History
Bellevue Square was first opened in 1946, trading under the name "Bellevue Shopping Square", with the first suburban department store opened by Marshall Field & Co. through its Seattle-based subsidiary, Frederick & Nelson.
With the mall's name shortened to Bellevue Square a few years later, JCPenney opened a store in 1955. Nordstrom, then a local shoe store, opened in 1958, before adding apparel and becoming the third major anchor in 1966, initially under the name Nordstrom Best.
In the 1980s, the mall, then led by the original developer's son, Kemper Freeman, Jr., expanded in several phases, finally adding a location for the Seattle department store The Bon Marché in 1984. In 1992, with the bankruptcy and closure of Frederick & Nelson and collapse of a deal to lease part of the vacated space to Saks Fifth Avenue, the center used the opportunity to reconfigure the vacant anchor as mall shop space. 1994 saw the addition of a separate The Bon Marché Home Store, while Nordstrom expanded the size of their store by half. In 2003, The Bon Marché stores were renamed Bon-Macy's, and in 2005 they adopted the name Macy's.
In 2007, Bellevue Square was linked by a skybridge to Lincoln Square, another Kemper Freeman owned property.
Bellevue Square continues to be owned by Kemper Freeman Jr. and his family, one of the few shopping centers in the United States that have not been purchased by a Real estate investment trust (REIT).
Read more about this topic: Bellevue Square
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“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)