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Belvidere Discount Mall

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Belvidere Discount Mall is a shopping mall located on Belvidere Street in Waukegan , Illinois , United States. It was one of the first shopping malls in the Chicago metropolitan area , and the first enclosed shopping mall in Lake County . Its current main anchor store is a Home Depot . The mall is notable for reinventing itself over time to remain open, with a current store mix.

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23-608: Belvidere Mall opened on November 18, 1965, and was Lake County's first enclosed shopping mall. At its opening, it contained 35 stores and 300,000 square feet (28,000 m). The anchor stores was Montgomery Ward department store that had formerly been in downtown Waukegan. While the mall thrived at first, the opening of the much larger nearby Lakehurst Mall in 1971 put a serious dent in Belvidere's fortunes. In 1988, sole anchor Montgomery Ward left for Lakehurst Mall . After about seven years of being empty, Builders Square occupied

46-434: A captive clientele. The challenges faced by the traditional large department stores have led to a resurgence in the use of supermarkets, even gyms , as anchors. The International Council of Shopping Centers makes the presence of anchors one of the main defining characteristics of the two largest categories of centres, the regional center with 400,000 to 800,000 square feet (74,000 m ) in gross leasable area , and

69-551: A common type of anchor store, since they are visited often. However, research on consumer behavior revealed that most trips to the grocery store did not result in visits to surrounding shops . Large supermarkets remain common anchor stores within power centers however. Since the end of the 20th century, the declining popularity of old-line department stores has made it necessary for mall management companies to consider re-anchoring with other retail alternatives, or mix commercial development with residential development to guarantee

92-574: A draftsman. After the success of his design for the Lederer leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue, he received further commissions for the design of shops, including Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the clothing chain Grayson’s. In 1941 Gruen moved to Los Angeles. He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1943. In 1951, he founded

115-426: Is a considerably larger tenant in a shopping mall , often a department store or retail chain . They are typically located at the ends of malls, sometimes in the middle. With their broad appeal, they are intended to attract a significant cross-section of the shopping public to the center. They are often offered steep discounts on rent in exchange for signing long-term leases in order to provide steady cash flows for

138-452: Is regarded by many as a dramatically ruthless re-imagining of a former immigrant tenement neighborhood (Gans, O'Conner, The Hub). In 1956, Gruen drafted a comprehensive revitalization plan for the central business district of downtown Fort Worth, Texas , but most components of the plan were never realized. Dr. ETH Ing. Walid Jabri, the architect and structural engineer, designed the 55,000 square-meter business complex Centre Gefinor, which

161-425: The superregional center with more than 800,000 square feet (74,000 m ) of space. The regional center typically has two or more anchors, while the superregional typically has three or more. In each case, the anchors account for 50–70% of the centre's leasable space. Shopping centres with anchor stores have consistently outperformed those without one, as the anchor helps draw shoppers initially attracted to

184-609: The Village Theaters chain, however Village closed the Belvidere operation at the end of 2003. The theatres remained unused until hosting public tours and art exhibits in 2019 and 2020. Since November 2021 the theater functions as a DIY venue known as Belvidere Cinema Gallery with monthly revival and independent screenings, local art exhibits and occasional live music. Anchor store In North American, Australian and New Zealand retail , an " anchor tenant ", sometimes called an " anchor store ", " draw tenant ", or " key tenant ",

207-468: The anchor spot in 1995, and was replaced with Home Depot around 2000. The mall has been renovated twice, in 1985 and again in 1998. The mall is currently owned by Imperial Realty, who purchased it from original owners Landuau & Heyman Inc. in the fall of 1985. As part of the 1998 renovation, the mall was renamed Belvidere Discount Mall. Today, Belvidere Mall differs from Lake County's other shopping malls, Gurnee Mills and Hawthorn Mall because all of

230-704: The anchor to shop at other shops in the mall. Thus, a mall which loses its last anchor is often considered to be a dead mall . Victor Gruen Victor David Gruen , born Viktor David Grünbaum (July 18, 1903 – February 14, 1980), was an Austrian-American architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States. He is also noted for his urban revitalization proposals, described in his writings and applied in master plans such as for Fort Worth , Texas (1955), Kalamazoo , Michigan (1958) and Fresno , California (1965). An advocate of prioritizing pedestrians over cars in urban cores, he

253-484: The architectural firm "Victor Gruen Associates", which was soon to become one of the major planning offices of that time. After the war, he designed the first suburban open-air shopping facility called Northland Mall near Detroit in 1954. After the success of the first project, he designed his best-known work for the owners of Dayton Department stores, the 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m ) Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota,

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276-503: The first enclosed shopping mall in the country. Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. Because he invented the modern mall, Malcolm Gladwell , writing in The New Yorker , suggested that "Victor Gruen may well have been

299-575: The future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends. As an architect he worked for Peter Behrens , and in 1933 opened his own architectural firm in Vienna. His firm specialized in remodeling of shops and apartments. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English." Arriving in New York he changed his name to Gruen from Grünbaum and started to work as

322-571: The gradual transformation of the inner city into a pedestrian zone , of which only some parts have been implemented, including Kärntner Straße and Graben . In a speech in London in 1978, Gruen disavowed shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his ideas: "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities." Gruen died on February 14, 1980. He was married four times and had two children. Gruen's book The Heart of our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure

345-538: The mall owners. Some examples of anchor stores in the United States are: Macy's , Sears , JCPenney , Nordstrom , Neiman Marcus , Saks Fifth Avenue , Dillard's , Kohl's , Walmart , and Target . And in Canada ; Hudson's Bay , Sears (formerly), Target (formerly), Zellers (formerly, now in all Hudson’s Bay locations), Nordstrom / Nordstrom Rack (formerly), TJX Companies ( HomeSense , Winners , Marshalls ), Walmart, Saks Fifth Avenue , Sporting Life . When

368-433: The most influential architect of the twentieth century." Until the mid-1970s, his office designed over fifty shopping malls in the United States. Gruen was the principal architect for a luxury housing development built on the 48-acre (190,000 m ) site of Boston , Massachusetts' former West End neighborhood. The first of several Gruen towers and plazas was completed in 1962. This development, known as Charles River Park

391-476: The painting to Michael, resulting in a landmark case in the New York Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals ruled the basis of inter vivos gifts, including the plaintiff having the burden of proof to a clear and convincing standard that the chattel was a gift and the required elements of a gift. Kemija Gruen claimed that if the painting was to be given after death, even if such arrangement

414-443: The planned shopping centre format was developed by Victor Gruen in the early to mid-1950s, signing larger department stores was necessary for the financial stability of the projects, and to draw retail traffic that would result in visits to the smaller shops in the centre as well. Anchors generally have their rents heavily discounted, and may even receive cash inducements from the centre to remain open. Early on, grocery stores were

437-465: The tenants, except for The Home Depot , are family-owned. Nearly all of them are Hispanic -owned or Hispanic-oriented. Since 2019 the mall also embraced artists and creators in Waukegan, frequently lending vacant retail spaces and its concourses for vendor fairs and popup shops. A single-screen 1,000-seat movie theater opened at the mall on January 21, 1966 with Do Not Disturb as its opening feature. It

460-557: Was a major influence on Walt Disney 's city planning ambitions and his ideas for the original EPCOT . In 1963, on his 21st birthday, his son New York attorney Michael S. Gruen (then a Harvard undergraduate) was given a painting "Schloss Kammer am Attersee II" by Gustav Klimt . While ownership of the painting was given to his son in 1963, the elder Gruen maintained a life estate on the chattel and continued to hang it in his living room and even paid for insurance and repairs. Upon Gruen's death in 1980, his widow, Kemija, refused to surrender

483-688: Was also the designer of the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the United States , the Kalamazoo Mall . Victor Gruen was born on July 18, 1903, in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna , Austria. He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts . A committed socialist , from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at the Naschmarkt "-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik ,

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506-632: Was built in the late 1960s on Rue Clémenceau in Beirut , Lebanon for which Victor Gruen designed the complete commercial area on the ground floor and the mezzanine after the completion of the skeleton. Gruen also designed the Greengate Mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which opened in 1965, as well as the Lakehurst Mall in 1971 for Waukegan, Illinois . In 1968, he returned to Vienna, where he engaged in

529-628: Was originally operated by the General Cinema Corporation . In early 1980 the theater was twinned. The Cinema closed in 1989, with the mall in decline and General Cinema expanding the nearby Lakehurst Cinema to 12 screens. In 1991, Imperial Realty twinned the Belvidere Cinema again to form a four-screen "miniplex" and reopened it as a discount theater. In 2002, the Belvidere Theatres joined the reopened Lakehurst Cinemas as part of

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