PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

THE BIGGER CITY

Now a major corporate base, Stamford, Conn., adds retail to the mix

BY DONNA MITCHELL

Stamford, Conn. — This city always had big ambitions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford set itself the none-too-small task of wooing major corporations to its central business district from New York City, 36 miles down the coast. To many at the time, the Big Apple seemed to be more maggot than apple, what with its rising crime rates and falling tax revenues.

Despite a major hiccup following the real estate crash of 1997, Stamford has managed to create a vibrant corporate core that brings thousands of office workers into its central business district each day.

But there is still much work to do. After all, what is a center without a place to shop? That is the issue municipal officials and developers have turned to more recently, using powerhouse retailers to anchor a downtown burgeoning with upscale retail developments.

Target Corp. is building a 164,000-square-foot store on Broad Street, across the street from where Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. is renovating a former Caldor unit.

National Realty & Development Corp., Purchase, N.Y., is developing Stamford Place, a 450,000-square-foot mixed-use center. On the east end of downtown, a private-investor group under the name GPL Greyrock plans to build Greyrock Place, a mixed-use center with 100,000 square feet of retail space, 11 floors of condominiums and a three-deck parking garage.

Safavieh, a Secaucus, N.J.–based seller of fine home furnishings and exotic rugs that started operating in Stamford in 1988, expects to open a 30,000-square-foot expansion this summer, bringing its total showroom space to about 100,000 square feet. Safavieh is to the downtown’s south.

“We wanted to treat the downtown as a shopping center, and every shopping center needs anchors,” said Sandy Goldstein, executive director of the Stamford Downtown Special Services District, the city’s business improvement district.

Rents charged for retail space provide a gauge of Stamford’s rising fortunes. Average rental rates were between $12 and $15 per square foot in the early 1990s, according to the special-services district’s 2002–2003 annual report. About five years ago, rental rates for triple-net leases were in the low $20s per square foot, says Norman Lotstein, a retail specialist at Stamford-based Pyramid Real Estate Group, and today they are in the low-$30 range.

These rates are not likely to reach the levels landlords charge in some of the towns around Stamford, at least not any time soon (the city is near some of the richest communities in America). In Greenwich, six miles to the south, retail space on Greenwich Avenue commands rents of between $60 and $100 per square foot, while on Main Street in Westport, about 12 miles south of Stamford, rates are slightly above $100.

But retail experts say there is plenty of demand within Stamford for additional retail. According to U.S. census data for 2000, Stamford has 117,083 residents, up from 108,056 in the 1990 counting. The median household income was $60,556 in 2000, versus $30,056 in 1990. Downtown Stamford is now a dense urban environment, with about 37,800 people living within a mile of its core. “We have substantial upside in front of us, based on the strength of our consumer market,” Lotstein said.

With its neighborhood parks, cafés and cherry-tree-lined streets that do not conform to a grid layout, the city looks and feels like a suburban town center — this, despite the presence of some major corporations. Xerox Corp. opened an office here in 1969. Others followed through the 1970s, including pharmaceuticals company Purdue Pharma, International Paper Co. and Pitney Bowes. Stamford solidified its standing as a corporate center when SBC Warburg (today UBS), the international investment banking arm of Swiss Bank, moved into a 594,000-square-foot complex in 1996. The center featured the world’s largest trading floor, a 65,000-square-foot expanse.

The city’s office space tripled from roughly 4 million square feet in 1970 to about 12 million square feet in 1984, says Joseph McGee, vice president of public policy and programs for the Southwestern Area Commerce & Industry Association of Connecticut. Formed in 1970, SACIA represents local businesses and mobilizes its members to promote Stamford. Today Stamford has about 16 million square feet of office space.

This office growth spawned an expansion of the Stamford railroad station, which handles some 30,000 commuters daily. Today Stamford’s workforce stands at about 85,000, nearly half of them commuters, says McGee.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Twin crises in the late 1980s — the real estate market collapse, and the stock market crash of October 1987 — disrupted Stamford’s growth. The hard times dragged on into the early 1990s, with about 20 percent of the office space and 22 percent of the retail space falling vacant, according to the special-services district.

But when things started picking up again in the mid-to-late ’90s, Fairfield County, which includes Stamford, used tax breaks to woo investment banks into all that vacant office space. Thus, the business district has evolved from a center for the older financial services and insurance businesses to a base for sleeker, more modern securities firms, says McGee.

The same kind of change is seen in the retail sector, where specialty and discount retailers such as Target are replacing the Woolworth’s and the Caldors of the past.

And it’s no coincidence that big-box retailers make up most of the new retail real estate development in Stamford. When city officials realized, about 12 years ago, that big-box stores would play a prominent role in the future of retail, they made plans to steer such developments to the central business district by banning retail elsewhere.

Big-box retail and power center developers took awhile to warm up to all this though, says William Hennessey, a partner at locally based law firm Sandak Hennessey & Greco. Hennessey specializes in planning and zoning in the Stamford area and also worked for the city’s law department during the boom of the early-to-mid-1980s.

“[City officials] went way ahead of the curve 10 years ago, and stuck their necks out, especially as some of their ideas were greeted with silence,” said Hennessey.

Those same ideas are being greeted today with the sounds of construction equipment instead, and most of the projects, including the Target development and the Burlington Coat Factory, are slated to open this fall. Stamford Place will probably open in the fall of 2006. “You go to other [suburban areas] and there is not really a place for you to go to a nice restaurant or go shopping,” said Michael Yaraghi, president of Safavieh. “In 1988 [Stamford] was very quiet, but it is a different city now.”