Winrock Redevelopment on Track with Green Community Center Vision by Construction Reporter

Winrock Mall Redevelopment is on track, recently attracting Nordstrom Rack and Designer Shoe Warehouse.  The new Winrock is envisioned as a “green” community center capturing rainwater for garden and fruit tree irrigation and PV solar panels slated for installation on all rooftops

More than 50 years after its grand opening, the Winrock Mall is on the verge of a new era.

This spring it was announced that Nordstrom Rack is planning to open a 35,000 square-foot outlet in the east Albuquerque shopping center.

“We’re very happy about this,” says Darin Sand, vice-president of development with Goodman Realty Group, which purchased the 84-acre Winrock property in 2007.  “Nordstrom should be here by the spring of 2016.”

Since the beginning of the new work on the old mall site the restaurants Dave & Busters, Genghis Grill and B.J.’s Restaurant and Brewhouse have all signed leases with what is now referred to as the Winrock Town Center.  Last month the Designer Shoe Warehouse, otherwise known as DSW, announced that it will open a nearly 17,000 square-foot Winrock store.

“Dave & Busters is being built right now,” reports Sand. “Nordstrom and DSW will happen soon, followed by some of the other restaurants.  Hopefully, this is going to be a continual process.”

Construction activity at Winrock, which was substantially initiated with the building of a 16-screen IMAX Regal Cinemas theatre last year, represents a dramatic shift in fortunes for what was the first and largest shopping center built in New Mexico.

Developed in 1959 by the University of New Mexico, which owned the land, and Winthrop Rockefeller, who would become famous as the first pro-civil rights governor of Arkansas, Winrock boasted 500,000 square feet of leasable space and soon housed such retail heavyweights as Montgomery Ward, S.S. Kresge 5 & 10, Hallmark Cards, and a Safeway supermarket.

Although the original Winrock enjoyed a dominant position in the regional shopping mall market for some three decades, its decline could be charted to the early 1990s when J.C. Penny closed its outlet there and the Safeway supermarket left.  By the end of the decade more vacancies appeared, with Montgomery Ward heading out in 2001.

When Goodman Realty entered the picture, so did a future unimagined by one-time patrons of the mall. Goodman Realty CEO Gary Goodman, with more than four decades developing malls, said he envisioned more than just a new reconfigured retail space.

Instead Goodman has talked of the new Winrock as a community center with an emphasis on green construction and practices. That emphasis has included plans to capture and purify rainwater to be used to irrigate gardens and fruit trees in the development. PV solar panels are slated for installation on all rooftops.

“We anticipate the construction of about 1 million square feet of retail, as well as 86,000 square feet of restaurants, a 150-room hotel, and a few hundred residential units,” says Sand.

Read the full article here.

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