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Town center triumphs over national mall owner
West Hartford’s Blue Back Square opens despite two referendums and litigation instigated by the Taubman company.
The November opening of Blue Back Square — the 550,000 sq. ft., $200 million-plus expansion of a long-established town center in West Hartford, Connecticut — marked the end of a series of legal and political obstructions orchestrated by the Taubman Centers Inc., one of America’s largest owners of regional malls.
Taubman, based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, owns nearly two dozen large malls, including Westfarms, an enclosed 1.3-million sq. ft. shopping center less than four miles from West Hartford Center. After architect Richard Heapes and his partners in Street-Works LLC announced plans to build a 20-acre addition to the mixed-use center of West Hartford, an affluent suburb with 64,000 residents, Taubman tried for more than three years to kill the project.
Taubman forced two town referendums, in 2004 and 2005, aimed at scuttling the municipal government’s involvement in Blue Back Square — a tight-knit mix of condominium and rental apartments, stores, cinemas, offices, medical facilities, and civic buildings. Both referendums endorsed Blue Back Square — the first by a margin of three to two, the second by a margin of more than two to one. The company also failed when it filed a lawsuit containing eight counts; the last of Taubman’s claims was tossed out of court in April.
The contention between Taubman, on the one hand, and the town and the developers, on the other, was one of the fiercest attempts a regional mall owner has ever made to prevent a new urban center from being built.
The Nov. 3 ribbon-cutting for the Square — named for the “Blue-backed Speller” that West Hartford native Noah Webster compiled to instruct American schoolchildren more than two centuries ago — took place as the town was preparing to file a counter-suit against Taubman.
“We have a fiduciary responsibility to recover the taxpayer money and the other damages associated with the delays of the project because of Taubman’s frivolous claims,” said Mayor Scott Slifka. The town is asking $4 million in legal expenses and lost revenue, blaming Taubman for unnecessary legal wrangling that delayed the start of Blue Back Square by about a year.
Taubman’s campaign against Blue Back Square “was their [Taubman’s] attempt to say ‘don’t do this near any of their malls,’” Heapes told New Urban News. Heapes said his development team was able to persist in the face of Taubman’s opposition because “our equity partner is European and a single individual” — Ronus Properties of Atlanta, which is owned by a businessman across the Atlantic. If the project had depended on financing from a conventional US source, Blue Back might have been shelved, he said.
In the late 1980s, Heapes designed Mizner Park, a pathbreaking new urban center that has become one of the most popular gathering places in Boca Raton, Florida. Since then, he has played a major role in designing mixed-use centers such as Bethesda Row in Bethesda, Maryland, Santana Row in San Jose, California, and Rockville Town Center in Rockville, Maryland. In 1999 he and Ken Narva founded Street-Works, in White Plains, New York, with the intention of not only consulting on projects around the country but also becoming a developer.
“We have eight other deals we’re looking into now,” Heapes told New Urban News during a tour of the West Hartford project. “We’re looking up and down the East Coast.” Street-Works lines up financial partners for its projects and often works closely with local governments. Two cities where the company has decided to work on projects are Quincy, Massachusetts, and Norwalk, Connecticut.
For the undertaking in West Hartford, Street-Works established a firm called Blue Back Square Development LLC (BBS), which agreed to make new or expanded civic buildings important elements in the town center expansion. “The police and courts building has been renovated,” Heapes noted. A public library has been enlarged. The town is getting a municipal office building large enough to accommodate the Board of Education as well as town departments. The First Congregational Church, a large orange-brick complex occupying one corner of the project’s site, also has been renovated. “Twenty-five percent of the project consists of civic uses,” said Heapes.
The town contributed several key properties to the project, along with $48.8 million in bond funds, which will be paid off through revenue generated by the development. An old town hall, which had been occupied by the Board of Education, has been converted to commercial uses, including restaurants. As part of the package, BBS has built two large parking garages which the town — not the developer — will own.
MANAGING THE MIX
As Heapes describes it, the key to Blue Back is that it consists of four components, each composing 25 percent of the project: civic buildings; retail, restaurants, and entertainment; housing (both rental and for-sale); and health care and wellness facilities. The sloping terrain made it possible for Blue Back to have two different ground levels, laying uses on top of one another more than would otherwise have been feasible. A large Barnes & Noble bookstore, for example, is partly underneath a Criterion five-screen movie theater. The arrangement is “almost a Rubik’s Cube,” he observed.
Some in the Hartford area have complained that the center is made up mainly of national retailers like Crate & Barrel, The Cheesecake Factory, and clothing and outdoor retailer REI. Heapes said, however, that BBS has brought in the kinds of anchors and activities that West Hartford Center once had, such as a movie theater, but which it lost years ago.
CONTRAST IN STYLES
The white, contemporary Crate & Barrel store stands across a narrow street from a building containing small ground-floor shops topped by four stories of condo units with traditional-looking façade elements. The contrast in style and scale is somewhat jarring, but when asked about it, Heapes contended that the differences of architectural character make sense. “Major retail and high-end residential — there’s no way they should look the same,” he said.
The varied aesthetics set Blue Back apart from more consistently themed centers, which are sometimes dismissed as “fake.” In West Hartford, the contrasts generate an urban feel like that of a traditional downtown, where various property owners make their own decisions — not necessarily in concert with the neighbors.
Although the Square has only two owners — the town and BBS — and although everything is being constructed in less than three years, “I want it to feel like it happened over time,” Heapes explained,. Pointing to a bright green storefront that stands out from its neighbors, Heapes said of the aesthetic mix: “It’s a Zen thing. This feels real to me.”
Most of the Square’s buildings have no backs — just fronts on sidewalks that are intended to be attractive to pedestrians. This made loading “really a challenge,” according to Heapes. The solution was the establishment of just one location on each block for deliveries. At the Square’s two parking garages, the number of vehicular entrances to the garages has similarly been kept to a minimum.
The Square offers approximately 1,960 parking spaces, including 164 on the streets and 528 in a town lot. One parking garage is partly embedded in the health facilities associated with Hartford Hospital, but the other is a free-standing, four-story-high structure that occupies a full block. Although one end of the garage will house an American Legion post, the building contains neither ground-floor retail nor a liner building to mask the parking, which stands across a street from The Lofts at Blue Back Square, a building containing 48 apartments.
Asked about the garage design, Heapes said that what he considered essential were such things as “higher ceilings and better lighting, to make the garage feel more open, and having daylight on both sides.” Instead of elevators, the garage is equipped with escalators. “That’s really a retail consumer-female decision,” he said, observing that suburban women generally dislike going into parking garages.
The street and sidewalk network makes it easy to walk between the Square and the older, adjoining section of West Hartford Center. The public portions of the project, including the streets, sidewalks, and civic buildings, will be maintained by the town. “You’re not at Westfarms, where private police tell you what to do,” wrote Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green. “You are outside, on public property: Protest the war, support the troops. Buy something. Refuse to buy something.” It’s your choice.
“Every part of the project tries to tell something about Noah and his interests” — which included gardening, abolitionism, education, spelling reform — “without being silly about it,” Heapes said.
During public discussions, an important selling point for the Square was that West Hartford Center needed more housing. Blue Back offers a condo building with 59 units, of which 43 units have been sold, at prices of $350,000 to $900,000. Heapes said the condos command $550 to $600 per square foot.
The other intended condo building was converted to loft rentals and redesigned prior to construction. Instead of the “4,500 sq. ft. superluxury units” originally envisioned, Heapes said, there are lofts of 600 to 940 sq. ft., renting for $1,500 to $3,000 a month. The change allowed Blue Back to adjust to the downturn in the condo market, and it also increased the number of people living in the Square.
This article is from the December 2007 issue of New Urban News
Plan by Street-Works
A plan for Blue Back Square includes first-floor retail tenants. A multiplex cinema is located above the Barnes & Noble
Philip Langdon
