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VERMONTERS FIGHT MALL, SETTLE FOR LIFESTYLE CENTER

By Lee Kessler

When it opens next year, Maple Tree Place’s tenants will include The Body Shop, Champlain Chocolates, Chili’s Bar and Grill, Staples, Starbucks and a supermarket.

Maple Tree Place, a mixed-use lifestyle center, will look pretty serene when it’s completed next year, what with its central town green and gazebo, its pond and its bike paths. But that congenial appearance will belie the bitter battles that have taken place over this site.

Taft Corners, in Williston, Vt., deserves a place on the register of America’s battlefield sites. Except that although the Battle of Gettysburg, say, was over in three days, the battle of Taft Corners, waged between retail developers and conservationists, lasted nearly 25 years.

Up until the mid-1970s, Taft Corners was a hay field five miles southwest of Burlington, Vt. Then The Pyramid Cos., the Syracuse, N.Y., entity behind the massive Palisades Center, West Nyack, N.Y., and the more massive DestiNY USA under way in Syracuse (see story, DestiNY USA envisions a giant green mall), bought the field. In 1978 it proposed a 420,000-square-foot mall. Local historians describe the events that followed very much as a docent would inform a battlefield tour group. One hears in the wind not the faded echo of musket fire, but the crack of gavels calling to order innumerable meetings in the town.

It’s easy to see why the site, at the intersection of U.S. Route 2 and Vermont state Route 2, was attractive to both conservationists and developers. Williston residents formed Citizens for Responsible Growth to protect what they saw as the natural beauty of Vermont, with the Green Mountains to the east, crowned by Mount Mansfield, and the more distant Adirondack Mountains to the west.

Pyramid valued the site for its proximity to both a growing Burlington and Interstate 89.

Things didn’t go Pyramid’s way at first. The proposed mall, which would have entailed more retail square footage than there was in all of downtown Burlington itself, was rejected at every level of appeal, up to the Vermont Supreme Court. Having spent more than $2 million in the skirmish, Pyramid sold the property in 1998.

But the company retained ownership of the field, and though the citizen’s group enjoyed its victory, it also knew it had not seen the last of its adversary. (Pyramid is, after all, no stranger to controversy, and the company is not afraid to fight for its sometimes revolutionary projects. In an Oct. 17, 1988, Boston Globe article, a Pyramid executive referred to his colleagues as “the Green Berets of mall building.” Robert Congel, company founder and president, was quoted as saying, “Controversy is the American way of life.” Indeed, in 1985 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Town Board members up for re-election opposed Pyramid’s Galleria mall; the company contributed more than $750,000 in campaign funds to help elect candidates in support.)

Pyramid’s next step at Taft Corners was to appoint a front man to give the project a local face. Enter Ben Frank. A former deputy commissioner in New York under Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Frank owned a townhouse in the ski resort of Stowe, Vt., giving him some local standing.

The fighting resumed in 1987, when Frank notified the town of Williston of his intention to build a 477,000-square-foot mall called Maple Tree Place. He presented it as “a Ben Frank project on land owned by Pyramid.” Citizens for Responsible Growth hastily reassembled. An ad the group ran in the local paper read, “They’re Baaack!” The group also organized a poster barrage, produced a video and created an antimall float in the Fourth of July parade. There was even an antimall campaign song composed and recorded by local rock musicians, titled “Back to the Pyramids.”

The project inched forward through a series of often acrimonious town meetings and local and state approval processes. In interviews with SCT, Frank described the opposition’s “personal attacks on respected people” as “vicious and so distorted.”

Over the ensuing years, however, both sides realized that neither was going to get its own way entirely: The project, in one form or another, was not going to vanish, while the local opposition wasn’t going to approve an enclosed big-box mall. In any case, by now Taft Corners was hardly bucolic wilderness. Other developers had also battled to have their projects approved, and across Route 2A a hard-fought big-box center had been built, housing Bed Bath & Beyond, Circuit City, Toys ‘R’ Us and Wal-Mart. Next to that stands a new office park.

Pyramid and its opponents compromised and began to discuss a mixed-use, open-air center with commercial, retail and residential space — in other words, a lifestyle center that would stand out less than a mall.

The final plans for Maple Tree Place, with its town green and subsidized housing, were approved in 1998. At that point Pyramid decided to disentangle itself from the two-decade-old struggle. It sold the property to Starwood Ceruzzi, a Fairfield, Conn., developer of big-box retail centers with more than 10 million square feet of space in its portfolio. Starwood Ceruzzi brought Frank in as a limited partner, and construction began in the spring of 2000. Since then, Starwood has worked hard to win over the town. For instance, to compensate for the loss of the meadow, it bought a 250-acre farm at the other end of town and donated it to the community.

“From our perspective, it was an agreement between the town, the developer and a citizen’s group that called for a mixed-use development with a town green,” said Mary Peterson, chairwoman of the Williston Select Board, expressing satisfaction with the project and the donation of the farm.

Construction is well under way. Some of the buildings will be finished in the spring, with the project’s final completion set for the fall, said Stephen Berini, senior executive vice president of Starwood Ceruzzi. It will consist of two-story buildings, one of which will accommodate a cinema. As such it will be relatively tall (56 feet), which has ruffled a few feathers. Some big-box retail on one part of the site has also touched nerves, Peterson noted.

“But I think perspectives will change when more shops are open and it’s a bustling center,” she added.

There are 159,000 people within a 30-minute drive of the center. Williston is the site of an IBM regional facility that employs more than 7,000 people, and the market’s median household income exceeds $52,000.

Retail tenants committed to the 71-acre center include Best Buy, Blockbuster Video, The Body Shop, Champlain Chocolates, Chili’s Bar and Grill, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Learning Express, Linens ’n Things, Merrill’s Cinema, Shaw’s Supermarket, Sprint, Staples and Starbucks. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has taken an office in one of the buildings at the edge of the project.

“We know the project’s success ultimately hinges upon the town green and the smaller shops around it,” Berini said. “We’re working at getting local tenancies involved, because that’s where the activity has to come for this thing to work. The local people have to embrace it.”

Maple Tree Place will also serve as a gathering place for community events, he added.

But not everyone is convinced yet.

“The developer keeps saying in the papers, you have to give it a chance until the thing is fully built,” said Fred Lager, one of the primary activists of Citizens for Responsible Growth. “The initial parts of it are effectively big-box stores. The Best Buy in particular is huge. ... It doesn’t look that encouraging. I’m sure when it’s completed it will look better than it does today. I still don’t think it’s particularly great.”

But many are happy, Berini said.

“When we came to the project, there was a history of anger,” he said. “But then there was also the inevitability that something was going to happen, so let’s try and do it right. Obviously, you can never please all the people. But we’re proud of what we did and what we are doing.”

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