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'We thought food would be an important part of the shopping experience. 'We merchandised it differently, with entertainment and food in addition to traditional types of stores,' Wexner said. A 300-room Hilton hotel showed that Easton was a place to hang out, not just a place to shop.

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Tenants included the Funny Bone Comedy Club, Shadowbox theater, a two-story Barnes & Noble bookstore and a 30-screen movie complex. Instead of anchoring the center with department stores and filling it with clothing retailers, Easton stocked the shelves with restaurants and entertainment destinations. The design filled Easton's spots with a mix of mall mainstays and some premium tenants such as Restoration Hardware, the Cheesecake Factory and Virgin Megastore.Д«ut Easton also dramatically changed the ingredients in the mall stew. 'The fact that developers didnвЂ™t see it but retailers did was really encouraging.' 'When we planned the first phase, we thought weвЂ™d have to take half the retail spaces because none of our competitors would have faith in it. Wexner worried that he would have to fill Easton from his own staple of stores such as The Limited, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant, Justice and Bath & Body Works. People asked, 'Where is this?' We said, 'Columbus, Ohio.' Eyes would roll and people would say, 'This is crazy.' ' If you ever wanted to hear skepticism, you needed only to stand by that for an hour. 'We had a big model of Easton we displayed. 'I remember going to the annual shopping center convention in Las Vegas,' Flatto said. Even though Easton hedged its bets by building a large enclosed mall space - Easton Station - in the center, reaction was still dubious. Wexner, Georgetown and Steiner, now a part of the team, came up with a design and started to sell it. Easton, he said, would be 'the most exciting and diverse retail space ever developed in the Midwest.' He described a project with offices, residences and up to 4 million square feet of retail space all built around a town center. 29, 1996, Wexner unveiled his next turn of the wheel.

'We came up with this notion of an urban district, ColumbusвЂ™ midtown.'ДЄt a Rotary Club of Columbus meeting on Jan.

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'Les had the vision of saying, 'This could be more, this can be the driver of the entire city,' ' said Adam Flatto, Georgetown's president and chief executive officer. Inspired by CocoWalk and others, Wexner made two crucial decisions: leave some stores open to the elements and move them off the highway to create what could become a town center. 'I believed that one day we would look at that real estate and say, 'ThatвЂ™s obsolete.' What would be the next turn of the wheel?' 'The pattern of the shopping center was so much of a cookie cutter, with a two- or three-story air-conditioned building with three, four, five, six department stores,' Wexner recalled. Wexner liked CocoWalk's open design, which mixed restaurants and shops in a 'lifestyle center' style that had been a hit in places such as Mizner Park in Florida and the Irvine Spectrum Center in Southern California. Their travels took them to shopping centers throughout the country, including a place called CocoWalk in Miami, developed by Yaromir Steiner, a native of Turkey. With the help of his development partner, the New York-based Georgetown Company, Wexner began exploring retail uses for the site. After opening a call center for Victoria's Secret on the property in 1992, Wexner reconsidered the future of the land. L Brands began assembling the future Easton property in the mid-1980s for a potential distribution center and offices. Easton Town Center will celebrate its 20th anniversary in a week, but its origins are far older.

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