Back in the early 1980s, West Edmonton Mall was one of the strangest business stories in the country.
Alberta was up to its neck in the quicksand of the worst recession since the Dirty Thirties.
Yet four reclusive Iranian immigrants, the Ghermezian brothers, whose origins were something of a mystery, were building an extravagant and seemingly oversized shopping centre on the western edge of the provincial capital.
Along with the usual mix of retail outlets, West Edmonton would have an indoor skating rink, an amusement park with roller-coasters and merry-go-rounds, and an underwater marine park with dolphins and more submarines than the Canadian navy - not that the Ghermezians were running around talking about the project while it was on the drawing boards. They left that job to a flamboyant former Montrealer named Rubin Stahl.
Ruby, as he came to be known by the journalists covering the story, and I was one of them, had a voice like a foghorn. He didn't talk. He yelled. His mind seemed to work at the speed of light while his poor tongue travelled at the speed of sound, so he rarely completed one sentence before starting the next and he sprinkled his discourses with superlatives. West Edmonton was going to be unique, fabulous, unbelievable, out of this world.
The whole production was so over the top that most of us didn't believe any of it until opening night in September 1983. And lo and behold, there were dolphins and submarines and figure skaters and a midway and a whole lot more. And that was just the start. Two years later, West Edmonton got even bigger. The Ghermezians added a five-acre waterpark - North America's largest - a hotel and more stores, bringing the total to about 800.
At that point, the mall was more or less done. Stahl, not being content to collect the rents and keep the tenants happy, moved on to Scottsdale, Ariz. He began building large-scale public aquariums, among other things, but now he's back with another shopping mall that may well make West Edmonton seem like kids' stuff.
In mid-June, while attending an International Council of Shopping Centers conference in Quebec, he unveiled plans for a project called Lac Mirabel, north of Montreal and adjacent to the expressway to the Laurentians. According to Stahl, construction will begin in August or September, and the centre will open by the fall of 2009.
Lac Mirabel will occupy 331 acres of land when it is fully built, whereas West Edmonton sits on 100. It will only have 300 stores, but the amenities and attractions will put it in a class by itself.
"We won't have roller-coasters and submarines," says Stahl, who has lost none of his zip in the two decades since he was building West Edmonton. "It'll be the mall of the future, the first of its kind. It's going to be beautiful. It would take me two hours to describe it."
Nevertheless, in the space of a brief telephone interview from his Scottsdale office, Stahl did his best. Lac Mirabel will have an 8,000-seat arena for major junior hockey with a hotel attached. It will have a 200-seat rink for young kids' hockey and one with 400 seats for older boys and girls. There will be an indoor soccer pitch and a 6,000-seat stadium, which could play host to a Triple-A baseball team.
There will be a 100,000-sq.-ft. spa - "as big as a Costco," as Stahl puts it - with its own hotel. He plans to include a waterpark with a wave pool, and indoor as well as outdoor swimming pools.
The property will be built around a man-made lake, hence the name Lac Mirabel, and there will be man-made streams, stocked with trout, flowing through it.
"People will actually be able to fly-fish in those streams," he says. "In the winter, we'll let them freeze and people will be able to skate on them. It's going to be unbelievable."
That is exactly what some people in the Montreal area have been saying about Lac Mirabel since Stahl began touting the project a decade ago.
He turned a few of the skeptics into believers when he showed up at the shopping-centre conference with a scale model and announced a partnership with Gordon Group Holdings LLC of Greenwich, Conn., a developer that has built a number of entertainment and retail complexes in the U.S.
"Are we real?" Gordon Group chairman Sheldon Gordon said in response to one question. "We are very real. I have been doing this for 45 years and have not fallen once yet."
If that wasn't enough, Stahl also disclosed that New York-based Morgan Stanley Real Estate Equity Fund is putting $110 million into the project and will be a part owner.
So Stahl is back in business near his native Montreal and the skeptics be damned. He's going to build a shopping centre like no other, just as he and the Ghermezians did when a lot of people were losing their shirts and the safe money was retreating from the market.
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
