Nordstrom Rack will open at Bayshore Town Center

Nordstrom Rack, the growing discount wing of upscale department store chain Nordstrom Inc., will open at Bayshore Town Center in Glendale in fall 2018, Nordstrom announced Thursday.

The 26,800-square-foot store will anchor a redeveloped north end of Bayshore, which was hit by the closing of a Sears store in December 2014.

This will be the second Nordstrom Rack in the Milwaukee area. The first opened at the Mayfair Collection shopping center in Wauwatosa in spring 2014.

The following year, Seattle-based Nordstrom opened a full-line department store at Mayfair mall — a coup for Mayfair and a long-awaited development on the Milwaukee retail scene.

But while the sleek new department store captured more attention by far, it is Rack and the rest of Nordstrom’s off-price segment that has been driving the retailer’s growth.

Faced with growing competition from thriving discounters such as T.J. Maxx and Ross Dress for Less, Nordstrom has opened about 115 Rack stores in the past five years. Over that period, its number of full-line department stores in the United States has been virtually flat.

From 2012 through 2016, Rack’s annual revenue grew by nearly $1.36 billion. Sales at the full-line Nordstrom stores, meanwhile, shrank by $778 million.

Real estate sources suggested a year ago that Rack was a prime candidate for Bayshore as it moved forward with razing the 117,000-square-foot Sears store and with redevelopment of the north end of the complex. The sources mentioned Total Wine & More, T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods as other prospective tenants.

Originally built in 1954, Bayshore was redeveloped in 2006 by owner Olshan Properties into a 1.3 million-square-foot complex that mixes retail stores, restaurants, apartments and offices in a village-like atmosphere.

In an interview last year, Richard Maslowski, then Glendale city administrator, said post-Sears plans for Bayshore would include construction of new buildings with retail on the first floor and apartments above, along with separate townhouse apartments and a public plaza.

Tom Daykin of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.