Four days of ribbon-cutting and grand-opening festivities have put “the last big exclamation point” on the ambitious $100 million redevelopment of Hammond Square.
And “Hammond is getting, without a doubt, one of the newest concepts in retail that has evolved over the last 10 years,” James E. “Jimmy” Maurin says proudly.
The board chairman of Stirling Properties makes that statement with evident professional and personal satisfaction. Although Stirling has been developing shopping centers for more than three decades, Hammond Square is obviously a special project for Maurin. The estimated 850,000-square foot melding of a “power” (big anchor stores) and “lifestyle” (smaller retailers) shopping concepts that has risen from rubble of a smaller, less than successful regional mall, is located in his own home town.
As Maurin did the ribbon-snipping honors on October 1 – which included laudatory speeches from area dignitaries, a second-line down Palace Drive where new retailers were opening their doors, and four surrounding days of tenant-sponsored giveaways and other celebratory events -- he was able to tout a complex that is 90 percent full and has the expectancy of being fully occupied by next summer.
Open, or soon-to-be-open, occupants of approximately 600,000 square feet of retail space include original tenants Dillards, Rite-Aid, Sears and AMC Theatres, new anchors Target, JC Penney, Best Buy, and T.J. Maxx and restaurants Sante Fe Cattle Co., Raising Canes, Albasha, and Phil’s Grill. Along Palace Drive, Hammond Square’s main street, are Books-A-Million, Shoe Department Encore, Rue 21, Hibbett Sports, Verizon Wireless, Coach House Gifts, Paris Parker, Foot Locker, GNC, Great American Cooking, Merle Norman and Purse Bag Pattie’s.
Billed as “coming soon” are Zales, Nagoya Sushi & Steak, East of Italy and Smoothie King.
Hammond Square’s initial success is flying in the face of a struggling national economy and some initial head scratching and hem hawing by retail companies, who wondered whether Hammond, where the original Hammond Square Mall had struggled since 1976, could support a major shopping center.
Maurin, however, had no doubts, thanks to his hometown roots and connections.
“There is no question that if you didn’t live in Hammond, as I have all my life, you would be considered crazy to do something like this in a town the size of Hammond,” Maurin said.
Mayor Mayson Foster uses almost the same words. “If you would have had an outside developer looking simply at the demographic numbers,” he said, “there’s no way he would have invested millions into the city of Hammond.”
“It surprises people,” he points out, “that our population base is only about 20,000. But the demographics do not include, “anyone who is not a resident of Hammond – Southeastern, North Oaks Hospital, surrounding areas where there are some high income people.”
The Hammond Square developers, he said, “were aware of the demographics being greater than what the numbers on paper were showing – because they’re from here.”
Maurin asserts that a bad multi-level design doomed the original Hammond Square Mall from just about the beginning, insolating successful anchors Dillards, JC Penney, and Sears from the smaller retailers who needed to benefit from their traffic. “I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t Hammond,” Maurin said. “Hammond was a great place to live and was growing like a weed. There was tremendous growth through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, culminated by the 15,000 people who moved here the day after Katrina and didn’t leave.”
He had begun buying property around Hammond Square Mall at Interstate 12 and U.S. 51 in the late 90s with the idea of building a mall periphery center. But after lengthy litigation with the mall’s owners which went all the way to the state Supreme Court, the owners “basically put their hands up and said, we give up, we’re going to sell you this mall,” Maurin recounted. “I didn’t want to buy; all I wanted to do was build my shopping center. They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.” Stirling acquired the mall for $14 million in May 2006.
“We spent the rest of the year figuring out what we were going to do and announced at the end of ’06 that we were going to tear the mall down,” Maurin said. “All the tenants shut down in April 2007, and then we began the demolition. It took us about a year just to get the old mall down.”
“It’s been a big undertaking,” said Maurin. While the openings last year of JC Penney and earlier this summer of Target, Best Buy and T.J. Maxx, as well as Albasha and Santa Fe Steak and Cattle Co. restaurants were landmark events, the opening of Main Street will allow people “to get a feel and look at what we’re doing,” Maurin said.
What they are doing, he explained, “is an evolution of what we have seen occur over the last 10 years” – combining the power and lifestyle shopping center concepts to create a shopping “destination for everybody.”
The new Palace Drive, which Maurin describes as “more of a pedestrian street,” compliments the center’s anchor stores.
“You want to create that main street mentality,” he said. “You want the buildings to be close to each other with walking, heavy landscaping. There’s a whole music system so there will be music on main street.”
“Yes, this is a relatively new concept,” Maurin said. “I’ve seen it be very successful in the rest of the country and, so far, everything we’ve opened up here has just blown the roof off in terms of success.”
“JC Penney opened a year ago with 13 other stores and it’ll end its first year as the number two of that group of stores that opened the same day,” he said. Target, he added, opened about two dozen stores simultaneously this summer, including the Hammond Square facility.
“I know the head of real estate for Target very well,” Maurin said. “When I saw him in Chicago recently, his comment to me was ‘What kind of water are ya’ll drinking down there?’ The Hammond Target is running number one or two every week among its summer-opening peers.
“Everybody underestimated the Hammond market,” Maurin said.
Because of that underestimation, Maurin admits it initially took “a lot of hard sell” to convince the big tenants to commit to Hammond Square.
“Business leaders in Hammond who are friends of mine were telling me, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got to do this,’” he said. “They said we’ve got Southeastern, we’ve got a great hospital in North Oaks, we’ve got growth, downtown Hammond is vibrant, but we don’t have the complete shopping experience.”
The old mall’s anchors Dillards, Sears and Rite Aid were committed to staying put throughout the demolition and rebuilding, and JC Penney, whose original mall store was torn down, was eager to return, having been a staple of first downtown Hammond, then Hammond Square Mall for decades. For the rest, “I used my 30-year relationship with all these big tenants and said, ‘You’re coming to my hometown and you don’t have a choice,’” Maurin said. “I twisted some arms, quite honestly to get them to take a chance on Hammond.”
His personal relationships also paid off with local government. Faced with the need for infrastructure improvements, Maurin told Mayor Foster (a high school classmate) and the city council, ‘Guys, I can’t do this alone.’ They said, tell us what we’ll need.’”
A consultant put a $12 million price tag on improvements. They included interstate ramp improvements, widening U.S. 51, a new ring road around the site, and water and sewer upgrades. “And they mayor and the council said, ‘We’ll do it,’” Maurin said. “They sold a bond issue and didn’t even blink. I said I‘d take care of everything else. Without these improvements these tenants would never have come.”
“There had to be a lot of trust, a lot of credibility,” Maurin said.
Foster, who is proud of the success of the city’s downtown area, sees a good relationship between downtown and Hammond Square. “The Hammond Square developers have insisted on making downtown Hammond a part of their overall plan,” he said. “Everything they have done they have done through the Hammond Chamber of Commerce with the information being sent to the Downtown Development District.”
“It’s been a labor of love,” Maurin said. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep over Hammond Square over the last three years. But we’ll open this center at about 90 percent full. There is not another shopping center in America opening this year that is 90 percent. Considering what happened a year ago with the meltdown and this consumer-led recession that we’ve had, this may be one of the two or three biggest shopping centers to open in the United States this year. We’ve held hands very closely with these tenants over the year and what’s happened has been amazing.”