Palisades Center turns 20 years old: Looking back and forward

Twenty years ago, the Palisades Center opened its doors, following more than a decade's worth of protests, court battles, cost overruns and eager anticipation from the public.

Four anchor stores opened on March 4, 1998, with Olympic Silver Medalist Nancy Kerrigan brought in on a $10,000 contract to inaugurate the fourth-floor ice rink and bring star power to the ceremonies.

The mega-mall carried the weight of a community's fears and expectations worthy of its $400 million, 2-million-square-foot imprint.

"Two decades ago, where others saw emptiness, we saw the future," says the narrator in a promotional video on the mall's website.

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Opponents feared West Nyack would be engulfed in a traffic nightmare, that the hordes of shoppers would include a wave of criminals who would terrorize the populace and drain police resources, and that it would lay waste to the county's downtowns.

Supporters hoped it would pour tens of millions in sales tax revenue into the county's coffers, create jobs and attract high-end retailers.

Born of battle

The road to that opening day stretched back to the mid-1980s. The grassroots battle waged by residents and environmentalists was the fiercest in a generation. Even the owners of the Nanuet Mall jumped in to bankroll the protests.

Greg Clary, who covered the years leading up to the Palisades Center's opening for The Journal News, remembered a chaotic Clarkstown planning board meeting attended by some 1,000 residents — a crowd so large it had to be moved from Town Hall to the high school.

"The cop handling traffic outside said it's more traffic than we get for Fourth of July fireworks, and there were fireworks ... people yelling at each other."

Clary said the contentiousness at public forums contained no middle ground. "You were either pro-mall or anti-mall," he said.

"It was an ongoing battle until the day it opened and then people settled down and were battling over where to find a parking spot," he said.

Shirley Lasker was an organizer of the Rockland Civic Association, which formed once news broke about how large the Palisades Center would be.

The concept of a building a mega-mall atop a former landfill was decidedly unappealing to Lasker and her neighbors, who had moved to West Nyack to enjoy a quiet suburban life.

"I stood up at a Town Board meeting and I said, 'What are you guys doing, who needs the second largest mall in America in West Nyack?' " Lasker recalled.

She said that although it was plain the majority of Clarkstown's residents didn't want the mall, members of the Town Board and Planning Board were "in cahoots" with the developer, who finally won the approvals needed to build.

Lasker, who was elected to the Town Board a year after the Palisades opened, called the mall "an abomination when you go in there ... architecturally, it's ugly."

She said the county and school district reaped the majority of the tax benefits, not the town, and said the mall created a security burden that outweighed its worth.

But she did find one positive that came out of the fight over the shopping mall.

"Part of what happened was there was an awakening among the people of Clarkstown about what kind of town they wanted," said Lasker, who now lives in Upper Nyack. "It led people to want to protect the environment of the town and protect open space, and also to tighten our planning laws and also our ethics laws."

George Hoehmann, born and raised in West Nyack, also had misgivings about the scope of the project but was more optimistic than Lasker.

"I was hopeful at the time that it could be good for the town but I definitely had concerns about what it was going to do to the roads, public safety in the town," he said recently. "I definitely was excited when it came through."

"We took our two kids at the time to their soft opening," recalled Hoehmann, who a decade later became a member of the Planning Board and later the Town Board before being elected supervisor in 2016. "I remember walking through the place and thinking it was pretty ugly but they had some interesting things going on and that was an exciting time, watching what was taking place with the mall as it was getting started."

Sinking feeling

The mall quickly became the subject of lore and legend, perhaps the most popular being that it was sinking into the ground and would soon close. Others reported seeing cracks and feeling the floor shake.

Rosie O'Donnell turned the rumors into national news during the monologue on her TV show in January 1999.

''Nobody will go to the mall anymore," O'Donnell said, giggling along with the audience. Rosie, who at the time lived in Nyack, said finding a parking spot during the Christmas rush was no problem because people were staying away.

Mall managing partner Tom Valenti appeared on the show the following morning to refute the rumors.

At the time Clarkstown's Building Department said cracks in the mall's walls and floors, a sinking basement parking lot and vibrating floors were to be expected when a building of that size is plopped on top of a former landfill and swamp.

Millions of visitors, and dollars

At a recent celebration marking the Palisades Center's 20th anniversary, officials and business leaders took turns praising the mall and wishing it future success.

General manager Darrin Houseman used the occasion to tout the site as "one of the largest and most visited malls in the country," with more than 24 million visitors from all 50 states and around the globe.

Houseman said the mall's 200-plus tenants included 25 from the original lineup, including Dave & Buster’s, Johnny Rockets, Barnes & Noble, Target, Macy’s, Lord & Taylor and Bed Bath & Beyond.

In a subsequent email, Houseman said the Palisades Center employed more than 5,000 people and had pumped over $954 million in sales taxes and $395 million in property taxes into Rockland County during its two decades.

Property tax numbers were not available from the county's Finance Department.

The mall's promotional video takes credit for "bringing economic growth to Clarkstown, raising awareness, property values and overall pride to the area."

The town will receive sales tax revenue sharing of about $4 million in 2018, Hoehmann said.

The mall has an assessed value of almost $140 million, and is paying about $14 million in school taxes for the 2017/18 school year and $7 million in Clarkstown taxes for 2018, according to figures supplied by the town.

The shopping center has filed several challenges to its tax assessments, and in 2013 the town and school district reached a settlement that refunded the mall $20 million.

What the town spends to provide services to the sprawling mall pretty much wipes out what it receives in taxes, Hoehmann said.

"On balance it's a close call if we receive what our true costs are across all town departments that service the mall," the supervisor said.

"There was a lot of discussion about how the mall was going to generate an enormous amount of tax revenue that was going to keep everybody's taxes really low," he said. That I don't think ever really happened."

Crime figures

If the mall didn't generate the anticipated tax windfall, neither did it produce the crime wave some feared given the number of people it attracts, according to the Clarkstown Police Department.

The department's crime figures from January 2007 to March 2018 showed the Palisades Center accounted for 28 percent of the town's reported robberies and 26 percent of reported larcenies.

The mall accounted for lower percentages for other reported crimes: arson, 9 percent; assault, 8 percent; burglary, 8 percent; and rape, 5 percent.

"When I reflect back some 20 years ago I remember the trepidation many residents had of the 'new mall' being built in West Nyack," Police Chief Raymond McCullagh said. "I look at the crime statistics generated from the Palisades Center mall, and I can say the mall is a safe place."

Competitive challenges

Roger Cohen, president of Nyack Chamber of Commerce, said his village's downtown had remained vibrant alongside its neighbor just two miles west.

"The chamber thinks the mall does attract a lot of positive business to Rockland and to Nyack," said Cohen, who has been with the chamber for six years."Also, the shopping experience at the mall and Nyack are quite different experiences. Those experiences are complementary and not mutually exclusive."

Cohen said Nyack's small businesses perhaps face a bigger threat than that posed by the Palisades Center.

"It's very difficult for any retail business to compete these days, especially with Amazon and other online stores," he said. "It's as much of a problem for everyone (as the mall)."

Lasker also warned of the dangers that online shopping posed to a town that had become "over-retailed."

"What happens if they fail?" she asked."What happens if they abandon the mall?"

Hoehmann said he believed the mall was in good financial shape, but "God forbid they're not successful, there's an enormous hole in the county budget, the school district budget and the town budget."

What's next

Marketing director Rachel Chester said the Palisades Center would continue to diversify its mix of retail with dining and entertainment.

She pointed to the addition of a ropes course, escape rooms, bowling alley and comedy club as examples of the mall's efforts "to stay vibrant, relevant and enhance the overall guest experience."

Hoehmann said it was crucial that the mall reinvent itself as an entertainment destination to counter the threat retailers face from online sellers.

He said the town was close to a deal with the owners in 2016 that would have allowed them to add space upstairs for an entertainment venue as well as adding a multi-level parking garage.

The talks collapsed and the owners filed a $50 million federal lawsuit targeted at lifting Clarkstown's restrictive covenant that forbids any expansion without a public referendum.

EklecCo NewCo, the Delaware-based LLC that owns the Palisades Center, is claiming that back when the mall was being built, it was forced into accepting the covenant, which is now claims is a violation of the company's constitutional rights.

Hoehmann noted that residents in November 2002 voted against releasing the company from the covenant.

"They want to expand, and I think that we're not adverse to them expanding the space upstairs," he said. "Their initial discussion was favorable ... the rub was can they expand without a permissive referendum? We have one opinion and their attorneys have another."

Hoehmann continued: "It's hard to come 20 years later and say, 'We had a gun put to our head and was forced into this,' and they agreed to it and there already was a permissive referendum 15 years ago."

At the crossroads

Its website positions the Palisades Center as "the center of it all," and for many Rockland residents it continues to occupy that place.

"On balance it's turned out to be a destination for me and many others." Hoehmann said. "There were many fears early on and most were not realized and it's certainly a place I find myself at more times than I realize.

Clary said the mall instantly took its place as the new crossroads of Rockland County.

"It's what Rockland became famous for," he said.

But for others, the immense marketplace has shrunk in importance over the years.

Alyssa Sunkin-Strube recalled her excitement as a 12-year-old when it opened, drawing her attention away from the Nanuet Mall, which paled in comparison. The new mall quickly became the place to be for Sunkin-Strube and her friends.

"In the eyes of a kid, you had this four-floor mall with all these bells and whistles," said Sunkin-Strube, of Valley Cottage.

Now 32, she parks in the commuter lot outside the Palisades Center to catch the TZ Express en route to her Midtown communications job — but rarely goes inside to shop.

Instead, she favors the Shops at Nanuet — which she still refers to as the Nanuet Mall.

"A lot of my shopping if I shop in Rockland at all is at the Nanuet Mall — Ann Taylor, Sur La Table," Sunkin-Strube said.

The Palisades Center, she said, "has lost a bit of its luster. I'm in my 30s. It's not the 'in' place for me and my friends."

Where shoppers come from

Based on ZIP code data received through the mall's WiFi, 56 percent of visitors travel from more than 20 miles outside of Rockland County.

27 percent are from outside New York State.

About the Palisades Center

Sits on 172 acres of land

4 levels

8,500 parking spaces

More than 220 businesses

40 White Houses could fit inside

1 million-square-foot roof

40 escalators

8 passenger elevators

11 freight elevators

1907 antique restored carousel

Indoor 60-plus-foot-tall Ferris wheel

Source: The Palisades Center

Twitter: @Bee_Bob