Northtown Sets Stage For Future Expansion Possibilities Include Sixth Anchor, Two New Parking Garages

With cars stacked triple-high and its megacenter running out of room for new stores, NorthTown Mall is moving closer to building on its last empty property.

Opinions vary on when, if ever, the expansion would commence. And no one is saying who would fill buildings and garages that would be erected on the asphalt tundra that stretches in front of the mall along Division Street, between Wellesley and Queen Avenues.

But Sabey Corp., the Seattle-based developer of NorthTown, is bracing neighbors for a sixth anchor department store, 225,000 square feet of new retail space and a pair of two-story parking garages.

“This is what we can possibly build up to, but we don’t know if we’ll ever get to that,” Laurent Poole, Sabey executive vice president, told neighbors at a public meeting Tuesday. “In the next couple of years, something’s going to happen.”

Sabey has hired a Bellevue, Wash., engineering firm to update traffic studies this fall to project the impacts of the expansion plan. Neighbors will be informed of results of the study next month as NorthTown moves closer to submitting the changes for city approval. Some aspects of the expansion were previously approved in 1988.

Poole said NorthTown’s expansion is in response to department store chains that want larger buildings and good public access. Once the retail stores go up, new parking garages become imperative to accommodate shoppers and meet NorthTown’s self-imposed standard of 4.5 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of store space.

Retailers that Sabey has contacted include Dillards, a Little Rock, Ark.-based department store chain; and Federated Stores, owner of The Bon Marche.

The Bon, which has a 90,000-square-foot store at NorthTown, wants a larger building, Poole said. Dillards, he added, “is looking at this market.”

New development plans call for increasing the size of NorthTown from 950,000 square feet to 1.176 million square feet. Parking for 1,000 cars would be added, boosting the garage capacity to 5,300 spaces.

The expansion would occur in four places. The Bon building would be expanded and reconfigured; and a new three-story, 180,000-square-foot department store - about the size of the Sears building - would be built on the southwest corner of the mall.

A two-story parking garage parallel to Division would link the new store and the Bon building. A smaller garage would be attached to the end of the east-side garage on the northwest corner of the mall.

NorthTown currently is 97 percent leased. It generates $18 million in annual taxes and a $55 million payroll, Poole said.

Among the 20 neighbors who forsook the Seattle Mariners playoff game to attend the traffic meeting Tuesday night, Poole heard little encouragement.

Neighbors complained that NorthTown hasn’t solved the traffic and parking problems which already exist. They said the $135 million mall creates traffic jams at intersections, endangers pedestrians and school children and lines nearby streets with cars parked by the 2,200 people who work at the mall.

“They’re using the neighborhood as a parking lot,” said Betty Beck, a 41-year resident at 416 E. Wabash. “They’ve destroyed the neighborhood.”

Poole said NorthTown has been giving prizes to employees to ride the bus to work during the Christmas shopping season, but ultimately the city has responsibility to manage residential traffic and parking problems.

Poole said he doesn’t expect the NorthTown expansion to add much traffic. By building a new garage on the west side of the mall, traffic in the streets east of the shopping center might even decline.

“Look at it this way,” said the Rev. Ward Correll of Zion Christian Center, a NorthTown neighbor that also has limited space for congregational parking. “They’re building us a new parking garage.”

City officials said 34,000 vehicles daily travel north and south on Division at Wellesley. About 15,000 vehicles travel east on Wellesley; 18,000 travel west.

, DataTimes