08.31.00
New 'Main Street' Shopping Being Built in Gettysburg

By Jeremy Fexler, STAFF REPORTER

Near the Gettysburg, Pa., battlefield where Union Gen. George Armstrong Custer forced Jeb Stuart’s cavalry into retreat, where some of the first repeating rifles in history saw action, lies the site of the “Second Civil War.”

Five years of planning and negotiating by Philadelphia’s Delancey Investment Group Inc., a Malvern builder and a West Chester architectural firm finally met the conditions of the town fathers, and construction of a $25 million main street retail project began – known as Gettysburg Village Factory Outlet. It will open Oct. 1 at the intersection of Routes 15 and 97.

Gettysburg sees 1.7 million visitors each year, according to the National Park Service. But other than a few souvenir stores and the visitor’s center, there’s nowhere to shop. Until now, no one’s capitalized on a market of spouses of Civil War buffs who find themselves dragged around unplanted fields for hours at a time for something they could have watched on PBS.

“We wanted it not to look like it was built in a year, but that it evolved over 100 years,” said Greg Boyle, who handles leasing for the property. “We early on evaluated the market, and found most of the shopping money was leaving Adams County. There’s no regional-type shopping experience for 30, 40, even 50 miles in some direction.”

“We also wanted a place that would be nice for special events”, he said. Boyle’s research found possible shoppers in locales with far drives for regional shopping, and visitors to the battlefield, as well as those who enter the area to hike or attend car and antiques shows.

There should be something for all tastes in the 14-building, 260,000 square-foot project. And that’s only the first phase. Stores include KB Toys, Craftworks, Dockers and Nine West. It’s more than 90 percent leased, with 60 signed tenants. Delancey seeks approvals for the second phase, with an additional 260,000 square feet, said Robert Cottone, executive vice president of IMC Construction. Leasing rates fall in the $20s, Boyle said.

Two restaurants and an 84-room Carlson Country Inn & Suites will round out the first phase. Following that phase, more of the 111-acre tract could undergo development for entertainment tenants, Boyle said. The site has more than 1,800 parking spaces for cars and buses, which surround the project. Limited parking within the complex includes diagonal spaces, saving suburban drivers the rigors of parallel parking.

The completed center will lie near the new visitor’s center for the battlefield, which will sit on 45 acres near Hunt Avenue. Additional development would lie at the end of the development, near a Musselman’s Food Court and Old Navy. Renderings haven’t been completed for those structures, which would surround a paved courtyard. An unnamed entertainment tenant will anchor that development, Boyle said.

“It’s horseshoe-shaped so the development recirculates traffic into itself,” Boyle said. At build-out, the retail center could employ 1,000, Boyle said. “We’ve been advocating for the past eight years to have retail walkable, not just seas of parking”, said Steven Bokdin, spokesman of Congress for a New Urbanism in San Francisco, “People want some kind of random experiences, especially if they live in a planned residential subdivision.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2000” encourages developers to invest in main street-oriented retail centers over malls.

Development
Started Jan. 7, the center will have taken just 10 months to complete, Cottone said. The site itself lies near the East Cavalry Battlefield, site of the Stuart-Custer engagement. The 6,000-acre battlefield lies on a good part of five townships in Adams County. Mt. Joy Township, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the town and preservationists had concerns. The project won the support of the township, and its approvals, following five years of plan revisions and meeting development conditions.

Adams County consists of pastoral communities determined to stay that way. Earlier this year the Gettysburg area saw the conclusion of a 30-year fight to achieve the demolition of a 1970s steel observation tower. After a successful lawsuit, the tower fell on July 3 – 137 years after Union troops turned back the Confederate frontal assault known as Pickett’s Charge, led by Gen. George Edward Pickett.

Ten pounds of explosives leveled the 393-foot tower as part of a National Park Service campaign to remove modern structures and return the battlefield to its appearance in 1863. Architectural elements from the 1860s erupt in peaks, mansards and gables from the roof, avoiding the horizontal outlines of more typical shopping centers. Delancey has worked to preserve wetlands on the site, and will maintain a barn that once housed Confederate prisoners of war. Developers also agreed to limit the traffic traveling down the main street.

The developer spent nearly $3 million in offsite road improvements, Cottone said. He estimated the buildings themselves cost about $37.33 per square foot to build. To get the steel needed in such a short time, IMC called every warehouse in the United States and Canada and took whatever was at hand. Other site challenges included specially making and eight-foot around clock for the clock tower and applying 40 different colors and types of siding.

IMC also worked with the 60 tenants to make sure their plans complied with township codes. Despite its previous use as farmland, the site required extensive excavation, as shale lies 18 inches under the topsoil. Eventually, IMC Construction excavated 342,000 cubic yards of the reddish rock. More than 160,000 square yards of cubic concrete went into the buildings, pavement and parking lot. The developer erected a 350,000-gallon water tank to supply the project.

IMC will widen a bridge over Route 15 for $2.5 million, with two full-time employees of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation monitoring this and other improvements, Cottone said. The firm is managing eight construction schedules. More than 200 construction workers are building the project. “We will greatly increase the volume of traffic, at the same time hugely improving the quality of traffic flow”, said Bill Freiburg, construction coordinator for Delancey.

Appearance played a crucial factor in the township’s acceptance of the project, said Bill Murphy, president of Murphy Architectural Group. Ugly modern necessities – such as generators – will have ornamented fencing to hide them. Six-panel doors like those on a house mark the rear exits of each building.

A team of his architects toured Pennsylvania to take architectural elements and color schemes on which to model the retail center. “We wanted to keep the town in a grid pattern to reflect the little towns like Railroad, New Freedom and Hanover an hour away,” Murphy said. “It’s kind of a studied chaos’ is kind of the best way of saying it.” Murphy cited old European towns, with their “hodgepodge of roofs banging into each other”. He believes many developers fear using colors today.

In order to inexpensively develop many of the architectural and period features, new technologies came into play. Wrought iron benches are really made of cast aluminum. Stone columns are made from dyed and shaped cement. Special styrofoam replaces ornate wooden moldings, but allows it to retain the appearance. Fake second floors have windows of the period, and stucco replicates cut limestone. Only the management area/rest area for bus drivers features a functioning second floor.

Instead of separate paving stones, walkways also come from shaped and dyed concrete. “Good planning doesn’t always necessarily cost more,” Murphy said. Archways, gables and towers remain prominent throughout, and even light fixtures resemble those of the period, though featuring the most modern wiring and more durable lighting. Diamond-shaped roof shingles offer another set of patterns and colors.

A Civil War bayonet rests in an inscribed base in the corner of the Murphy Architectural Group conference room in West Chester. The inscription congratulates Murphy for helping Delancey win the “Second Civil War” – seeing the design through, from planning to construction.

Rebirth of Main Street
People now combine their shopping with leisure activities more often than ever, said Geoffrey Booth, director of retail of development for the Urban Land Institute in Washington. “We’re time poor and cash rich”, Booth said. “We tend to shop more while we’re recreating. You never go to a shopping mall to take your partner out to dinner. Main streets bring the opportunity to set up view lines to the next retail spend, and prolong an enjoyable entertainment experience.”

Main street retail offers developers cost savings, according to Booth, whether they are redeveloped from an older district or built from scratch. The separate facilities in a main street development practically eliminate common area charges, Booth said. He cited studies that found the aesthetics of main streets led to longer shopping trips. As a result, traditional malls have begun trying to bring the outside inside, Booth said.

“Malls are struggling to get back to an external feel”, Booth said. “The narrow hallways of the ‘70s have been widened and now roofs have been torn off for natural light. Real vegetation is being brought in and plastic planters eliminated.” Contrary to what many believe, main streets actually can speed up a shopping trip, Boyle said. “The distance from a parked car to the mall store you want to shop in is one-third of a mile”, Boyle said.

Mizner Park, a 398,000 square-foot, mixed-use development configured as a downtown center for Boca Raton, Fla., became one of the first new main street developments, with retail, restaurants, housing an amphitheater and movie theater. Such developments now stretch from Montreal to Fort Worth, Texas. Now, many shopping hubs that declined following the expansion of regional malls – such as Silver Spring, Md. – now are moving toward reinvigorating their downtown centers. Silver Spring now is undergoing $326 million redevelopment, with completion scheduled for 2001 and tenants ranging from Fresh Fields to the American Film Institute.