Boomtowns on the Byways

RETAIL TRADE Boomtowns on the Byways On 70 acres in Yonkers, N.Y. last week, builders were working on a $30 million shopping Center, the biggest in the East. The Cross County Center, seven miles from Manhattan, will contain one of the biggest supermarkets (First National Stores) ever built on the Eastern Seaboard and a $5,500,000 Gimbels' branch, its first in the New York area. The 5,40O-car parking lot will be big enough to handle 25,000 cars a day.

Such huge new developments are the logical outgrowth of the traffic jams, parking woes, and decaying rapid-transit systems that are choking U.S. cities. The shopping centers first sprung up haphazardly around supermarkets. Now they cluster around department stores and have become big, new "one-stop"' shopping centers. They are informal (women in slacks cause no raised eyebrows), have day nurseries for children, and generally stay open until 9 at night six days a week. They are the modern bazaar, where whole families can not only do their buying together but have an evening of fun.

At Columbus' $10 million, 40-acre Town & Country center, Builder Don Casto entertains with strolling singers, trapeze artists and high divers. At Boston's Shoppers' World, customers are offered free dog and fashion shows, square dances twice a week, band concerts, fireworks.

Such lively doings have made the shopping centers magnets for money. The Equitable Life Assurance Society alone has sunk more than $20 million into three centers: Seattle's Northgate. Boston's Shoppers' World. San Francisco's Stonestown. Last week the Commerce Department attributed the 43% rise in commercial building outlays so far this year mainly to new shopping centers. Among the newest:

P: The $40 million River Park center, planned for a 90-acre site just off the Schuylkill Expressway near Philadelphia's city line. When it is completed, it will have a hotel, three 770-unit apartment buildings and an office building, each twelve stories high, 70 shops, and parking for 6,000 cars.

P:Oakland's $20 million Bay-Fair shopping center, to be built around a new Macy's branch store, the chain's fourth in the San Francisco area. East Bay will have 100 competing stores (including another yet undetermined department store).

P:Milwaukee's $15 million, 105-acre Westgate shopping center, which will contain Gimbels and Marshall Field department stores, an office building, and parking for 7,500 cars.

P:Stanford University's $15 million, 60-acre Palo Alto, Calif, project, where three San Francisco department stores (The Emporium, I. Magnin and Roos Brothers) will build branches.

P:Cleveland's $10 million Westgate Center, which will have two supermarkets, two banks, and a branch of Halle Bros, department store.

The shopping centers have drawn consumers' dollars even more spectacularly than they have the promoters'. Los Angeles' $100 million Lakewood Center, opened two years ago but only one-fourth finished, already rings up about $50 million in annual sales. San Francisco's Stonestown (see cut), one year old this week, is expected to gross $30 million annually by the end of next year. Not only do many of the stores average more business per square foot of floor space than their best in-town competition, but with 10-14% lower operating costs, they also net a much higher profit.

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