Shopping Center Business

DEC 2016

Shopping Center Business is the leading monthly business magazine for the retail real estate industry.

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HARLEM IRVING 98 • SHOPPING CENTER BUSINESS • December 2016 grated its retail and residential expertise to create a development called University Village at the University of Illinois. That project features 864 units of condomini- um, townhome and single-family homes and 130,000 square feet of street retail. University Village stands as one of the pre- miere developments in the city of Chicago as well as a model for other public-private partnerships involving university housing combined with retail development in the United States. "With this foundation, we are able to evolve continuously within the market without changing our values," says Filler HISTORY OF HARLEM IRVING "I believe the first shopping center in the Chicagoland area was Evergreen Plaza on the South Side. Arthur Rubloff devel- oped it," says Marchese, who began work- ing at the the Harlem Irving Companies in construction and maintenance more than 50 years ago, during high school and col- lege vacations. "There were perhaps a couple of oth- er centers developed around the same time," he notes. "In 1954, several inves- tors came to my father and said, 'We have this property under contract and we think this new-fangled idea of a shopping center is going to be a terrific thing in the future. Would you be interested?' So, he invested and they were fortunate enough to be able to place some of the major tenants at that time. It was really pie in the sky." The original tenants at Harlem Irving Plaza included Wieboldt's department store, Kroger, Woolworth's, Walgreens, Lerner Shops, W.T. Grant, Western Tire, and Fannie Mae, which still remains a tenant at the shopping center 60 years later. "Over the years, some of the partners passed away or were bought out and the property wound up with our family as sole ownership," Marchese says. "We began to see that the future of the shopping cen- ter industry was the enclosed mall. There were many mall conversions throughout the country in the late 1960s and early '70s. We spoke to other owners and devel- opers to get their thoughts on the best way to approach the conversion process. We did it in phases. We started construction of the enclosure in 1976 and completed much of it by 1979. After that, there were additional conversions and upgrades that culminated in 2004." Today, the Harlem Irving shopping cen- ter is 725,000 square feet and includes an additional four acres of contiguous prop- erty on which the company built space for X-Sport Fitness, Panera, Chipotle and Red Robin. The center has sales in excess of $530 per square foot. Marchese says, "The de- mographics have changed over the years but it has always been a blue-collar area. At one time, it was predominantly Irish, Italian and Polish. There is still a strong Polish demographic, and we have seen a tremendous increase in the Hispanic pop- ulation as well." Harlem Irving Plaza is one of the most popular retail centers in greater Chicago. At 725,000 square feet, it serves a broad trade area. To commemorate its 60th anniversary, Harlem Irving Plaza created a memory wall that tells the center's history through stories and photography.

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