Can politicians create an instant downtown? In Buffalo Grove, the answer is yes, but they can’t make it work. The 6-year-old Buffalo Grove Town Center, a low-slung red brick shopping mall at the northwest corner of Lake-Cook Road and Illinois Highway 83, was designed to be the focal point for the community.
Buffalo Grove, like many of its Lake County cousins, grew up as a scattering of subdivisions and stores without a central location. “We wanted to create a quality downtown area, with an old-fashioned village green atmosphere, where our residents could gather to shop and visit,” said state Rep. Verna Clayton (R-Buffalo Grove), who was village president when the Town Center was planned.
So far that vision has failed, and there may be some lessons in this for other communities facing the same issues.
The Town Center, built by the Simon Property Group Inc. of Indianapolis (developers of the Mall of America near Minneapolis) to the specifications of Buffalo Grove officials, has only 60 percent occupancy, the lowest of all 114 of Simon’s commercial ventures.
Chain stores that flourish elsewhere, such as Private Lives and Singer Shoes, have pulled out of the Town Center, and remaining shopowners, many of whom are local residents, wonder how long they can stay in business.
The benches, sidewalks and gazebo that officials had hoped would attract strolling Buffalo Grovers are empty, and the $8.5 million bond issue the village sold to build them is in default. Perhaps worst of all, local residents are feeling shortchanged by a project they believed would add to the quality of their lives.
Helene Stein, who has lived in Buffalo Grove for 23 years, said, “This has been very disappointing. We wanted a center for our town, but we got a glorified shopping center instead. I don’t know what went wrong.”
Another resident, Harris Weiss, thinks he does know. He said that when he moved his children’s clothing store, Born Beautiful of Buffalo Grove, into the new Buffalo Grove Town Center five years ago, he thought the demographics and location were perfect. “All we needed was the right mix of stores and restaurants around us, and business would be terrific,” he said.
He’s still waiting. The problem can’t be location, he said, pointing to The Grove, a decidedly less attractive strip mall just across Highway 83 that is fully leased and crowded with customers. And it can’t be demographics. Marketing studies prepared for Simon Property reveal that almost three-fourths of the homes within five miles of the center are filled with people under age 50, young families in their peak shopping years.
Instead, Weiss thinks the Town Center’s problems began at its conception, when village officials and developers had two different concepts for the same 55-acre area. Village administrators perceived this as a higher-end downtown area, with upscale shops and white tablecloth restaurants, he said, while developers thought of it as a site for more traditional mall offerings.
As early as 1972, Buffalo Grove officials had designated the site, then a vast stretch of fields and farmhouses, as the eventual heart of their new town. Officials did not condemn the land for public use but decided to wait until a like-minded developer came along to help them transform it.
After three developers failed to assemble enough fields into a site worth developing, Stanley Lieberman, a local real estate agent, took over the project in the early 1980s. Within two years, Lieberman and his partners had bought enough farmland to interest the Simon Property Group, the country’s second-largest shopping center developer, in the project. (Lieberman no longer has an interest in the development and has moved his realty office from the Town Center to Palatine. He declined to comment.)
The first clash between the village’s dream and the developers’ sense of commercial reality came during the Town Center’s planning stages in the mid to late ’80s.
Many residents and officials took the village green portion of their dream literally and wanted their Town Center designed as a square of stores, with public space in the middle, or as an old-fashioned Main Street, with stores facing each other across a pedestrian mall. The developers, however, insisted that neither plan would work in a Northern climate, where people have grown accustomed to parking as close to stores as possible.
Finally, everyone settled on the present design, of a streetscape stretching north from Lake-Cook along Highway 83. A park-like area at the north end of the mall includes walkways to nearby apartment buildings, some of which are still in the planning stages. “We were convinced that the streetscape was consistent with good design principles,” said Buffalo Grove Village Manager William Balling.
Steve Simon, Simon Property’s development manager for its community center division, said, “We spent more money on the architecture and building materials there than in most community centers. I think it’s one of the finest-looking strip centers we’ve ever done.”
When the developers balked at paying for additional amenities such as sidewalks, benches, planters, landscaping and the gazebo, the village borrowed $8.5 million from MSA Realty Corp., a Simon subsidiary, to pay for them.
The real clash between the developers and the village began in the late ’80s before the first geranium was planted. While the Simon leasing staff wanted to bring in the same types of tenants they rented space to in their 21 other Illinois properties, “the village wanted a more family type of place,” Steve Simon said. The list of what the village did not want included large discount stores and fast-food restaurants.
As Simon agents tried to attract upscale tenants in the early ’90s, the economy took a turn downward. At its high point, the mall was about 80 percent occupied.
William Argall, a retail property expert for CB Commercial of Lincolnshire, explained what happened next. “When a shopping center has an anchor, like a grocery, a department or discount store, that large retailer draws in customers for the smaller shops as well. That is what is happening in The Grove, which we happen to lease, and which has a large grocery store. But in an anchorless specialty center, as the Town Center was designed to be, a group of smaller tenants must create their own critical mass.”
Retailers whose sales were extemely sensitive to the economy closed their Town Center stores, including Erehwon Mountain Outfitters Inc., Techline Studio furniture store and Evans Furs. Smaller retailers, such as Private Lives and Singer Shoes and a delicatassen, followed.
The Love’s Yogurt and Salad Shop near the south end of the mall also closed, but Buffalo Grove resident Norm Kovarsky “was silly enough to open it up again three years ago,” Kovarsky said. Although he is managing to keep his business alive, “we need more foot traffic here to be lucrative,” he said.
Like other Town Center retailers, Kovarsky admits he’s frustrated. “I know that when they first entered into partnership, the village and Simon did not work well together. Maybe the village wanted higher-class stores and restaurants than the community could afford. We’re a young community with big houses, but we all have big mortgages, too. Lately the village and the developers have been more cooperative. In fact, the village let Simon bring in a freestanding Boston Chicken in record time, and we’re hoping that some of those customers will mosey on over here for dessert.” That is, if they can find him.
Town Center lacks the signs needed to lead customers to its stores and restaurants, tenants complain, which goes back to the vision of building a community center instead of a commercial entity.
Thanos Kourliouros, operations manager for Chicago-based Giordano’s Enterprises Inc., said he has been fighting for more signs since that 36-store chain opened its Town Center restaurant in 1992. “This is a high-speed area, and from the street Town Center could be an office complex or a warehouse.
Simon representatives recently persuaded village officials to allow extra signage near Highway 83, according to Michael E. McCarty, Simon’s senior vice president of community center leasing, but he said tenants refused to pay for it.
