A Healthy Walk
February 16th, 2008
August 28, 2004
Source: Press of Atlantic City
A Healthy Walk
ATLANTIC CITY - As they shopped their way down Michigan Avenue on Friday, Michele and Michael Papas only found one thing wrong with the street and the scene: They couldn”t believe it was in Atlantic City.
“The last time I was down here, it looked like a hole,” Michele said. “But this is clean and fresh and new.”
That last time was about seven years ago, but her husband had been telling her lately to give the city another chance. When she did, what sold her on the idea of a new Atlantic City was a visit to The Walk, the midtown retail and entertainment district that expects to have 34 stores and restaurants open by today.
And today, a bit more than a year after the first store opened quietly, is when The Walk’’s management is throwing a grand-opening party, featuring live entertainment and giveaways and sales and promotions. The opening will shut down two blocks of Michigan Avenue, from Atlantic to Baltic avenues, to vehicles and could cause traffic problems in the neighborhood around it, according to a warning city police issued Friday.
That afternoon, though, the longest visible traffic snag in the neighborhood was a checkout line about eight customers deep at The Gap outlet on Arctic Avenue. But both the stores and the streets were bustling with bargain-hunting, bag-toting customers - and with workers putting last-minute touches on new businesses, new landscaping, new murals and new signs, all in preparation for today’’s big to-do.
David Cordish, the project’’s developer, adds that the building and expanding will keep bustling along in the coming months. After two stores, Brooks Brothers and Reebok, open in time to start selling this morning, he expects about 15 more businesses to get their cash registers in gear before Christmas.
“It certainly doesn”t look like the same place we started on,” he said Friday from The Cordish Company’’s headquarters in Baltimore’’s Inner Harbor. “But it does look like we expected and hoped it would. … We”re not surprised, but we know other people are.”
And from the business end, Cordish brags that owners who already have stores are asking for leases in that new phase too.
“You know you have a good thing going when that happens, because (the owner) knows more than you do about how business is really going,” Cordish said, adding that business surveys show stores in The Walk already have higher sales-per-square-foot rates than merchants are doing in the long-established, and high-traffic, Inner Harbor.
Most of the stores in The Walk are outlets for national brands, but a few local merchants are moving in. Brenda Petrovic, a co-owner of Atlantic County Harley Davidson, says she and her husband, Ben, plan to move the Atlantic City branch of their store out of the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort and down to the corner of Michigan and Arctic avenues, based on both the visibility of the spot and the business they”ve learned their future neighbors in The Walk are generating.
“All the studies we”ve done and (Harley-Davidson) has done … say the sales figures are very good,” Petrovic says. While she can”t say exactly when her new store will open, she hopes it will be soon - and she’’s making sure it has a presence at the grand opening.
“We”re upset that we”re going to miss it, but we want people to know that we”re coming and that eventually, we”ll be there,” Petrovic says.
Frances M. Santoro, the economic-development director for the state’’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, can also offer dollar signs as proof that The Walk has been the success story that CRDA - which bought and owns the ground under the stores and leased it to Cordish - believed it would be.
The first phase of the project included a $31 million subsidy from the CRDA to the developer. The coming phase, she adds, has no such retail subsidy - although the agency may have to pay for some infrastructure improvements to public areas.
That new section is scheduled to stretch The Walk to the downtown side of the Atlantic City Expressway, including the blocks of Mississippi and Missouri avenues between Atlantic and Baltic avenues. But Santoro argues that the effects will stretch well beyond those boundaries, which was the CRDA’’s reasoning behind the project all along.
“This has raised the bar, and other developers and casinos are realizing that we need more of this,” she said, adding that The Walk and other retail/entertainment centers will draw people on their own, even without the casinos that two others now under construction - The Pier at Caesars and The Quarter, at the Tropicana Casino and Resort - are attached to.
“These will help us stave off any challenges from gaming expansions in other venues,” Santoro says. “We will be a formidable tourist attraction. And by Atlantic City being strong, the whole state benefits.”
Kim Butler, a spokeswoman for The Walk, sees the same effect work on a more local level.
“Every time a new store opens, everyone else is excited,” she says. “Because with every new store, the traffic increases.”
But as they kept up their tour of the stores, the Papases, from Clifton, didn”t see even that big a picture. They just saw a side of the city they”d never seen before - and never expected to see now.
“I remember when this was all torn apart,” Michael said. “I”m still kind of shocked.”
And his wife, who just said no to Atlantic City for years, has changed that opinion. Michael has to come back to town for a convention in October, and now Michele says she”ll be happy to join him, for several reasons - including this one:
“The outlet prices,” the veteran shopper confided, before getting back to business, “are terrific.”
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