Theater announcement a big lift for Montclair Place

The regional shopping mall has announced it has reached a deal to develop a multiplex. Officials hope that move is a step toward making the struggling facility more entertainment oriented, but that effort still has a long way to go.

Efforts to revive Montclair Place got a boost last week with the announcement that the mall’s owner, Los Angeles-based CIM Group, will bring a 12-screen AMC Dine-In theater to the property.

The project will occupy about 55,000 square feet of a two-story, 134,000-square foot building that is under construction on the site of the former Broadway department store, according to a statement.

Besides the multiplex, the new building at Montclair Place will have about 64,000 square feet of restaurants and entertainment-themed attractions, all of which will provide a major new entrance to the retail facility.

“AMC is an exceptional movie exhibition company that expands the entertainment options and enhances our visitor experience at Montclair Place,” said Shaul Kuba, co-Founder and principal of CIM Group, in the statement. “Securing the lease with AMC is a signature component of our repositioning program to recreate Montclair Place.”

The AMC project, which has been in the works for several years, is the beginning of the next phase of improvements to Montclair Place, a 1.2 million square-foot enclosed mall in the center of the city.

So far, the mall’s north end has been upgraded, and its food court has been moved to the center of the property. It has also added Moreno St. Market, a food hall that is becoming the community gathering place CIM Group hoped it would, according to the statement.

Covers have been added to the mall’s indoor bridges to make them more attractive, signs have been added to the mall’s north side and some landscaping and other improvements have been done to that part of the property, said Mike Diaz, Montclair’s city planner.

“Those are the big improvements, the ones that are easy to identify,” Diaz said. “There are still little things that need to be done, utility improvements and things like that. But those are the main things we’ve been able to get done, so far.”

Montclair Place opened 1968, when its main competition was the Pomona Mall, an outdoor facility that was starting to fade, and Eastland Shopping Center in West Covina, which was also outdoors but thriving.

Montclair Place – known at the time as Montclair Plaza – quickly became the dominant retail destination on the west end of the Inland Empire. It added a second level in 1987 and underwent a major interior renovation in 2008.

By the time CIM Group bought the mall in 2014 for a reported $170 million, Montclair Place was experiencing difficulty. It was losing ground to Ontario Mills, which opened in 1996, and Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga, which set up shop in 2004.

The Shoppes at Chino Hills, which is celebrating its anniversary this year, has also put a dent into Montclair Place. But the 50-year-old mall next to Interstate 10 is in a battle much larger than just having to deal with stronger local competition.

It’s also fighting the decline of the enclosed regional shopping mall, the model that dominated the U.S. retail market starting in the early 1970s but began falling out of favor about 10 years ago. On top of that, like almost every brick-and-mortar retailer, Montclair Place is competing against online shopping’s seemingly limitless rise in popularity.

Total e-commerce sales in the United States last year were $453.5 billion, an increase of about 16 percent compared with 2016, according to data released earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

E-commerce accounted for nearly nine percent of all U.S. retail sales last year, a one percent year-over-year increase, the department reported.

The days of a mall being a collection of shops and a few fast-food restaurants are long gone, which is why so many properties that got started during the same era as Montclair Plaza are fighting to survive, said Rick Lazar, senior vice president and a veteran commercial broker with Coldwell Banker Commercial in Redlands.

“Everything now is about lifestyle and entertainment,” Lazar said. “Victoria Gardens mixes those two elements together and it’s thriving in a big way, but if you’re in the position Montclair Place is in, it can be hard to find the right combination. You also have the problem of multiple ownership with malls, which makes it harder for people to agree on what needs to be done.”

A variety of factors have made it to difficult to upgrade Montclair  Place so it can compete in today’s retail environment, Diaz said.

“I agree that multiple ownership has been a problem but there have been other issues,” Diaz said. “[Montclair Place] used to be owned by General Growth Properties, and when they filed bankruptcy [in 2009] that slowed everything down. When you file bankruptcy, everything goes into limbo and you can’t do very much.”

The city, which must approve any major changes to the property, has always encouraged taking a long-term approach to modernizing Montclair Place, according to Diaz.

“It’s like Las Vegas wedding compared to a church wedding,” he said. “With a Las Vegas wedding you do everything quickly, but with a church wedding you go slow and make sure you get everything just right. This is a church wedding.”