Adaptable Mall Faces Toughest Challenge Yet
By John Keenan, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Dec. 8–When Westroads Mall opened in August 1968, it spurred surrounding residential, commercial and retail development, and achieved iconic status in Omaha’s retail history.
Wednesday, it achieved a different notoriety, joining names like Columbine and Virginia Tech as sites of fearful atrocities.
In the wake of Robert Hawkins’ shooting rampage, which left nine dead, including Hawkins, the nearly 40-year-old mall must again demonstrate its ability to adapt, survive and thrive. Withstanding this challenge, however, will be different than fighting off competitors, Internet commerce or the latest fad in shopping centers.
What Westroads — scheduled to reopen today except for the Von Maur store where the shootings occurred — has on its side is its long history and the loyalty of many people in Omaha and beyond.
Besides providing an economic boost and a gateway for the city’s westward development, Westroads also became part of nearly every Omahan’s life, said developer and longtime customer Trenton Magid.
“Just like we grew up on Big Fred’s pizza, it was always ‘Let’s go to ‘Stroads,’” Magid said. “‘My mom can drive us there if yours can pick up.’ We’d cruise the mall, go to Spencer’s to buy black lights.”
The early Westroads had “all those crazy stores,” he said, including the Revolving Door Lounge, one of Omaha’s first karaoke bars.
The shooting won’t keep shoppers away, Magid predicted.
Like Magid, Omahan Deb Campbell has been going to Westroads Mall since she was in junior high. She’s 36 now.
“It was a place to hang out with my friends, go to movies,” she said.
She remembers seeing the campy “Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the first time at a midnight showing in one of the eight small theaters inside the mall.
“I probably wasn’t supposed to see it when I was 14,” said Campbell. “And I honestly don’t know how we even got in there.”
Over the years, Westroads, now managed by General Growth Properties in Chicago, has shown an uncanny capacity to adapt.
It could lose major tenants such as Montgomery Ward, and amenities such as a small movie multiplex, only to add sought-after national retailers, nationally popular restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory, and the latest generation of movie theaters.
The three-story Von Maur department store, site of Wednesday’s tragedy, opened in 1995.
Angela Horner, 39, has been going to Westroads since she was 6 or 7, when her sister worked at Baskin-Robbins and she could get free ice cream.
“My friends and I used to shop at Younkers and Express. We hung out at the movie theaters all the time. And who didn’t go to Bishop’s with their grandparents?” she said of the longtime cafeteria.
Continuing to add new stores and to respond to customers will have more of a long-term effect than the shootings, said Malachy Kavanagh of the International Council of Shopping Centers.
“Obviously, there is a period of time for mourning, a very appropriate time,” Kavanagh said. “But . . . people have a connectivity to their center.”
A person’s favorite mall can be the site of first jobs and first dates, and it offers familiarity and comfort, Kavanagh said.
That makes something like Wednesday’s shooting even more horrific, he said.
“It’s sort of an invasion of a sanctuary in some terms. It will take time for some to go back, but others will go back immediately, almost in defiance of this individual.”
Some morning radio deejays this week exhorted listeners to return to Westroads to shop as soon as it reopens.
Bob Batt, executive vice president of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, will be one of those shopping there this weekend.
Westroads Mall opened the same year that Batt’s family moved the Mart, which was founded by his grandmother, Rose Blumkin, to its current location on 72nd Street.
“Nobody’d ever seen anything like that in 1968. It was a sight to behold,” he said.
When developer John Wiebe first announced the project, though, some people were skeptical. The site at 102nd Street and West Dodge Road seemed far away from the retail and residential centers of the city.
But for the wave of people just beginning to contemplate living in now-thriving west Omaha, Westroads was important because it provided nearby shopping and services.
One of those early residential pioneers was Andy Vassios, who moved with his family to Omaha from Denver in 1973. They settled near 132nd and Pacific Streets.
“It was farmland and a lot of unimproved areas, and Westroads was a big place to go,” said Vassios
Marie Clifford, whose gift shop, the Afternoon, has been in the mall for some 38 years, said people in Omaha and beyond have a sense of ownership in the center.
“A lot of people grew up with the mall. (Last month) someone at the gym told me, ‘That’s my mall.’ I think that’s the way a lot of Omaha people feel about it.”
As Clifford was leaving the mall after the shooting Wednesday, a police officer checking identification saw that she was from the Afternoon.
“Oh, that’s my favorite store,” she said he told her.
A warm moment at the end of a chilling day.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
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