Adding third floor, movie theater to Colonie Center requires threading tons of steel through current stores

By ALAN WECHSLER Business writer

December 19, 2006 Tuesday

COLONIE - Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the construction at Colonie Center is how easy it is to thread a 40-foot-tall, 14.5-ton steel column through a lingerie store.

All it took was one of the world's tallest portable cranes and a handful of construction workers. A relatively simple solution to a complex engineering dilemma: What's the best way to add a third floor to a shopping center?

The solution involves the massive column, about the weight of six Toyota Corollas, which was lowered through the roof through a vertical tunnel constructed for that purpose.

On the second floor, it traveled silently through a Victoria's Secret shop, behind a wall covered with skimpy merchandise. On the first floor, a worker guided the massive metal form by hand to its base atop a concrete footing that measured 20 feet to a side and 5 feet deep.

There, it was bolted and welded into place. When finished, the column towered 85 feet, doubling the height of the mall.

In all, six such columns will be needed to build a 13-screen movie theater where the two-story mall's roof once was.

The project, part of Colonie Center's $70 million redevelopment, is the most intricate part of a plan to turn the Wolf Road mall into an upscale retail destination.

Since Feldman Mall Properties Inc. of Phoenix bought the 40-year-old mall in February 2005, it has added high-end tenants and a glitzy interior.

A new theater was always part of the plan. But how do to it?

Larry Feldman, chairman and chief executive of the company, said the original idea was to build the theater in front of the mall along Wolf Road. But that design would interfere with plans to add a striking facade.

"If the theater was sitting there, it would have been a big block of space that would have not done anything for the street appeal of the mall," he said.

Putting the theater on the roof solved that problem; at the same time, it could draw people into the mall.
But the concept wouldn't come cheaply, and helps explain why what was originally a $22 million improvement project has tripled in cost in the past year.

The problem was weight. A giant theater can't just be parked on a roof - there isn't enough support. What engineers eventually came up with were the heavy-duty columns, which will suspend the theater over the mall via a giant steel truss. What will look like one building from the outside will actually be two relatively independent structures.

The third floor will be joined to a front extension, to be built more conventionally from the ground up.

For the project, a section of Colonie Center was closed off and six sleeves were created through the mall to accommodate the giant posts. The columns, constructed by Civis Steel Co. of Gouverneur, were lifted and set into place by a crane that costs $8,000 a day to rent. The heavy lifting takes place in the morning before the mall opens, for safety reasons.

The third-floor Regal Cinema complex will eventually hold 3,500 people and is expected to open next November.

Mark Cahill, an architect from Philadelphia, and Ken Grissom, the project's construction manager, took a reporter and photographer on a tour of the work site last week. On the roof, sparks flew as steelworkers joined beams together. Around them, Cahill pointed out where pipes, ceiling insulation, even part of a skylight will have to be moved to accommodate the new floor.

The "overbuild" project costs about twice as much as a conventional structure, Cahill said.

"That sounds extreme," said Caroline Westort, research professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, after hearing what Feldman was doing. But the fact that the company is willing to pay so much shows how strongly it believes in the improvements, she said.