By this time next year, a failed Towson mall -- Towson Marketplace -- will be one of the biggest discount shopping centers in the region.
The renamed Towson Place will be a 670,000-square-foot collection of large, discount retailers, a development configuration referred to in the real estate industry as a "power center."
Towson Place will be bigger than the 500,000-square-foot Snowden Square, a power center in Columbia. In square footage, it will approach the size of Towson Town Center, a regional mall nearby that covers 961,000 square feet.
The center between Joppa Road and Putty Hill Avenue is owned by the Talisman Companies, in Coral Gables, Fla., which has been trying since 1995 to redevelop it.
New tenants to the center will include Target, a Super Fresh grocery store, Petsmart (which is relocating from an adjacent center), Bed, Bath & Beyond, Sports Authority, T.J. Maxx, discount retailer Frugal Fannies, craft store Michaels and Barbecue's Galore, said James Schlesinger, Talisman's president and chief executive officer.
The center will be Frugal Fannies' entry into the Baltimore market. The retailer will have a 50,000-square-foot designer clothes discount warehouse.
Designs also call for three freestanding restaurants at the site.
Schlesinger would not reveal the companies that are negotiating for the restaurant locations.
Not all the tenants of the shopping center will be new arrivals.
Existing tenants that are remaining in the center are Marshalls clothing store, Toys `R' Us and Montgomery Ward & Co., which is undergoing a renovation.
Plans for an AMC Theaters multiplex died under heavy community opposition, Schlesinger said.
Talisman is spending $20 million on the renovation.
"I've been hot on this project for years," said Karen Wilner, a real estate broker at KLNB Inc. in Towson, who handled the lease negotiations.
Wilner said the 43-acre site is ideally suited for this type of development, which is in short supply in north Baltimore County.
The former Towson Marketplace was a 485,000-square-foot enclosed mall anchored by Marshalls and Toys `R' Us.
The concept didn't work, Schlesinger said, because of a poor design and unclear position in the market. It was supposed to be a discount mall, but it had mostly smaller stores.
Today's discount, or power, centers typically contain several large stores of 30,000 square feet or more, each with its own entrance.
They are designed to be near regional shopping malls such as Towson Town Center, which is less than one mile from Towson Place.
Talisman bought the location in 1995 from Equitable Bank (now NationsBank), which had been the lender for Bramalea Properties, the original developer.
Since then, Schlesinger said Talisman has had to negotiate with some existing tenants to move out. The interior mall portion of the site has been demolished.
As part of those negotiations, Talisman bought the Best Products building from a third-party landlord, and then had to buy Best Product's lease when that company filed for bankruptcy.
Talisman's only other project in the Baltimore area is Westview Mall, which Talisman and American Express bought in 1989. The regional mall was converted into a discount mall, with movie theaters and T.J. Maxx.
Across the country, Talisman leases and manages more than 1.7 million square feet of retail space.