An article out of today's Business Journal:
Regency Square Mall at a crossroadsProperty owners ponder tear-down of mall’s west wing
Jacksonville Business Journal - by Christian Conte Staff Writer
Forty-two years ago, the Regency Square Mall represented the latest and greatest trends in shopping mall development. Today, it is considered outdated and out-of-style.
A growing number of its storefronts have gone dark, the most recent being the three well-known national stores Old Navy, Lane Bryant and Charlotte Russe, which closed within days of one another last month.
The mall is a victim of new shopping center trends, changing demographics and the recession, but Regency Square General Manager Helen Ciesla said neither the mall’s management nor its owner, the financially troubled General Growth Properties Inc., is giving up on it.
“The mall’s intention is to stay here,” Ciesla said. “We’re a viable shopping center that serves the community.
“We will always have a need for retail. It’s the amount of retail that’s in question right now.”
To that end, Ciesla said the mall owner is considering several different options, among them filling the empty space with office or medical uses, selling off what is considered the west wing of the mall or even demolishing the west wing. The latter two options would be more difficult, however, because there are still some tenants in the west wing, including Sears, one of the mall’s four anchor stores.
At its height, Regency Square Mall was the place to shop in Northeast Florida. As a result, it became one of the most profitable retail centers in the nation in the 1970s, with annual sales averaging $156 per square foot compared with the national average at the time of $88 per square foot, according to an Urban Land Institute study published in 1978.
The mall attracted new retailers and restaurants to the city over the years — including Chick-fil-A, The Children’s Place, Belk and Old Navy — even as its popularity started to wane in the 1990s. The mall was also home to some of the most upscale boutiques in the area, including Lilli Rubin, which had only one other location in the nation in Atlanta.
As a teenager, Bonnie Hayflick and her mother, Janice Hayflick, traveled from Mandarin to shop at Regency Square Mall in the 1970s for special occasions and school clothes. Hayflick was so enamored with the mall that she got her first job there at the Body Shop at the age of 17.
Now the single-story, 1.4 million-square-foot mall is pockmarked with empty spaces that make up the 20 percent vacancy rate, according to the mall, compared with 6 percent in December 2008 and 4 percent in December 2007, according to the mall and data from the New York-based real estate information provider Trepp LLC.
But Ciesla said the Charlotte Russe space that just emptied is already under contract with a new tenant, as is the Gap space that has been empty longer. Two other new tenants, a gold buyer and a costume jewelry and accessories store, have already signed leases to take up space in the coming months.
More of the mall’s vacancies are in the west wing. In recent years, the mall has had an influx of local tenants who are filling some of the space once occupied mostly by national tenants that are starting to consolidate, Ciesla said.
Mike Khaled opened the upscale men’s clothing store Zionni on the west side of the mall in 1999 and relocated to a slightly smaller, renamed space on the east side of the mall called Manzoni in March because of the economy and the foot traffic.
Despite its recent challenges, he is still confident that Regency will strengthen when the economy recovers, especially if it was downsized in some way.
A steady decline
Regency Square Mall arguably started to decline in 1990 when The Avenues mall opened on the Southside, taking with it a portion of Regency Square Mall’s shoppers. The Arlington area’s sociodemographics also started to shift in the 1990s and crime started to become a problem at the mall.
John Saoud, now an associate at Colliers Dickinson Inc., worked at the Great American Cookie Co. and Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream at the mall as a teenager in the late 1990s. He remembers a distinct change when the movie theater was relocated to a new separate building outside. Families and couples on dates stopped going into the mall on Friday and Saturday nights, and the mall became a popular hang-out for a less scrupulous crowd reflected by the number of fights and shoplifting incidents.
The mall continued to decline, Saoud said, when a portion of State Road 9A was completed in the area, making it even easier to go past the Regency Square Mall to get to The Avenues.
But the linchpin of the mall’s decline, Saoud said, was the construction of the St. Johns Town Center to the south in 2005 and the River City Marketplace to the north in 2006, which continued to drain Regency Square Mall of customers.
“It’s really been cut off to the immediate West Arlington area,” Saoud said.
The nation’s worst economic recession in decades has forced more retailers inside the mall and nearby to shutter in the past two years, while others closed their Regency Square Mall store to consolidate to more profitable stores at the Town Center and River City Marketplace.
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