For several years now, the Taubman Co. has been looking through slatted eyes at West Hartford’s Blue Back Square. The Westfarms Mall owner has not been happy with the ballyhooed “lifestyle center” competitor. But now it’s probable that Taubman is looking a little further east, to Manchester and South Windsor, and wondering just how many millions of dollars its attack strategy is going to cost it.
Not that Taubman hasn’t already spent millions in a fruitless effort to thwart Blue Back, which for the past few weeks has been on a rolling grand opening to throngs of people.
Taubman was behind eight legal challenges — all of which have been dismissed by the courts — and numerous PR efforts to kill the development.
But Taubman is likely to have to cough up tens of millions more, if the close of an eerily similar suit is any gauge.
General Growth Properties owns the Shoppes at Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester. Three years ago, General Growth mimicked Taubman’s strategies, suing to stop the development of the Evergreen Walk shopping center next door in South Windsor.
General Growth eventually dropped the local suit, but it didn’t abandon the strategy nationally. It employed the same technique to pummel a proposed mall in California.
That mall fought back, and two weeks ago General Growth announced that it had lost the fight. A court ordered it to pay its rival $74.2 million, “plus to-be-determined punitive damages.”
The award was so large, it sent General Growth’s third quarter results deep into the red. The punitive damages may do the same to the fourth quarter.
That announcement from General Growth came just a week after West Hartford officials filed suit against Taubman, claiming vexatious litigation, wrongful interference with a business relationship, unfair trade practices and abuse of process. Blue Back’s developers are also expected to file their own suit.
For a company that was so vocal about its competition for so long, Taubman is being awfully quiet in the face of its own legal problems. Maybe that’s because it’s seen what happens to obstructionist bullies. It has so far fallen in every venue it’s fought. How much more can it afford to lose?
Worst Face Forward
Aetna is having a banner year financially. One has to wonder then: couldn’t it have spent just a little bit of it on a decent architect?
The insurance giant is relocating thousands of employees to the city from its Middletown campus. To accommodate them all, Aetna just finished building a new parking garage.
Now, few parking garages are works of art, but this monstrosity looms large over I-84, a multi-story concrete barricade. It didn’t have to be this way. Just look at the Trumbull on the Park garage for an example of a parking structure in harmony with its surroundings.
Aetna’s garage is a hideous slab of dull grey that deadens the senses and kills the vitality of the cityscape. Clearly, the days of Jack Dollard — who made a giant smokestack on the other side of the highway seem like a whimsical piece of art — are long gone.
