BALL + MALL

0

Sports and shopping once disparate activities that now enjoy an almost symbiotic relationship could each get a shot in the arm from a pair of Southland developments in the works.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt recently unveiled plans to renovate the team’s nearly 50-year-old stadium in an effort to expand the restaurant and retail options and make the venue an attraction even on non-game days.

Across town, meanwhile, billionaire real estate developer Ed Roski Jr. has turned heads with his ambitious effort to lure a professional football franchise with the promise of a sleek, modern venue. Roski, part-owner of the Lakers and Kings and the driving force behind construction of the Staples Center, is planning to build that stadium in the middle of a 600-acre entertainment destination featuring chain stores, cafes, hotels and more that will draw patrons and tourists every day of the year.

Together, these two projects highlight a new trend in stadium development in which the stadium is just one element in a broader entertainment complex often featuring retail, restaurants and office space.

Los Angeles is ideal for this type of development, several experts said, because the climate and culture are particularly suited for spacious outdoor shopping destinations, such as Universal CityWalk and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

“There are so many public outdoor spaces that have retail elements that have become successful as they have embraced the outdoor elements,” said Scott Johnson, design partner at Johnson Fain, the Los Angeles-based architecture firm that is designing the Dodger Stadium renovation. “It’s very quintessentially Los Angeles.”

The popularity of such retail centers has given rise to new amalgamated sports-retail complexes. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, said David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute.

“A couple of decades ago, sports was not entertainment sports was sports and entertainment was entertainment. Now they are one,” said Carter, who has consulted on sports venue developments including Roski’s stadium project. “Back then, they weren’t concerned about the all-day entertainment experience.”

But as fans have requested more stadium amenities, owners have discovered the lucrative possibilities that such arrangements present.

“It’s truly a function of supply and demand,” he said. “Fans have come to expect the complete experience.”


Expanded options

For the Dodgers, the complete experience starts with a museum spotlighting the history of the storied franchise.

The $500-million stadium makeover also would include an outdoor promenade that will give fans expanded entertainment options. Planners want fans “to really think of Dodger Stadium as a destination beyond specific game days,” Johnson said. “We see this as a very large, multi-use urban project.”

But Los Angeles is not the only city eyeing this type of entertainment-centered stadium development.

Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, has been talking for several years about turning the team’s Gillette Stadium into a “destination” for fans 365 days a year. Already he has lured national retail chain Bass Pro Shops to an emerging development in an adjacent former parking lot.

Similar efforts in San Francisco, Dallas and New York are in various states of negotiation or construction, as well.

Stadium owners, many of whom often hold a stake in the team as well, are increasingly drawn to this type of development because combining shopping and retail is a mutually beneficial arrangement, Carter said.

“It creates a buzz,” he said. “Having retail attached to a stadium certainly helps the branding of both sides of the equation.”

What’s more, revenue from the retail is not shared under the NFL’s revenue-sharing agreement, so it behooves owners to maximize the profit from their facilities.

Under NFL rules, television deals, licensed merchandise sales and some other sources of revenue are shared equally by the league’s 32 teams. Many stadium-based revenue sources, including luxury box money, stadium naming rights and income from retail operations, however, are not shared.

“That’s incredibly important revenue to generate because that’s not revenue that you have to share with the owners,” Carter said.


‘Exciting tourist destination’

Roski’s $800-million stadium will feature more than 800,000 square feet of retail and another 160,000 square feet of restaurants.

“What we’re trying to do is make this an exciting tourist destination,” Roski said. “If we do it right, when you come as a

tourist from Asia or wherever you’re coming from to California, you’re going to go to Universal Studios, you’re going to go to L.A. Live, you’re going to go here, you’re going to go to Disneyland.”

His Majestic Realty Co., headquartered near the proposed stadium site in City of Industry, has a 65-year lease on the stadium site. The development is part of a larger effort to improve the area the company has invested $60 million to renovate the Pacific Palms Resort in nearby Industry Hills.

Roski first began calling for a team to move to Los Angeles in the 1990s, after the Raiders and Rams left the city. His efforts at the time centered on putting a team in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where USC’s football team plays. But the league and a number of teams rejected that idea.

But even then, Roski was championing the idea of broadening the retail and entertainment options for stadium patrons.

Sheldon Sloan, who was president of the Coliseum Commission at the time, said Roski wanted to rearrange the venue to accommodate more restaurants and shops.

“He saw it as something that would be a 24/7 kind of a mall all the time, whether there was a game or not,” said Sloan, a former judge and president of the State Bar of California.

In his latest proposal, Roski said the retail component is a must because the economics are just not compelling otherwise. A typical NFL team will only play about a dozen home games in a season, and that necessitates a design that draws people in on non-game days.

“These are major investments and to use it 12, 13 times a year, it’s pretty hard to make the numbers work,” Roski said. “You need to have other amenities around it that make it become a 365-day-a-year facility.”

The company also boasts that the east San Gabriel Valley location is accessible to residents of nearby Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. (The company says 12 million people live within 25 miles, though that radius doesn’t extend to the wealthy Westside.)

The company hopes to begin construction as early as the end of the year and believes the venue can be ready by 2011.

But before that can happen, of course, a team must commit to move. Roski will not say which teams are most likely to move, but industry observers have speculated that the Minnesota Vikings, Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers are among the candidates.

“The NFL has always looked at this as a tremendous opportunity and they want to come to Los Angeles,” Roski said. “They just wanted to do it right and they wanted to have the right facility.”

No posts to display