At the Macy’s building in Ardmore’s Suburban Square, the
push-ups won’t be in the lingerie section anymore.
Shuttered by the troubled department-store chain
early last year, the late 1920s building is being retrofitted into what will be
one of the first Pennsylvania locations for the expanding upscale health-club
operator Life Time Fitness Inc.
The change comes as the venerable shopping center is
refashioned to serve residents of the increasingly more densely populated
Philadelphia suburb that surrounds it, within a retail environment that sees
department stores struggling.
“It continues to evolve,” Nina Rogers, real estate
director for Suburban Square’s owner, New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Kimco Realty
Corp., said of the mall in an interview this week. “When the Macy’s building
closed, it provided us with an incredible opportunity.”
March's shutdown of Macy's Suburban Square location was
part of the Cincinnati-based chain’s nationwide push to shore up its balance
sheet by shedding expensive real estate in under-performing locations.
The Suburban Square store had been losing traffic for
years to Macy’s King of Prussia Mall location fewer than 10 miles away, said
Steven Gartner, who markets space at the Ardmore property as a managing
director with real estate services firm CBRE in Philadelphia.
Last week, Macy’s announced that another store in King of
Prussia’s orbit, its Plymouth Meeting Mall branch, would be shuttered in
another round of closures involving 68 locations.
For Kimco, the conversion of the Suburban Square Macy’s
is part of a $70 million renovation plan that also includes a new four-level,
625-space parking garage with ground-floor retail space and an expansion of the
mall’s Trader Joe’s food market.
Life Time Fitness will occupy almost 79,000 square feet
of the approximately 100,000-square-foot Macy’s building near the mall's
center, with most of the structure’s remaining space going to a branch of
Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s West Elm furniture chain, Rogers said.
Both are scheduled to open in October, she said.
Life Time Fitness' founder and chief executive, Bahram
Akradi, said in an interview that his clubs aim to match the amenities of a
high-end wellness resort, with lavish spa facilities and upscale cafes with
healthy menus, in addition to classes and exercise studios.
The company currently operates more than 120 clubs across
the United States and Canada, including an existing location in Mount Laurel.
In addition to Suburban Square, clubs also are set to open this year in King of
Prussia and Fort Washington, with more area locations planned, Akradi said.
“We love the immediate community,” he said of the
affluent Main Line neighborhoods that surround Suburban Square. “That’s exactly
the customer we want to serve.”
Other previously unannounced leases at the mall include
blow-drying salon Drybar LLC, scheduled to open later this year, and manicure
chain Anthony Vince Nail Spa, which should open in early 2018, Rogers said.
The health club and beauty services could help Kimco
boost traffic at Suburban Square substantially, drawing more frequent visits
than Macy’s ever could, said Shawn Howton, faculty director at Villanova
University’s Daniel M. DiLella Center for Real Estate.
Plans are in the works for additional multifamily
projects in the vicinity that would increase the area's density and walkability
even more, further boosting the ranks of potential health-club patrons and mall
visitors, Howton said.
Those projects include developer Carl Dranoff’s 110-unit
One Ardmore proposal on a nearby Cricket Avenue parking lot
and a 77-unit development at 47-65 Cricket Avenue planned by Pete Staz and
Peter Spain of Core Development.
“If you want to live in the new condos, you want to be
able to walk to a fitness center,” Howton said. “Long term, it’s probably a
good part of the transformation of that space.”
Source: Philly.com
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