Walgreens 'spectacular Times Square entrance

Real Estate Weekly, Nov 26, 2008 by Daniel Geiger

When The New York Times built and relocated its headquarters to 1 Times Square from Lower Manhattan just after the turn of the 19th century, the building was meant to be a home befitting of its success but that would also continue to spur its rising prominence.

A little more than a hundred years later, Walgreens has chosen to occupy the property for much the same reason. Although it vies with CVS for the title of the nation's biggest pharmacy and convenience store chain, Walgreens has less than a dozen locations in Manhattan, a smattering that hardly registers among shoppers when compared to the roughly 300 locations that the local drug store king, Duane Reade, has around the city. Company executives said they never envisioned an attempt--in what would look foolhardy now amid a recession--to roll out boatloads of stores in a Starbucks-style saturation of the city's retail landscape in order to command market share.

"There was a time when we were down to just a few stores in New York City," said John Foley, vice president of store operations at the company. Foley indicated that the Chicago-based company had shifted its focus away from the northeast decades ago to concentrate on markets it felt were more core to its business. "It's going to be a slow methodical type of growth, we're not interested in 220 stores."

Instead, with 1 Times Square the company took a more precision-guided approach, looking to buoy its brand both locally and abroad by virtue of Times Square's multifaceted popularity as an office neighborhood, entertainment district and tourist destination. Considered a central nerve of pop culture, retail experts say that having a store in the area is as much an advertising play as a way to tap its boatloads of foot traffic.

On top of the reportedly $4.5 million in rent that Walgreens agreed last year to pay annually to lease the building, the company spent millions of dollars building huge electronic billboards, or as its designers and company executives prefer to call them, spectaculars.

"Don't call it a sign, call it a spectacular," said Arthur Gilmore, president of the Gilmore Group, which designed the towering displays, whose most striking component is a pair of diagonal strips of electronic signage that streak nearly contiguously up the east and west faces of the 340-foot tall tower. "Signs have a derogatory meaning, you feel like it's urban blight, this is big and loud, but it's not ugly, it ties the building together."

Walgreens executives say that the spectacular is the largest of its type in the world. Behind the spectaculars and covering the sides of building are scrims, giant sheets of mesh watermarked with Walgreens' logo.

Craig Sinclair, a Walgreens divisional advertising vice president, said during a press conference held at the store Thursday to announce its grand opening, that he felt the billion or so viewers of the New Years Eve ball drop--a tradition started by The New York Times on 1 Time Square's roof soon after the building was completed in 1904 and that has taken place there ever since--wouldn't be able to help but notice Walgreens' brand.

"This is the biggest point of purchase display in the world, 20,000 s/f of display and we get to have a Walgreens store down at the bottom, it's big, unique and bold," Sinclair said. "We will capture the attention of New York and the tourists that come from around the world and we'll make some money at the same time doing it."

But as The Times quickly learned in the early part of the last century, One Times Square also presents its share of logistical challenges. Over one hundred years old, Sinclair said that designers had to check whether the building could support the spectaculars, which he said weighed 25 tons.

"We had to X-ray the entire building to make sure that it could support that weight," Sinclair said. "We found that structurally we had to do a lot of modifications."

The sole inhabitant of the small sliver of land between 42nd and 43rd Street and Seventh Avenue and Broadway, One Times Square is also surprisingly isolated and compact. Walgreens executives said that the company had to custom-tailor the layout of the store to accommodate the small size and draw customers into the space, which is spread over the first three floors of the building.

The company crammed tourist items, packaged foods and beverages on the ground floor and typical convenience store staples like candy bars, potato chips, gum and cigarettes at the counter to draw impulse buyers. Unique product displays and a wider selection of slightly more upscale goods than is typical in a conventional Walgreens will hopefully bring shoppers upstairs.

Featured prominently on the second floor is a L'Oreal showcase that Catherine Lindner, a divisional vice president of marketing development at Walgreens, said had been imported from Europe and featured a wide selection of the cosmetic company's line. She said that shoppers would come to the store for this installation and that most no longer restricted their buying to places like department stores, what had been one of the predominant channels for cosmetics purchases.