Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Fashion Show mall work wrapping up

With little of the fanfare that marked previous expansions of the Fashion Show mall on the Las Vegas Strip, the last phase, which includes a food court, opened last week.

The final phase of Fashion Show's $1 billion expansion adds an additional 117,000 square feet of retail space and an 11,288-square-foot food court, bringing the mall to 2 million square feet of space.

While the mall's portion of construction is complete, many tenants are still finishing their stores. The multi-media cloud and screens above the plaza are also complete, but will not be fully operational until later this month.

The 72,000-square-foot plaza in front of the mall also opened last week, along with six new entrances that front Las Vegas Boulevard.

"I think it's fantastic, it puts people right at our front door," said Greg Zimmerman, vice president and development director for the Rouse Co., developer and owner of Fashion Show. "We spent a lot of time getting a great tenant mix, and they are taking time with their store fronts, which will be spectacular."

Two levels of stores will front the Strip, which is across from Steve Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas hotel-casino. The stores, which include Quiksilver, Starbucks and Zara, are not open yet but are scheduled to open by the end of the year.

Thirty-four stores are expected to open by year end, including 20 stores that are to open this month. Some are already open, including Fossil, Champs Sports, Casual Corner/ Petite Sophisticate and The Children's Place. Five food outlets are open in the food court, such as Subway and Chinese Gourmet Express, and eight are expected to open by the end of the year.

Susan Teepe, manager of shoe store Marmi, said the expansion will help draw people into the mall, especially now that construction has been cleared away and pedestrians do not have to walk on the opposite side of the street because of closed sidewalks.

"This is just fabulous, beautiful," Teepe said as she took a break with employee Kim Wolf on the balcony of the mall's third-floor food court. "I've been in this mall for eight years and this is very nice, and the access is wonderful."

The expansion also solves another problem, Teepe said.

"Customers were constantly asking where the food court was, and we didn't have anything," she said.

Henderson resident Beverly Bullerdick said some mall employees still don't know there is a food court. She said after asking around where the food court was, she gave up and looked for it herself.

Eating a pretzel and looking out over the Strip, Bullerdick said she hadn't visited the mall in awhile.

"I don't think you could describe it," she said of the mall's architecture and store selection. "If they don't have it here, they don't make it."

Bullerdick said she was enjoying the breeze on the food court's patio while its location was still widely unknown.

"I can't imagine when this gets going that you'll find a place to sit," she said.

Especially when the mall's "cloud" goes live.

The cloud is a 480-foot elliptical-shaped steel canopy that "hovers" almost 20 stories above the mall's plaza on Las Vegas Boulevard.

The cloud will be lighted nightly starting Oct. 31 as part of an overall multi-media display, Zimmerman said. Halloween also marks the beginning of daily house fashion shows at the mall, he said.

"It's an ambitious undertaking for a shopping center, but it's what Fashion Show was designed for," Zimmerman said.

The fashion shows will be performed in the mall's main hallway that includes an 80-foot retractable runway.

Zimmerman expects traffic at the mall, which already attracts more than 10 million visitors a year, to pick up now that construction has completed.

"There's so much foot traffic along Las Vegas Boulevard," he said. "For the last year and a half they've been walking by a construction site. We did our best to sign it but clearly they were intimidated by it."

Zimmerman did not release sales figures, but did say the mall was "on target" to have sales-per-square-foot reach $1,000 by 2006.

Now that the expansion and renovation of Fashion Show is completed, Zimmerman and his team will turn their attention to two new projects: leasing out the vacant Lord & Taylor space in the mall and planning for the Summerlin mall in western Las Vegas, which is scheduled to open in 2006.

Lord & Taylor was supposed to open its 138,000-square-foot Las Vegas store in Spring 2004, which would have made it the eighth anchor at the Fashion Show mall.

Instead, Lord & Taylor pulled out of the deal after announcing in August it was closing 32 department stores and would concentrate on its core markets in the Northeast and westward to Chicago and St. Louis.

The May Department Stores Co., which owns Lord & Taylor, said it would sell its space at Fashion Show back to Rouse.

Zimmerman said discussions to sell the space back are still under way.

He said once the mall gets the space back, it most likely won't be an anchor tenant.

"It will be broken up into small store spaces," he said. "There will be larger users, but its unlikely someone would take the whole building."

Zimmerman said he also will begin plans for the Summerlin mall, with construction beginning midyear next year.

He said the tenant mix will be similar to other malls and will house some of the same tenants as Fashion Show. But he said it will likely not have many of the same high-end retailers or specialty stores like Puma and SKECHERS USA, both shoe stores.

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