A 150,000-square-foot, three-level Von Maur department store will anchor a retail and office space development that Marcus Corp. plans to build at the former West Point Cinema and Menard’s store sites southwest of Blue Mound Road and Barker Road in the Town of Brookfield. The West Point Plaza strip mall will also be torn down to make way for the project.
The project, which has yet to be named, will be similar to, but smaller than, Bayshore Town Center in Glendale, said Katie Falvey, director of real estate for Marcus Corp. The design architect for the project is Baltimore-based Development Design Group Inc., which also was the design architect for Bayshore Town Center. Milwaukee-based Eppstein Uhen Architects will be the architect of record for the project.
The architecture for the Marcus Corp. project will be similar to Bayshore, Falvey said.
“Traditional high quality architecture, open air Main Street kind of a theme,” she said.
In addition to the 150,000-square-foot Von Maur store, the project will have up to 250,000 square feet of additional retail and restaurant space and could “potentially” have 100,000 square feet of office space.
“Von Maur wants to be surrounded by other retailers and restaurants and have some energy,” Falvey said.
By comparison, Bayshore Town Center in Glendale has about 1 million square feet of retail and restaurant space and about 200,000 square feet of office space.
Similar to Bayshore, the Marcus Corp. project will mostly have two-story buildings with retail space on the first floor and usually office space on the second floor.
Also similar to Bayshore, the Marcus Corp. project will have a central town square green space and a road running through the development right up to the buildings with parallel parking spaces.
The Marcus Corp. project will also have 1,000-space underground parking area underneath the buildings. The site is sloped on a hill. The underground parking will be built into the hill and the buildings will be built on top of the underground parking. The first level of some of the buildings, including the Von Maur building, will connect with the underground parking area.
Escalators in the underground parking area will take shoppers up directly to the town square green space.
The project will have a total of 1,900 parking spaces.
The Davenport, Iowa-based Von Maur department store chain has 25 locations in the Midwest, but none in Wisconsin.
One Milwaukee retail real estate insider said Von Maur’s offerings are similar to a Macy’s store, and the shopping experience is similar to a Nordstrom store with a level of customers service and quality store design.
Also similar to Bayshore, the Marcus project will have several restaurants including at least one fine dining restaurant and at least one large scale casual restaurant, Falvey said.
“We’d also like to have a pub establishment,” she said.
The total cost of the project will be $125-130 million, Falvey said. A proposal in the legislature would grant the Town of Brookfield authority to provide tax incremental financing (TIF) assistance for the project, which towns normally are not allowed to do. The amount of TIF that Marcus will seek for the project is yet to be determined, Falvey said.
Construction is expected to begin this summer and be complete in the fall of 2012, in time for the holiday shopping season.
The project site is a highly-visible location along I-94 and Blue Mound Road, one of the region’s most prominent retail corridors.
“The site is ideal with the tremendous visibility, regional access and demographics of the area,” Falvey said.
Fitchburg-based Tri-North Builders Inc. is the construction manager for the project and Bruce Westling of NAI MLG Commercial is handling leasing for the project.
