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| Thursday, November 7, 2002 |
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| TRACY PAVILION STARTS TO COME TOGETHER |
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In the hottest retail corner of the city, the Tracy Pavilion shopping center is growing around Home Depot.
The first buildings are being framed right now, but all 300,000 square feet of shopping should be up and running by late summer.
Those first buildings will house some of the smaller users including Panda Express, Starbucks, Supercuts, a wireless store, a mail center, a tanning salon and an ice cream shop, said leasing agent Jon Schultz, who is the senior vice president of CB Richard Ellis.
Construction on other anchor tenants near Home Depot will begin soon and are scheduled to finish in late April and late May, depending on rain delays during winter, said Steven Usdan, partner at the construction firm W.L. Butler.
Linens ‘N Things, Marshall’s and PetSmart all have signed leases for the large spaces. “We are negotiating with another couple of anchors,” Schultz said.
Nearly all of the buildings are leased before they are built. “Tracy’s demographics and geographic location provide a retail draw,” Usdan said.
The whole area near the West Valley Mall is doing very well, said Linda Maurer, city economic development management analyst. “We see a lot of interest in those sites,” she said.
The national chains and general caliber of stores coming into this center are better than normal for a city of Tracy’s size, Schultz said.
“The incomes and the sophistication of the people in Tracy are creating the need for this kind of retailing,” he said.
Eighteen years ago when Pat Brown moved to Tracy, a center like this was only available with a long car trip to Livermore or Modesto. “Now five minutes from the house we have everything we need,” he said.
Major retail is an important part of the overall growth of the city that is good for everyone, Brown added.
It is good for the economy, but a center like this steals some of the feeling of the town, said Angela Worth, who moved from Livermore five years ago. “I kind of like Tracy small,” she said.
The whole site has a circular pattern that allows people to shop at all the stores, similar to how an outdoor mall would be set up, Usdan said.
“The way we designed and developed the center really lends itself to pedestrian shopping,” he said. A dedicated walking path across the parking lot will allow people to move from the Linens ‘N Things that’s next to Home Depot to the PetSmart that’s closer to Grant Line Road.
There are a lot of architectural features in the design that encourages leisurely shopping, including shaded walkways and seating, Usdan said. According to the plans there will be a kind of central area with benches and a clock tower on an expanded sidewalk directly across from Home Depot.
An outdoor mall will be nice, said Ruth Damon, who was shopping at Wal-Mart in the Tracy Marketplace across Grant Line Road. At several of the centers in town pedestrians have to dash across the parking lot to move from building to building, she said.
Mostly, Damon is looking forward to having a Marshall’s nearby. “We’ve already been enjoying Home Depot,” she said.
There is still about 30,000 square feet of space available for lease in the center, but it shouldn’t be hard to fill, Schultz said.
“In Northern California, we are seeing good retail activity,” he said.
At left, construction workers guide an 18,000-pound girder into place that carries the load for the ceiling of a building that will be a part of the new Tracy Pavilion shopping center. Below, Dura-Built’s Patrick Collins works on a section of wood framing that will be one of the new buildings in the shopping center.
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