Laura Peters

lpeters@newsleader.com

STAUNTON - Malls used to be at the epicenter of all we loved and feared about American suburban culture.

It’s where teens would escape their parents for an afternoon (and how parents would escape their teens), where you’d window shop to your heart’s desires or where you’d get your first store credit card.

For several generations, malls have been part of the American coming of age story. They’ve been celebrated -- and demolished -- in seminal cinematic scenes of the 80s and 90s. But within the past few decades, malls have been on the decline. It’s something Staunton has seen in its very own backyard.

The Staunton Mall, located in Augusta County, was built in the late 1960s as an open air mall and later enclosed. By the 1990s, the mall had seen a facelift and brief revival, before everything started to dwindle into the sadness the mall has become.

Still, with closed stores, empty spaces and a sparse parking lot, the Staunton Mall is trying to reinvent itself yet again for a new century, according to Megan Frook, the mall’s new marketing manager.

Frook knows malls. She spent most of her teen years in the malls in Northern Virginia.

“It was basically just the freedom to go to a place not monitored by your parents all the time,” she said. “But, be safe in a semi-controlled environment.”

It was a place to hang out, to shop, eat and gossip, Frook said.

“We went there all the time,” she said. “That was what I did in my teenage years, sort of a coming of age thing.”

Frook is part of a new management team, Asprey Real Estate Corporation, trying to breathe life into the nearly half-century old edifice. The mall was previously managed by the former owners Staunton Mall Realty LLC. Asprey took over management in August of 2015, and Frook got busy.

“We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what went on in the past,” Frook said.

Staunton Mall Realty LLC sold the property to Staunton Mall LLC, a Delaware company, on Feb. 19, 2014 for $4.5 million.

The property is valued at $8.4 million. That includes the almost 35 acres the mall sits on, four buildings and other improvements, according to Augusta tax information. The land alone is valued at almost $2.8 million.

Frook said the past six months has entailed a lot of cleanup — not just of the building, but of severed relationships.

“There’s a certain amount of disappointment on the part of some mall tenants on how the mall was managed. Being upfront with them with our plans and knowing they are included and involved is important,” she said. “(Tenants) are cautiously optimistic,” noting that “we are still in the beginning of things.”

The rumor of the mall’s imminent demise has festered for so long, Frook said she’s been working hard to change that perception. And it’s not just about the mall but about being part of the larger community as well.

“We’re interested in being a part of what’s going on in Augusta County and Staunton,” she said. “We’re open to suggestions, to get a feel for what people want.”

Getting tenants in is also a huge component of a growing the mall and its image.

“There’s been a lot of changeover,” Frook said. “We’re doing a lot behind the scenes. Being consistent and active and letting people know what’s going on … only time can prove that.”

Frook said she’s received a lot of feedback from the public.

“They all want to know what we want to do with it,” she said.

“I think that shopping will never go out of style,” Frook added. “That’s never going to be something that people do without.”

With the rise of the web-based economy, the emphasis by small cities on boosting local shopping by reviving cozy downtown main streets, the image of malls as larger than life shopping destinations has lost some of its luster. Frook is intent on making the mall a viable place for gathering. In this new place the Staunton Mall is becoming, the stores have changed, often radically, and the idea of what a local mall is has shifted on its circa 1980s axis toward a very different looking horizon.

Different tenants and improvements

With a diversified space, the Staunton Mall is able to offer something somewhat out of the norm. Many spaces are occupied by gyms or fitness-centered business. These new tenants generate synergy with other stores located at the mall including GNC, a nutrition and vitamin store, and Hibbetts Sports, which offers sporting goods.

“Having a diversified space like that can make (the mall) more of a destination,” Frook said.

Major names from our collective mall memory are either long gone, leaving the mall scene or disappearing entirely, like Hallmark, Goody’s, Montgomery Ward or KB Toys.

“Depending on the level of mall, there are different stores that survive and those that haven’t,” Frook said.

Walk through the Staunton Mall today and you’ll find a diversification that speaks to something far different than a celebration of consumer culture. With a tae kwon do dojang, a gymnastics studio, a fitness center and a CrossFit box, the Staunton Mall has become a place for healthy lifestyle choices. Many of the fitness oriented tenants have moved to the mall for bigger spaces that cost less to rent.

In the midst of this new mall culture, management aims to revive a few of the traditional elements, perhaps most notably the theater space. Regal Cinemas left in 2010 and the then-management at the mall took over the theater. The six screens have remained empty relatively since then. The big thing standing in the way to get a theater back at the mall is digitizing it, which means more money.

Some improvements have been made to the mall, Frook said, including getting the parking lot lighting functioning and patching the roof. Not all the infrastructure work is done, but it’s something the mall is working at in an incremental way, she said.

Repaving the mall’s parking lot is on the list of things to do, but in the meantime, filling potholes and smoothing out areas are ongoing and in the works. Snow and winter weather will push back on these types of improvements.

The Dead Mall trend

Standing in direct contrast to plans to revive the Staunton Mall are a veritable zombie army of dead, dying, and (some might even say) undead malls, laying waste to vast acreage across the country.

DeadMalls.com documents the decline of some of those malls.

It’s been almost a decade since the website has featured Staunton’s very own. At the time they did, the mall was still somewhat full and not as desolate is it appears now.

So, is it dead or not dead? Is it dying or reviving? Exactly which mall movie are we stuck in here? What’s the test to know what we’re dealing with?

A mall is considered dead when occupancy falls below 30 percent and consumer traffic has dropped significantly, according to Jack Thomas of DeadMalls.com.

“I always compare the dead mall phenomenon to Darwinism. The strong malls will adapt, the weak ones will die off — and some should,” Thomas said. “Back in the 80s and 90s, malls were built like wildfire. A town that should have only had one or two had eight. We’ve been seeing for a long time now, first here in the Northeast, now to other parts of the country, a culmination of that line of thinking. With the way things are in the economy, we may see this for years to come.”

A mall is considered struggling when overall occupancy is less that 75 percent but more than 30 percent, or at least two anchor spaces are empty, he said.

The Staunton Mall is seeing between 65 and 70 percent right now, according to Frook. The mall has one vacant anchor store and have about 40 leased tenants with a number of available storefronts.

It boils down to two reasons a mall would die off, according to Thomas — competition and mismanagement. The Staunton Mall has seen its days of being tossed around to different management teams and name changes, and overall change in the area cannot be overlooked.

“Demographics also come into play, if there is a shift in clientele, gang activity or store theft. Occasionally, it’s a mix of all three,” Thomas said. “If a newer and bigger mall opens nearby and draws people in with greater offerings, a smaller older mall will fall behind.”

Newer stores did start to pop up nearby in the form of strip malls. Waynesboro opened Waynesboro Town Center in the late 1990s and now has stores like Target, Books a Million, Kohl’s and Bed Bath and Beyond.

“If management doesn’t step in to try and lure new tenants or pick up the image of the mall then it is not going to keep or bring business back,” Thomas said. “This is a double edged sword a lot of the time, because the owners need their money too, so rent gets jacked up to cover the cost of the operation.”

“An anchor store, for example, generally is charged less rent because they are considered a destination tenant,” Thomas added. “When those stores leave, the smaller stores have to pick up the pace. National chains may not want to do this however, and in some cases their respective leases require the presence of said anchor for them to stay, so they throw in the towel too. Local mom and pop tenants or temporary tenants then leave because they cannot afford to sustain their business while remaining in the mall. It’s a domino effect.”

International Council of Shopping Centers CEO Tom McGee said those malls that have survived are getting stronger and mall occupancy is above 94 percent, which is a high that hasn’t been seen since 1987.

“Malls and shopping centers are also integral to not just the companies that own them – but to the communities they serve,” he said. “They are a significant job creator, driver of gross domestic product and critical revenue source for the communities they serve through the generation of sales taxes ($140.5 billion annually) and the payment of property taxes ($23.9 billion annually).”

“Right now only 7 percent of total retail sales occur online – the rest are in physical stores,” he added. “So if a property is struggling it’s not because of e-commerce, but likely because of economic and demographic issues.”

Victor Gruen designed the first modern day mall with the idea to bring the community together in the 1950s. Gruen wanted malls to be a place to gather for those who have moved out into the suburbs, a “third place” in suburban geographies where home and work were located in distant places bridged only by driving.

Gruen would lure people into the malls with extravagant window displays and large open spaces with fountains, large stairways and greenery. It was inviting.

“Essentially they were to be indoor cities, with parks, plant life, petting zoos, community events, etcetera,” Thomas said. “Eventually the consumerism won out. In time, we may see another shift in a new direction. Basically, whatever keeps people in the door is the way these malls survive.”

Shifting mall plans

That’s where re-imagining malls comes in.

One thing that the Staunton Mall has going for it currently is the wide variety of what is offered there. With gyms, food options and even a model train museum, Frook said the diversity of both store offerings and things to do is only going to expand.

And in its efforts to reimagine the mall and its place in today’s culture, the Staunton Mall is not alone against a world of zombies. Other projects are ongoing. One mall outside of Richmond was purchased by the county’s economic development authority to be revived.

Talks of redeveloping Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield County started to bubble in the early 2000s.

“The mall had gone into severe decline and it became clear that the property would not be redeveloped without county participation,” said Garrett Hart, director of Chesterfield economic development.

The county was able to finance the new urban revitalization effort through the economic development authority to the sum of $16 million for the site purchase and infrastructure improvements, Hart said. The County is repaid the $16 million purchase from the sales of the land to the developer and the infrastructure improvements are paid for by the tax increment financing, or TIF tax proceeds.

“Phases one retail is complete and the phase two residential will start leasing in the spring, phase three retail will begin by October of this year and phase four office could have its first building and tenant by the end of this year,” Hart said. “The project has been a great success and has acted as the anchor for private sector reinvestment in the entire area.”

The site includes a grocery store, restaurants, nail and hair salons and hundreds of upscale, neo-urban-style apartments, according to Hart.

“(There’s been) quite a bit of revival and we are really just getting started,” Hart said. “The mall was assessed at around $16 million when the EDA purchased it. There is now well over $130 million in value on the same site now. The malls across the street and just to the west of the project are both being redone and have attracted quite a few new businesses and retailers.”

Similar efforts can be seen in Staunton, like with the city’s endeavor Staunton Crossing. The process of obtaining the 300-acre Staunton Crossing property started in 2006. The property used to be the site of Western State Hospital and has about 26 buildings in varying conditions. Staunton paid $15 million for the property through city-issued bonds in a land-swap deal with the state.

Staunton’s Economic Development Authority, which owns the land, has been investing in upgrades to it to make it into a mixed-use development with residential, industry and more.

Construction has started on the entrance of the development, where new lights and roads underway.

Now a hotel has decided to call Staunton Crossing its home. Back in October, the city council voted to sell 19 acres of publicly held land located along U.S. 250 to Staunton Crossing Partners, LLC — a local developer who hopes for a five-year build-out that includes businesses like a Marriott-affiliated hotel.

As for the county stepping in to aid the Staunton Mall, Economic Development Director Amanda Glover said the county supports the mall, but it’s privately owned and the county doesn’t see stepping in anytime soon.

“The Staunton Mall is privately owned and Augusta County would work collaboratively with a private entity on any type of development,” Glover said. “It is important for citizens to be able to shop locally and to have access to a variety of goods and services. Augusta County is always interested in working with the development community and private businesses to enhance local shopping opportunities.”

Follow Laura Peters @peterslaura and @peterpants. You can reach her at lpeters@newsleader.com or 213-9125.