Family behind West Edmonton Mall now planning America's (new) largest mall

The billionaire Edmonton family behind the West Edmonton Mall and the Mall of America have announced a massive new project in Florida.

Debbie Patire, spokeswoman for Triple Five Group U.S., said the company is in the initial development stages for American Dream Miami.

“We are in the very, very early stages of development for this project but it’s building on the success of what we started 30 years ago at West Edmonton Mall,” Patire told Yahoo Canada News.

Triple Five is the multibillion-dollar economic offspring of the Ghermezian family.

Patire declined a request for an interview with any of the notoriously publicity-shy family members.

The company was founded by Jacob Ghermezian, a rug exporter in Iran who built his first successful retail multiplex in Tehran before emigrating to Montreal in the 1950s, according to his January 2000 obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

In Canada, Ghermezian resumed his carpet export business and quickly built it into a chain of stores.

In the early 1960s Ghermezian and his sons — Eskander, Nader, Raphael and Bahman — moved to Edmonton. The Alberta capital was on the cusp of an oil boom that would transform the city and the province, and the Ghermezian patriarch and his sons amassed substantial real estate holdings.

In 1981, at the outset of the Retail Revolution, the family opened the West Edmonton Mall and destination shopping was born. It had hundreds of stores, an indoor skating rink, a five-acre water park with a beach and an indoor amusement park.

For more than two decades, the West Edmonton Mall reigned as the world’s largest but has by now been outdone by shopping centres in China and the Middle East. It remains the largest in North America.

A little more than a decade after cutting the ribbon in the Alberta capital, the Ghermezians opened the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, a 4.2-million square foot retail city and the largest retail mall in the United States.

Next year, the American Dream Meadowlands mall in New Jersey is expected to open its doors to show off an indoor ski hill, a skating rink and a Dreamworks amusement park.

But the path to prosperity has not been without its stumbles.

Triple Five spent hundreds of millions buying property in Las Vegas with the intention of developing a destination mall in the undisputed North American capital of excess. The development was abandoned, however, amid foreclosures and allegations.

Don Ghermezian told the New York Times in 2011 that the family had learned from its troubles in Las Vegas.

“We’ve become a lot more conservative in our approach, in terms of the projects we’ll go after,” he said. “We have to be 100 percent confident we’ll be able to make it successful. With American Dream, we think we’ve found that.”

Today, the company boasts divisions involved in oil and gas and mineral industries, nuclear energy engineering and biotechnology.

Despite the rise of the Internet and the fall of the middle class suburban shopper, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez revealed plans for the American Dream Miami last week in an interview with the Miami Herald.

Gimenez told the newspaper that the project would cost as much as $4 million and employ 25,000 people.

Like its New Jersey cousin, the Florida development is expected to feature an indoor amusement park and ski hill. County and company officials told the newspaper that the mall will be the largest in the U.S.

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