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LAND O'LAKES - The mall, that notorious destroyer of American downtowns, is being recreated. And its newest version looks surprisingly like Main Street.
Old-time Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater stores such as Maas Brothers and Kress Co. are long gone, but shopper nostalgia is conjuring the downtown back to life.
The resurrection is happening in the suburbs north of Tampa, wrought by the very mall developers who helped shutter downtown retail edifices in the first place.
The proposed Cypress Creek Town Center in Pasco County represents such a marriage of mall and Main Street. Not only that, it's heralded as the biggest mall on the west coast of Florida.
Cypress Creek will still have the parking lot sprawl of the traditional mall, but the stores are supposed to stretch down a shady, sidewalked and fountained facsimile of a downtown shopping boulevard. Elegant shop-front adornments such as awnings, tile roofs, balustrades and bell towers would encourage strolling and browsing.
Cypress Creek would even let a few lucky customers park on the street in front of their favorite store. "It's a return to where shopping used to be, back to the charming downtowns, although people didn't view them as charming at the time," said Bill Fullington, vice president of marketing for Cypress Creek developer the Richard E. Jacobs Group.
It has taken decades for retailing to reach this crossroads. In the 1960s and 1970s, enclosed malls offered automobile accessibility, low prices and variety of merchandise that downtown stores couldn't match.
Gone was the stone, brick and terra cotta ornament of the downtown stores. Gone was the lunch counter, the creaky escalator and the toy department on the fourth floor. For malls, a big air-conditioned shell in the suburbs was enough.
The Tampa-St. Petersburg area embraced such monuments to consumption. Think of WestShore Plaza, University Mall, Tyrone Square Mall and Gulf View Square.
But the shopping public, increasingly cool to what's seen as a sterile retail atmosphere, demands more, said Geoffrey Booth, an expert on retailing for the Washington, D.C., think tank Urban Land Institute.
The change is partly in reaction to the success of so-called big box power centers: commercial parcels dominated by discount stores, supercenters and home improvement stores that have been peeling customers from malls.
"People are looking for the missing element, which is a sense of place. Life is suddenly too short, especially after 9/11," Booth said.
"Most aging baby boomers grew up on a diet of Mayberry and Leave it to Beaver. It was safe and secure. You didn't have to worry about anything."
Mall developers have gotten the message. And they're not complaining.
They see more than just marketing advantages in the retro style. Outdoor malls are also cheaper to build. Their common areas, unencumbered by the air conditioning and lighting of enclosed malls, are less costly to maintain.
Simon Property Group, the country's biggest operator of regional malls, owns 174 enclosed centers across the U.S, including Gulf View Square and Tyrone Square in the Tampa Bay area.
But all six new malls it has in the pipeline are open-air. Two are in Florida: St. John's Town Center in Jacksonville and Coconut Point in Fort Myers.
"Our three core constituencies are enamored of the concept," Simon spokesman Les Morris said. "One is the consumer. They like being outside. Tenants love it, too. And municipalities like the sense of new urbanism and the town center feel of them."
Jacobs, the Cypress Creek developer, has seized just as strongly on the concept. The company has released few details about its plans for Cypress Creek. It is "pre-marketing" the 1.5-million-square-foot center to tenants and does not want to jeopardize its prospects. The tentative opening date is 2007.
But Jacobs said the project is modeled on Gulf Coast Town Center, an open-air mall with a Mediterranean flavor being built on Interstate 75 near Fort Myers. Cypress Creek and Gulf Coast are more or less sister projects.
In Fort Myers, a Main Street a third of a mile long will showcase the bulk of the more than 100 stores and shops. Three department stores - Belk, JCPenney and Burdines - have grabbed the biggest lots.
The front end of the boulevard will feature decorative arches under which cars and pedestrians can pass. A Bass Pro Shop sporting goods emporium would anchor the end of Main Street, like Cinderella's castle does Main Street USA in Disney.
The Fort Myers plans show beautified storefronts of columns, arches, canopies, railings, windows and towers. Roofs are a mix of copper, tile, slate and shingle.
Perfumed bougainvillea would climb the trunks of towering palms. Two side streets cross the main boulevard, and the intersections marked by traffic circles, fountains and pavilions.
The tenant mix at Cypress Creek is still a work in progress, although Jacobs promises three fashion-brand department stores and a multiscreen cinema.
Pasco county commissioners are scheduled to vote on rezoning the 500-acre site at I-75 and State Road 56 in July. The location puts Cypress Creek within 20 minutes of tens of thousands of middle- and upper-income shoppers in New Tampa, southern Pasco and Carrollwood.
"The mall in your area is targeted to be more upscale than the one in Fort Myers," Fullington said.
Mall experts say the concept is a winner. Mock downtowns have spread across the country and Booth, the retailing expert from Washington, said he can't think of a single recent one that has failed, even in colder climates.
He recalls visiting such a shopping center in Vancouver. Despite snow on the ground, shoppers happily sipped coffee under umbrellas in outdoor cafes.
Tenants are happy. Rather than being entombed in the bare exterior of enclosed malls, stores can flaunt their facades to passing shoppers.
"It's going back to the idea of downtown department stores architecturally," Booth said. "The old buildings actually bespoke the quality of the goods and the quality of the company."
Tampa Bay malls have been inching in the open-air direction the past few years. Westfield Shoppingtown Citrus Park, near Tampa, has laid out what looks to be a Main Street, albeit within an air-conditioned shell.
The upscale International Plaza in Tampa took things a bit further, opening part of the shopping center to the outdoors.
Some view the Main Street idea as a retailing fad that will pass as surely as Maas Brothers did in downtown Tampa and Clearwater. But mall developers would be signing their death warrants if they built centers spurned by the public, Booth said.
While most enclosed malls should continue to thrive, consumers are demanding alternatives.
"People say, "We're the richest and most powerful country in the world and all we've got to choose from is an enclosed mall and a grubby strip center on Route 1,' " Booth said. "There's got to be another way."