Mall is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Carousel Center developer Robert Congel (left) and fellow mall founder Bruce Kenan (right) say they are proud that the mall has become a vibrant part of the Syracuse community.Syracuse, NY -- As Carousel Center churned toward its 20th anniversary this fall, Bridgette Oliva thought about an anniversary of her own.
Oliva brought her two children, Maureen, 14, and Daniel, 11, to the venue where her wedding reception was held: Carousel Center mall’s soaring Center Atrium and the sixth-floor, 12,000-square-foot Skydeck.
“It was Aug. 31, 1991, and I was the first person to use it for a wedding reception,” said Oliva, who was raised in Syracuse but now lives in San Antonio, Texas. “We booked it before it was even built and did it sight unseen. We hoped and prayed it would be OK — and it was gorgeous.”
It was sight-unseen because when it was booked in the first half of 1990, there wasn’t a mall. Just a shell of a mall.
But at the time, Oliva and her then-fiance, Danny Oliva, weren’t the only ones taking chances.
There has been a lot of risk-taking in the 20 years since Carousel Center mall opened in Syracuse — on Oct. 15, 1990 — atop a toxic waste site, neighboring a waste-treatment plant and one of the most polluted lakes in the nation, surrounded by unsightly oil tanks and abandoned, rusting buildings.
“Can a Mall at a Toxic Dump Revive an Ailing Syracuse?” a New York Times headline asked two days after the mall opened.
Today, the oil tanks are long gone. Onondaga Lake is clean enough to attract nesting eagles. The waste-treatment plant still occasionally sends its noxious greetings to the parking lot, but visitors scurry inside.
Carousel Center remains one of the busiest malls in the nation, attracting 20 million visitors each year. And, according to other numbers supplied by the privately held Pyramid Cos.:
- Some 310 million people have visited the mall since opening day.
- Carousel Center and its tenants employ 3,600 people. Taken together, that would land the mall fourth on the list of employers in Onondaga County, behind Upstate Medical University, Syracuse University and Wegmans.
- Sales between 1990 and 2009 (the last year available) total $6.8 billion.
- The mall’s annual sales average $400 million. Carousel Center collected $492 million in sales tax through 2007.
- The mall hosts 178 stores and businesses.
In comparison, the Mall of America near Minneapolis, the nation’s largest, reports it has 500 stores, 40 million visitors per year and annual sales of $437 million.
In Central New York, Carousel attracts retail unique to the mall, and unique to the area, Pyramid executives and observers say.
“It’s changed the face of the retail landscape for the people of Syracuse and beyond,” said Amanda Nicholson, assistant professor of retail management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “It brought a selection of new retailers into the Central New York market that had not been here before, and by doing so, made Syracuse into a major retail force ... drawing shoppers from a very wide distance.”
Still, it’s far from the same mall that opened in 1990.
Many retailers have come and gone. Bankruptcies and buyouts have changed the nameplates on the front of the stores. Gone are names like Lechmere, Hills, Bonwit Teller, Kaufmann’s, Saturday Matinee. Gone are L&N Seafood and Malarkey’s, two sit-down restaurants that opened with the mall in October 1990.
But Syracuse-based The Pyramid Cos., which owns and operates 18 shopping centers in the Northeast and generates $5 billion in retail sales annually, has for the better part of 20 years — and through the Great Recession — kept its hometown showcase mall running at an occupancy rate in the mid- to upper-90 percent, matching the occupancy rates of the busiest top major U.S. malls.
There are many reasons for that, says Bruce Kenan, one of the mall’s founders and a partner in The Pyramid Cos.
“I kind of get a flush of energy when I come in this building,” said Kenan, as he sat for an interview in the mall management offices with Pyramid founding partner Robert Congel. “It’s not a building, not a structure. Really, it’s a vibrant part of the community. From the beginning, we wanted it to have that social impact on the community. And it’s constantly changing and evolving. It’s a totally living thing that provides employment, a huge amount of money to the government, and for those who come here to shop, it provides for their needs.”
It almost didn’t land where it did. That’s where Congel came in.
In the mid-1980s, said Congel, he and other Pyramid executives were very close to putting their new showcase shopping center on the other side of Interstate 690, on a swath of land across from Sacred Heart Church in Syracuse.
“We worked out a great (highway) interchange plan with the state and it was way, way down the road toward getting done,” said Congel. “It was a great site. But we just couldn’t do it. Somebody — somebody — had to clean up this site (where the mall stands today). Every time we brought an executive to town it was just a total embarrassment, driving from the airport down 81, past a junkyard and oil farm, leaky and rusty.”
Todd Norley, who was part of Pyramid’s leasing team when the Syracuse company was flying retail executives to Syracuse, said they looked in horror on the surroundings of the mall-under-construction.
“They would see the oil tanks, look at you and say, ‘Are you serious? You flew us all the way here for THIS? I don’t think so,’” said Norley, a former Syracuse University quarterback who is now a partner in GCD Consultants in Waltham, Mass., which finds mall and shopping center space for top retailers.
Norley said Congel’s force overcame the obstacles.
“That was to be the crown jewel, obviously, to the portfolio,” said Norley. “We had a lot of first dibs in New York state for retailers. Carousel was to be huge. ...
“It was the first mall to combine strip-center retail with that of a traditional mall, along with entertainment and the restaurant component. It was Bob’s vision of where the industry was going. As we’ve seen in the last 20 year, it’s played out that way.”
Firsts? The first Best Buy in New York state, and the first in a mall. The first Old Navy in a mall. Both are still there.
The cost to build Carousel in the first location considered would have been far less than the $200 million spent on the final Oil City site, said Congel, because the major environmental cleanup wouldn’t have been needed — and Pyramid wouldn’t have had to float a mall. The current Carousel rides on a steel pier driven deep into the water and earth.
Now, executives say, the mall is riding on sales up 10 to 11 percent over the recession-battered year-ago period, said Kenan.
The industry is watching.
“It is not surprising to me at all that (Carousel Center) is doing well there,” said Jesse Tron, speaking for the trade group the International Council of Shopping Centers. “Over the course of the recession, we’ve seen the enclosed (shopping center) format thrive or regain a little traction. Whether that translates into new development remains to be seen.”
Since Carousel Center opened, and often in the ensuing years, the mantra “enclosed malls are dead” has been an industry standard.
Indeed, no new malls have been built since 2006, Tron said . The trend in shopping centers is now toward building lifestyle centers, which combine retail with restaurants, entertainment and living spaces, including apartments and condominiums.
Dan Butler of the trade group National Retail Federation said “it wasn’t so much that everyone was predicting the death of all malls, but it just got to the point of saturation for many malls and supermalls.
“Small is the new big,” he said.
Indeed, the Central New York market was oversaturated with malls, and as ownership changed, the malls — Penn Can, Camillus, Fairmount Fair, Fayetteville, to name a few — closed and were reformatted to other uses.
Rochester-based Wilmorite Inc., once the dominant mall force in Central New York, in 2005 sold most of its mall holdings to California-based Macerich. Macerich owns and operates the two other malls in Onondaga County: ShoppingTown in DeWitt and Great Northern Mall in Clay.
ShoppingTown, only a few years ago set for a major makeover, has lost many of its tenants.
It’s a trend, Butler said.
“Many retailers can’t find space that is affordable, or want a smaller footprint,” Butler said. “The smaller footprint can be very dynamic.”
Pyramid executives say they know how to buck the trend.
“We started late in the mall business, but wherever we go, we always wind up the dominant mall,” Congel said.
Said Kenan, “It’s the power of positive action. If you stay ahead, the customers are going to come.”