Shopping is for the Dogs

Wiley Polaris Fashion Place, Columbus, Ohio

OK, fess up: how many times have you gone out for a shopping spree only to return to your house to find that Fido shredded your curtains? Quite a few? Maybe he was just jealous that he didn’t get to nosh on Sbarro too.

According to a recent article in the Columbus Dispatch, Polaris Fashion Place, the newest and largest mall in greater Columbus, Ohio, is fetching shoppers by letting dogs in. While I can’t imagine this is likely to catch on everywhere quickly, it does fit in nicely with the “new” shopping-as-leisure concept that I blogged about yesterday. If people can bring their dogs along for a social stroll, then they’re more likely to go hang out there, right? Plus, anyone who has taken a walk with an adorable pooch in tow (and, for what it’s worth, that’s my pup Wiley in the picture up there) knows that they’re a great ice-breaker and conversation starter; I mean, talk about a great way to really transform the mall into a social center, where you can even meet new people! The Polaris mall management even says that the issue of, um… accidents, isn’t as bad as you might think. It’s fitting that this fashion-conscious city (both The Limited Companies and Abercrombie & Fitch are based here) would lead the charge on something that certainly makes sense as a potential new trend.

Federated Drops Stores: What We Think Will Happen

The Macy's at Northshore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts is being divested
According to this article, Federated Department Stores (the parent company of Macy’s) is selling nine former stores to General Growth Properties. This is just a small part of the divestitures occurring in areas where Macy’s had a substantial amount of overlap with a former May chain (such as Filene’s, Kaufmann’s, Strawbridge’s, Robinsons-May, etc.). In many instances, there is no obvious traditional department store to replace the departed May chain in these spaces, and most of the ones who do exist aren’t in a position to expand into these spaces. JCPenney, whose financial situation continues to improve, is a likely candidate for some, but in many malls they already have a presence. Boscov’s (who I would love to see building a presence in New England) has taken all of the locations they can possibly absorb given their size, Nordstrom only makes sense in malls and metropolitan areas with certain demographics, and The Bon Ton is busy integrating the former Saks chains in the midwest that they acquired only a few months back. Dillard’s could take some stores, but they’re very far from many areas like the northeast that have the highest concentrations of May anchors gone dark. Target, Kohl’s, and Wal-Mart may make sense for malls located in dense, more urban areas where land is scarce and development is difficult, but all tend to prefer to avoid malls in most cases.

Filene's Department Store There’s also the problem that many of the shells left dark–whether they were originally a May or Federated space–are far too large by modern department store standards. In New England, Macy’s has tended to prefer to keep the smaller and more modern Filene’s spaces over their own spaces, which were all acquired from Jordan Marsh a decade ago. Many of these former Jordan Marsh stores had in excess of 300,000 or even 400,000 square feet, and sometimes featured four levels of sales floors fronting a one-level mall (The Northshore Mall in Peabody, Mass. and the Warwick Mall in Warwick, RI both spring to mind). There just aren’t any chains in expansion mode that would want to occupy a space like this anymore, so the buildings will almost certainly have to come down.

Because of this shift, many of the former May stores (most of which were owned by May, not by the mall’s management company) are being sold back to the malls rather than to new tenants. In most cases, the malls are promising to rebuild the spaces to hold new tenants or to incorporate more in-line space. A few things that I think we’re likely to see:

  • Outdoor, faux-“lifestyle” promenades, complete with more upscale retailers and restaurants. Many in-line mall stores who are trending towards an anchor format (Crate & Barrel, H&M, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware) will flock towards these areas. My own take on this type of development, however, is that it’s superficial and trendy in the bad way. They don’t really suit the existing development of the mall, turning their backs on the present hubs of activity inside of the mall corridors, and instead turn onto… a sea of asphalt in the mall parking lot. I think the litmus test for successfully creating the kind of outdoor shopping environment that’s necessary for a good “lifestyle center” (and can you tell how much I just hate that name?), should be: Is it pleasant enough to sit outside and have lunch? Are you looking at fountains and pedestrians and landscaping, or a nice view, or are you looking at a parking lot? If the answer is the latter, then it’s doomed, and these lifestyle areas will look dated quickly.
  • Tear down the existing boxes to make room for new, 21st century tenants. I think this is a generally better idea. We’ve seen a shift away from traditional mall anchor stores and towards big box stores over the past decade or two, but why? While price is certainly an issue (especially with Wal-Mart), I maintain it has more to do with convenience. Americans work longer hours, have longer commutes, and have more choices for entertainment than they used to. If it’s 6pm on a Wednesday night, and you need some essentials, do you want to blow your entire evening at a mall or would you rather pick them up at Target in a half hour? Most would probably pick the latter. The most successful modern malls have realized this shift, and no longer target the convenience-oriented customer but rather the leisure shopper. These people are shopping for fun; buying items they may not need but are probably excited about buying, and are doing so at a leisurely time as a result. This is why stores like Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Bass Pro Shops, Steve & Barry’s University Sportswear, and Borders or Barnes & Noble as well as entertainment venues like theatres, destination restaurants, or bowling alleys make such good mall anchors today: they focus on leisure purposes. The bookstores, especially, have done an excellent job cultivating a shopping-as-activity atmosphere, and that can spill over into a traditional mall beautifully if done right. This can also be beneficial in suburban or rural locations that are removed from nightlife or traditional entertainment districts, by creating a regional hub for social activity.
  • Unusual anchor stores, at least in high-priced real estate markets with high barriers to entry (such as organized anti-sprawl citizens groups or restrictive zoning). Here in the Boston area, for example, Wal-Mart has almost no presence due in a large part to an absence of available land for such large stores and due to some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country. Because Boston is one of the metropolitan areas hardest-hit by the Federated/May merger, Wal-Mart would be wise to strategically pluck vacant stores to build a stronger presence by moving into traditional, enclosed malls.
  • More In-Line Space. This is probably a pipe-dream on my part, but the potential exists for some malls (such as the aforementioned Northshore and Warwick Malls) to use these vacancies as an opportunity to create room for more stores. In many cases, the herd of malls has thinned in the past half-decade or so, which may have created new opportunities. In markets where there was once two or three malls but now there is only one, it may make sense for the surviving mall to expand to include more space.

One thing is for sure: as we’ve known for awhile, malls themselves are in trouble. This loss of anchor tenants will likely sink some of them, but the most creative management companies, the ones who set out to create a place to be rather than a place to shop, may help usher in their new era.

Brookside Mall; Fredericton, New Brunswick

Brookside Mall parking area in Fredricton, NB

I figured that we might as well take a detour to a somewhat exotic locale for this strange little mall. In keeping with Canada’s typically crazy mall-building tendencies, the Brookside Mall is one of five (!!) malls serving the greater Fredericton, New Brunswick area. Fredericton is a tidy, attractive little city in central New Brunswick and is the capital of the province. To say this area is remote is a bit of an understatement: Fredericton has only about 50,000 people, and there are almost no suburbs. When you leave Fredericton, you leave–the surrounding areas have almost no population at all. We were really fascinated to find that they actually watch Boston television stations up there–this is a seven hour drive north of Boston!

I saw the Brookside Mall on a road trip up to New Brunswick just about a year ago. This is the lone mall for the northern side of Fredricton, and seems to be emblematic of many smaller Canadian malls: it includes a Zellers, a Sobey’s Supermarket, and a dollar store (in this case, it is the somewhat puzzling “Rossy Fredericton,” which reminded me a bit of Woolworth or Family Dollar).

Rossy Fredricton inside Brookside Mall in Fredricton, NB

While not dead, it’s easy to tell from the many vacant storefronts that the Brookside Mall wasn’t really thriving either. It seemed more typical of the kind of malaise that many smaller Canadian malls seem to endure, but quite unlike in the States, the tenants didn’t clear out wholesale. A mall like this one wouldn’t probably even be enclosed in the United States.

Brookside Mall also had kind of an interesting design. From the entrance on Brookside Drive (visible in the above photo) it appeared to be a standard older dumbell-style mall, with Sobey’s and Rossy Fredericton at each end. When using the main entrance, however, you find that there’s a larger hallway that goes straight back, then turns diagonally to the left, and ends at Zellers in the rear of the mall, making the center quite a bit larger than it seems initially. Furthermore, the style of the center (which is more or less laid out like a “V”) lead me to believe that a large empty space in the middle of the V was probably an anchor store of some sort, with entrances by both Rossy Fredericton and Zellers. Turns out I was half right–according to the diagram below, there is an entire wing spanning between Zellers and Rossy Fredericton that was closed off when I was there last year. What a neat floorplan for a smaller mall!

Brookside Mall floorplan, Fredericton, NB

Befitting of its physical remoteness there’s almost nothing about the Brookside Mall on the web, so if you do know something then (as usual) please comment! I did find this leasing page, and a general article about big box development planned for Fredericton and elsewhere in New Brunswick. There’s no satellite imagery of that area, either, though if you feel like you might want to visit the Brookside Mall, here it is. You can zoom out and get a really terrible satellite photo, too, but why would you want to?

Brookside Mall entrance in Fredricton, NB Brookside Mall Sobey's in Fredricton, NB Brookside Mall in Fredricton, NB

Brookside Mall in Fredricton, NB Zellers wing at Brookside Mall in Fredricton, NB Center court at Brookside Mall in Fredricton, NB

Mystic Mall; Chelsea, Massachusetts

Mystic Mall Logo in Chelsea, MA

In one of my inaugural posts about the Billerica Mall, I noted that it was one of four malls around the Boston area constructed with the same basic design. Mystic Mall is another, and it’s in the process of being torn down.

Before I wax poetic about the ol’ Mystic Mall, let me add a pair of disclaimers: I’m sorry for a) talking so much about Massachusetts and b) focusing so heavily on dead malls lately. The former is something of a necessity on my part given my location, but I do branch out often. Similarly, these two have converged in part because news has dictated it so: demolition efforts have begun at both the Billerica Mall and the Mystic Mall very recently, and I wanted to get these pictures up and send out an alert for any soul who may wish to swing by and take a look before it’s too late.

OK, now that we’ve got business out of the way, we can talk about Mystic Mall, a largely forgotten inner city mall that’s been shuttered for four years. Unlike the nearby Assembly Square Mall, which has made constant news since closing in 1999, the Mystic Mall is not located in a desirable location and its redevelopment hasn’t captured the imagination of ambitious New Urbanists. Like the Billerica Mall, the Mystic Mall was constructed in the early 1970s, and it housed a Market Basket (without a mall entrance) and a Kmart. While Billerica is deep in the northwestern suburbs of Boston, however, Mystic Mall is located in the heart of the dense urban city of Chelsea, built as part of a redevelopment effort in the middle of an eighteen-block swath of land that was destroyed by the Second Great Chelsea Fire of 1973.

Vandalized rear entrance to Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

From the outset, the little Mystic Mall had the deck stacked against it. Located on Everett Street a half mile off busy route 16–the main retail corridor for the area–and buried deep in a section of Chelsea known for gas fields, warehouses, strip clubs, and scrap yards–it wasn’t exactly in the middle of a shopping mecca. Like its three sister malls (the Billerica Mall, the Woburn Mall, and Weymouth’s Harbourlight Mall), Mystic Mall sports a brutalist, ’70s modern decor that’s heavy on such out-of-favor architectural characteristics as corduroy concrete. All four malls had about as much charm as a subway station, with dark interiors and exposed concrete walls. Furthermore, it was located within a few miles of several larger, more successful malls, mainly the Meadow Glen Mall in Medford and the Assembly Square Mall in Somerville. Lastly, crime in the area (or at least the impression of it being unsafe) largely kept away everyone but local residents.

What is weird about this place is that it hummed along relatively well until 2002. Granted, towards the end of its life, most of the stores inside were local, secondary tenants catering to the largely Latino local clientele, but it was mostly leased. Then in early 2002, it was announced that the mall was going to be redeveloped and it was rather abruptly shuttered and all of the stores vacated. The lone exception was one cross wing in front of the old Kmart, which had long since been taken over by a local furniture and housewares store called Adam’s, and two other local stores adjacent to it within the center. At the opposite end of the mall the Market Basket and Brooks Pharmacy stores, which both had exterior entrances, remained open. After this initial buzz of activity, however, the news on the center stopped coming, and it was just left to rot, making its abrupt abandonment even sadder.

While details are still hard to come by, it does seem as though the Mystic Mall is actually going to be demolished in the very near future. Several of the last remaining tenants have vacated the center (and Adam’s Furniture is apparently moving out) and the entire center of the mall has been gutted. Reportedly the two anchor buildings, which sit at opposite sides of the lot, will remain while the entire center of the mall is demolished.

I’m not really sure about Mystic Mall’s redevelopment prospects. Given its location, it wouldn’t make sense for residential and most of the successful retail development in the area is clustered a bit to the west, around busy Wellington Circle at routes 16 and 28. The best bet is probably to incorporate a smaller shopping center with industrial and office uses, especially since it’s difficult to find such a large and unbroken piece of real estate so close to the center of Boston.

Former Speedy Muffler and Kmart Auto Center at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA
The pictures below were all taken in late May, 2006. I wanted to highlight the one above in particular, because it’s kind of neat. You can (clearly!) see that this building was once a Speedy Muffler location, but before that it was the Kmart Auto Service center. It’s actually part of the main Kmart building in the mall.

Mystic Mall pylon in Chelsea, MA Brooks Pharmacy at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Main entrance at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Adam's Furniture (former Kmart) wing entrance at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Market Basket at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Side of former Kmart at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Rear entrance behind Market Basket at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA An entrance at the abandoned Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Second Street (rear) facing side of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Second Street (rear) facing side of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Interior of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Adam's Furniture (former Kmart) at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Interior of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Interior of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Adam's (Former Kmart) entrance to Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Interior of Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Prangeway: Here are some vintage photos of Mystic Mall from August 24, 2001.  They feature more of the interior of the mall, which was vacated and closed off in 2002 except for the area by Adam’s furniture.  Also, one of the pictures is a candid of Caldor laughing at a vacated Deb Shop in the mall after we reminisced about how Deb’s fixtures and overall design in general were ridiculous up until the 1990s.  The hanging metal trapeze-looking things and the store’s color scheme of purple, magenta, and sometimes bright green were very new-wave and would be considered kind of outrageous (and maybe a little S&M, if you know what I mean) today.

Mystic Mall pylon in Chelsea, MA Caldor laughing at a closed Deb Shop at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA dark, cavernous corridors in Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA The Seafarers Bed inside Adam's furniture at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Adam's Furniture at Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA

Mystic Mall in Chelsea, MA Mystic Mall exterior in Chelsea, MA