Construction
Built by F.D. Rich Co, and opened in 1982, the mall's site was part of the Landmark urban renewal project and previously was the location of tenement structures that once lined Greyrock Place, the street which is its primary address. Saks Fifth Avenue opened its store in the mall on March 12, 1983. A third anchor, a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) Filene's closed in 2005 (before the merger of the May Department Stores and Federated Department Stores), as the store's sales were not up to par. This location originally opened as a J.C. Penney store, but was eventually shuttered and replaced by Filene's in 1996. The far south end of the mall which housed J.C. Penney and Filene's was demolished in 2006 and was replaced by a pedestrian-oriented exterior complex of retail stores and restaurants that directly connects to the mall. It opened on November 1, 2007.
The construction of the mall and adjacent office towers had a profound effect on the face of downtown Stamford during the 1970s and 1980s, and was profiled in a May 8, 1988 article in The New York Times headlined "A Town Sells Off Pieces of its Soul."
Stamford Town Center has four floors of shopping - floors 3, 4, 5 and 7, with The Food Court located on the 7th floor. The supporting parking structure has space for 4,000 cars and is situated in levels below and above the mall, thus forming a kind of mall and parking 'sandwich'.
The mall was a significant part of Stamford's urban renewal efforts, and thus was not without controversy. The mall gutted the heart of Stamford's traditional Main Street retailing and business district, and is widely perceived to be a large fortress-like structure, that even today appears hugely out of scale to the remaining cityscape. Another perception of its design is that it was built to primarily cater to auto-oriented visitors and it was made difficult to enter from the street as a pedestrian. Most pedestrian routes from the street involve going through the mall's anchor stores or through the other (primarily office) buildings of Landmark Square and Atlantic Street. The redevelopment of the former Filene's/ J.C.Penney location has alleviated some of these original design characteristics.
Read more about this topic: Stamford Town Center
Famous quotes containing the word construction:
“Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)