deliberately punitive, just cheap. (The idea that bare-bones decor was a necessary element of bargain shopping, he says, was an ex post facto rationalization.) Aware that it was renovating the premises of an old factory, the Crow company’s designers ended up squeezing the industrial motif a little too strongly, producing boxy stucco store buildings under industrial awnings supported by iron columns in a way that made them look like refugees from an emergency scaffolding job. “Very little signage, very dull milled-aluminum doorways,” Craig remarks as we stroll down the concrete path.
For all that, the Citadel has by no means been a failure as a retail mall. Annual sales per square foot approach $400, which is well above the national average for outlet malls. “It’s really not that broken,” Craig says, although he adds that his target for the refurbished center is $500 per square foot.
The first step in the Citadel’s transformation, he says, will involve gussying up the existing buildings. This work must take place without creating too much inconvenience for the tenants and their clientele, so it will be limited to improving the stark landscaping, repainting, replacing storefront glass and replacing the worn concrete walkways with snazzier inlays.
Assyrian Upgrade
The real change will come with Phase Two, which will approximately double the retail space and is scheduled to be completed by November 2004. Craig’s goal here is to “bring the history into the project,” by which he means carrying the Assyrian theme of the building’s two-story front wall and ziggurat-style front office building through to the shopping environment.
To achieve the proper look, Craig even sent a couple of architecture teams to the Louvre in Paris, where they conferred with the museum’s Assyrian art curator and examined archeological drafts of the Palace of Sargon II, the pre-Christian structure outside Baghdad that was said to be the model for the Samson Tire factory.
Craig loves to talk about his plans for preserving what’s left of the original Samson factory, including a restoration of the distinctive two-story front wall on Telegraph Avenue. (The factory was the work of the great L.A. architecture firm Morgan, Walls, & Clements, which also is responsible for such local landmarks as the Wiltern and El Capitan theaters.) The real key to improving the Citadel, however, is attracting more stores. “The first issue is to have a critical mass of tenants,” says Craig, a transplanted Missourian who came west to attend USC in the ‘70s. “You want to have a center with stores for every member of the family. When you only have this many, the selection is very limited.”
He says 50% of the 125,000 square feet in Phase Two is committed to tenants, including existing Citadel retailers who plan to move up to the new section. Assuming Phase Two is as successful as he hopes, the third and final phase of about another 140,000 square feet will follow by a couple of years.
“There are a lot of great things about this project,” Craig says, clearly exhilarated by the prospect of doing something more than raising a shopping mall out of the desert dust. “Now, the moment you come inside the walls the architecture falls off the face of the Earth. We’re going to improve the experience.”
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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.
