ATR In The News

VANDERBILT WILL LEAD 100 OAKS MALL REBIRTH

Medical plaza to share building with retail shops

By CHAS SISK
Staff Writer
Tennessean.com
July 17, 2007

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will lead the resuscitation of the 100 Oaks Mall under a deal reached Monday with the shopping center's new owners.

The university hospital plans to treat as many as 2,000 people a day in space that it will rent from the mall's new owners, a pair of Dallas-based developers. The campus, which is scheduled to open next summer, will be Vanderbilt's biggest outside its West End Avenue campus.

The medical plaza is meant to serve as the linchpin for the turnaround of 100 Oaks. Built in the mid-1960s, the building was Nashville's first enclosed shopping mall, but it has suffered from high vacancies for decades.

Vanderbilt will take up the mall's second and third floors, as well as a neighboring office tower. The operation will take up nearly 440,000 square feet. By comparison, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's main campus is about 4.5 million square feet.

The hospital was drawn to the site because it is visible from Interstate 65, easy to reach and inexpensive to develop, said Wright Pinson, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs.

"It's just reaching out into the community, taking our services to the community, rather than forcing the community to come here," he said.

The shopping center also is meant to feed customers into the building's first-floor shops on Powell Avenue and Thompson Lane.

"This is the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that we hoped they'd adapt," said Tom Jurkovich, director of the Mayor's Office of Economic and Community Development. "It's fairly significant and innovative."

Exactly what Vanderbilt will move to the mall is still being determined, a hospital spokesman said. A statement released by the developer said more than 1,000 people will be employed in 20 medical clinics, the accounting department, patient billing and other administrative offices.

Entrances and exits, as well as some traffic lights leading to the mall, could be moved to improve traffic flow around the mall.

Co-owners Frank Mihalopoulos and Tony Ruggeri have hired Steve Johnson of the firm Gresham Smith and Partners to supervise renovations to the building. Those will include redesigning its exterior to let in more outside light and converting the mall's second floor from retail to office space.

Mihalopoulos and Ruggeri, who bought the mall late last year, also have hired John Forster of the Shopping Center Group to boost leasing in the building's first floor. A team of brokers from CB Richard Ellis brokered the deal with Vanderbilt and will continue to handle office leasing at the mall.