Main Line Shoppers
O’Neill Properties breaks ground on mixed-use town center at end of Philadelphia’s Main Line.
Susan H. Fishman

Construction on Worthington, a mixed-use town center in one of the most affluent suburbs in the country, is underway. A $420 million venture, the largest private investment ever by an individual in the state of Pennsylvania, Worthington will no doubt live up to expectations of a first-class, first-of-its-kind center for the market.

Worthington’s high demographics will lead to the creation of a first class retail component. High-end grocer Wegman’s will be one of the anchors of the projects.

Until Worthington came about, there were no first-class retail environments, much less restaurant or entertainment venues, in Malvern, a suburb of Pennsylvania. But it would seem that residents liked it that way. It took 85 township meetings for Philadelphia-based developer O’Neill Properties to convince the community that Worthington was a needed and worthwhile venture.

“At the first meeting, there were hundreds of people with cars parked all the way down the street,” remembers Brian O’Neill, president of O’Neill Properties. “But over time, we negotiated with the township the benefits of having such a beautiful, high-end urban lifestyle center, and they bought into it. They realized that our architectural design was superior, and the service to their office sector and residential folks was such a bonus, that it was a benefit and not a detriment.”

The Philadelphia Main Line was an area populated primarily by extremely wealthy Philadelphia families from the industrial revolution. Over time, technology, money management and private equity have filled in and a number of towns that wrap along the train line that commutes to and from Philadelphia were created. The last town on the line is a town called Malvern, which was traditionally the place where the largest estates were located. As a result, the expensive private schools, the great hospitals, and all the banks have gone there to cater to that ultra-wealthy clientele.

For years, a steel mill sat at the corner of Routes 29 and 202 in Malvern. Today, the area near that intersection is home to the corporate headquarters of Vanguard, as well as large offices for companies such as Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Shared Medical Systems and HBO. O’Neill Properties had its eye on the steel mill for more than 20 years, in hopes the owners would sell. A few years ago, Columbus, Ohio-based Worthington Steel finally agreed to sell the plant and its 44 acres to O’Neill. After gaining the site, O’Neill then went to the township and sold them on the location for a retail project.

A rendering of Worthington.

When completed, the project will include 750,000 square feet of retail (with predicted sales somewhere in the range of $600 to $800 per square foot); 753 residential units, which include townhomes and one, two and three-bedroom condos; and several hundred square feet of office space, which is all pre-committed with mostly small tenants, primarily investment firms, from the Great Valley Corporate Center.

Coronado, California-based The McGarey Group is leasing Worthington for O’Neill Properties. BMAC Real Estate, headed by Bruce MacLeod, is also engaged as a development consultant. Wegman’s Food Markets has committed to a 145,000 square-foot store that will probably be open 24 hours a day. O’Neill Properties has also reached agreements with Borders Books, Muvico, Brio restaurant, Banana Republic, Jos. A Banks, California Pizza Kitchen and Starbucks. The company is currently negotiating deals with Ann Taylor and Limited and has signed a letter of intent with Target, who will take a pad site next to Wegman’s.

But traditional urban lifestyle town centers have not typically wanted big anchors associated with them, says O’Neill.

“The tenants saw that as an infringement on their brand. The result has been that the ones who have done well have done very well but others, because of lack of traffic, have trailed from a sales-per-square-foot perspective. So when we set out to do Worthington, our goal was to drive 7 million people per year through the site from the anchors and then have the small stores generate whatever they generated, but the combination of the two would be the powerhouse sales-per-square-foot scenario. We call it bringing Washington, Boston and Philadelphia to your front door and creating sales.”

Today, Malvern boasts ultra-high demographics, with 600,000 people, an average household income of $130,000 and 100,000 office workers commuting to the area. Most of the jobs in the target market are high-paying, white-collar jobs in the nearby office parks of The Great Valley Corporate Center. Also, the 700,000 square feet of office space at Worthington is expected to be a premium location, and will be built to a standard beyond Class A.

Designed by Antunovich Associates (who planned the award winning town center, The Market Common Clarendon, in Arlington, Virginia), Worthington is designed to look classic and permanent. The finishes will be extremely high-end and durable. O’Neill is insistent that nothing be flimsy or theatrical. He has taken a personal interest in the finishes, selecting them himself.

O’Neill’s team visited and photographed Herald Square in London and Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland and modeled Worthington’s architecture off of a European shopping district.  “These are two downtown shopping districts with residential units above the stores that date back over 200 years. Grafton Street on a Saturday morning at 11:00 will have 200,000 people on the street.”

“If you think about the success of Fifth Avenue, it’s driven entirely by the population of very wealthy shoppers on the sidewalk,” he adds. “Basically, any store can open on Fifth Avenue and do well. So we’ve employed the same tactic at Worthington but with a little more European design.”

Consisting of native materials to Chester County, such as Pennsylvania fieldstone and certain bricks, the buildings will have European colors that you don’t often find in the United States, such as mustard yellow and light blue. Every restaurant will have mandatory outdoor seating and cafes with wide sidewalks — in some cases as wide as 20 feet.

“It’s built like a town square with the movie theater at the center of the square and the bookstore at the other end, so it’s highly concentrated,” notes O’Neill.

O’Neill has done some environmental remediation on the site. The company was able to scrap the steel from the mill and sell it. The sale of the steel paid for the cost of the environmental remediation and the demolition of the mill. O’Neill is working in partnership with the Pennsylvania department of environmental protection, and will restore the mill area to a project that will prove to be an innovative shopping experience to the Main Line.

The company was able to obtain an off-ramp directly off of Route 202 into the project site and a second off-ramp off of Route 29.

“So when you get off of the two major arteries, you actually empty out roughly 110,000 cars a day into the shopping district, which again, is just another way of forcing traffic through that site,” says O’Neill.

Worthington will feature thousands of parking spaces concealed in a series of parking garages, which have buildings wrapped around them. Though there will be several thousand parking spaces on the site, very few will actually be visible to the drivers by. And they are selectively located so that no one has to walk more than 150 feet or so to a parking space. The strategic design includes multiple entrances so shoppers can get into a parking garage from virtually any location. The center will also include a connection to and extension of the Chester County Rails-to-Trails bike path, and the re-opening of Little Valley Creek, which is currently enclosed in a pipe under asphalt paving.

The project site for Worthington has been graded and is looking at a 2009 occupancy. Once complete, Worthington projects an estimated 7 million visitors per year.


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