A marvel of the 21st century is that Labelscar has a great little tool called web analytics where I can see (amongst other things) the search terms that people use to access our site. While I generally keep my day job separate from my goings-on as a mall geek, I don’t mind mentioning that I work in the burgeoning search marketing industry, which is really just a long-winded way of saying that I find the *way* that people find us to be sort of fascinating. But beyond that, sometimes it gives me good leads on retail-related news.

It was based on such a query that caused someone to stumble upon this site–something about “new mall hudson”–that lead me to find that W/S Development, a well-known New England developer of lifestyle centers, recently introduced the proposed lifestyle center to end all others, a gigantic riverfront development to be built on the site of a current golf course in Hudson, New Hampshire.

At first glance, I can see some pluses and minuses of this project, although admittedly I haven’t seen many of the details about it. First, the good: despite that it’s a lifestyle center, it appears to replicate a genuine streetscape, with blocks and neighborhoods (including a fashion-oriented “Pavilion Buildings” neighborhood, and a more nightlife-centric “Theater District,” amongst others), a riverfront performing arts theater and resort hotel, a residential component, and a variety of other features. In essence, this is a brand new, destinational downtown for the deep suburbia of the Merrimack Valley, a place that will serve as a super-regional destination for all of the densely populated suburbs stretching north of Boston (and into New Hampshire) for 60 miles. That could be sort of neat.

The bad, of course, is notable. The immediate thing that jumps to mind is that the site–while currently somewhat off the way, retail-wise, is very close to the Daniel Webster Highway in Nashua, along with the Pheasant Lane Mall, which is currently one of the largest retail strips in all of New England. While I’ve learned from the guys at Freakonomics that these things tend to do better when clustered together (rather than spaced apart, as you might think), it still seems that the sheer magnitude of this project–which is being touted as the largest mall in New England, thus implying the square footage will exceed 2 million–will likely require that it steals a substantial amount of stores from the thriving Pheasant Lane Mall and its adjacent retail strip, setting the stage for another visit from Mr. Yuk. This is to say nothing of the impact to downtown Nashua and downtown Lowell, which like most older industrial cities have been staging a comeback, mainly in the form of new restaurants and entertainment.

And the other elephant in the room is the Tewksbury Mills project, whose status is unknown now that Mills is to be acquired by Simon. Will Simon want to move forward with the Tewksbury Mills project–which serves a more underutilized slice of the same portion of the metropolitan area–or will W/S Development’s much more ambitious and massive project be the ultimate retail winner, and what could it mean for the many surrounding retail developments?

The Fox Run Mall is the lone enclosed shopping center serving the seacoast region of New Hampshire. Since there’s no signage alerting you of the fact, many mistakenly assume the mall is located in the affluent and picturesque coastal city of Portsmouth, but is actually in the tiny suburb of Newington, just to the city’s north and west.

Opening in 1983 adjacent to the existing, four-anchor Newington Mall in a large and prosperous retail district, the Fox Run Mall featured Sears, JCPenney, Filene’s, and Jordan Marsh as anchor stores. The long, winding mall (here’s a leasing plan, in PDF) features approximately 600,000 square feet of retail space, with room for nearly 100 tenants. New Hampshire has no sales tax, so many malls in New Hampshire were built near state lines to take advantage of interstate traffic, and the Fox Run Mall is no exception: it is only a mile or two from the Maine border and only about 15 miles from Massachusetts, and near the junction of the Spaulding Turnpike and I-95. The only substantial anchor shifts through the center’s life involved acquisitions: Jordan Marsh was purchased by Macy’s in the mid-1990s, and then recently the Filene’s store was converted to a second Macy’s space in the mall as a result of the Federated/May merger. Unlike most malls that featured both a Federated and May store, both here remained open due to their relatively small size. The center sported a rather dark and heavily brown decor until a renovation in either 2000 or 2001 made it look the way it does today.

The Fox Run Mall did ultimately kill its neighbor, the smaller and older Newington Mall, in the mid-1990s. The Fox Run Mall (which is today owned by Simon) purchased the Newington Mall in 1995 or 1996 and evited all of the remaining in-line tenants, connected the two properties by road, and turned the old mall into a large annex, “The Crossings at Fox Run,” that consists almost entirely of big box stores and shares a logo with the Fox Run Mall. I’ll write some more about this in a separate post at some point.

While not the most entertaining of malls, the Fox Run Mall sports a few minor points of cool design. Two of the mall’s anchors are located off large courts, set apart from the mall itself, that give them dramatic frontage. In addition, the old Filene’s anchor is one of the edgiest and most interesting of their store designs, with triangular, glass entrances pushed to the corners of the building and a rock face on both the exterior and interior. Sadly, this store even sported the long-disused, 1970s vintage art-deco-styled Filene’s logo up until being re-bannered as Macy’s. The mall’s narrow and windy nature also makes it feel larger than it is, since you’re constantly twisting and turning through its hallways.

Perhaps the best bit, though, is their distinctive logo, which for some reason is widely known to many New Englanders who haven’t even visited the mall. For some reason, people just love that fox.

Since this blog is sub-titled retail history, I figured that our inaugural mall from the Granite State might as well be, um, history.

The Nashua Mall was the first enclosed shopping mall built in New Hampshire, opening in 1969. The 350,000 square foot, 35-ish store, simply laid-out dumbell mall served for many years as the sole enclosed mall serving the city of Nashua, which sits on the Massachusetts state line. Originally, the mall itself hosted Woolco and Almy’s as anchor stores, and the sprawling outlots included a Montgomey Ward, a large plaza with (I think) a supermarket, Child World, and–probably built sometime later–a Shop ‘N Save/Hannaford supermarket.

There were some expected shifts, with the roster of anchors you see above: mainly that the Woolco became a Bradlees in the mid-1980s, Almy’s became a Burlington Coat Factory in the late 1980s, and the Montgomery Ward (which closed in 1997) became an Ames before that store also closed in 2002.

The Nashua Mall’s downfall was twofold:

• It looked extremely old, because it clearly never received a significant face-lift during its entire lifetime. I wish I’d had the foresight to snap some pictures before it was too late, because the Nashua Mall was truly a gem. Despite that it was one straight-shot hallway, it was wide and with high ceilings, decorated with diagonal wood paneling and extremely groovy, dangling 1960s vintage light fixtures. The high ceilings employed an old Frank Lloyd Wright architectural trick (though I seriously doubt it was intentional) wherein there were dramatic changes in the ceiling elevation, causing some “low” areas broken by very “high” areas. Wright built this into many of his structures to cause people to move throughout the building, because lower ceilings in hallways and foyers encouraged people to move towards the more open central areas. Oh, there was also a beat up penny fountain in the center court, and Bradlees had a massive wall clock at the front of their store.
• A change in demographics in the Nashua area. Unlike most malls that die, Nashua’s demographics improved as the city experienced a major development boom throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Included in this boom was the new Pheasant Lane Mall, a large two level mall constructed on Daniel Webster Highway on the state line on Nashua’s extreme south side. Because the New Hampshire border towns are a popular place to shop for Massachusetts residents due to the lack of sales tax, this mall would become widely popular and steal much of the business away from the Nashua Mall on the city’s northwest side. Similarly, the sprawling northwestern corner of Nashua also developed its own major commercial strip, but it was all located one exit to the north along route 101a, away from the Nashua Mall. With a population of 85,000 proper and many dense suburbs located nearby, Nashua could’ve easily continued to support two malls, but the Nashua Mall never received the necessary cosmetic love to make it viable.

Strangely, despite the mall’s horrendous condition, it soldiered on quite well until its death in the early 2000s and even included some mid-market tenants such as Brookstone and Cherry & Webb. The first major blow was when Bradlees closed with the entire chain in early 2001, leaving Burlington Coat Factory as the lone anchor. Kohl’s announced they would be taking the space, but they demolished the Bradlees building and built their own structure that was freestanding yet on roughly the same footprint. Not long after, the half of the mall closest to Burlington Coat Factory was shuttered and dramatically reworked to host a Christmas Tree Shop, which did also not have access to the mall. This left a small area of the original unrenovated enclosed mall for a couple of years. DeadMalls has some photos of it in this state.

This final portion of the mall would close in early 2004. The last of the mall was bigboxed, and the center today hosts Kohl’s, Christmas Tree Shops, Burlington Coat Factory, LL Bean, Home Depot, and Starbucks amongst its anchor stores. If you happen to be in the area, make sure to take note of the Burlington Coat Factory store, which is the last vestige of the original mall–the building is even still in the old Almy’s style!

Our friends over at From Woolworth to Wal-Mart have an even more complete history of the Nashua Mall, including a few more precise details than I’ve included here and some illustrative graphics to show how the mall used to look. The only truly original visual I have to offer up is the mall’s logo above–I scanned that off of a promotional flyer given out at the mall in 2000 or 2001. Despite the way it looks, it isn’t really *that* old!
Want to see something really strange? I’m not sure how long it will last, but if you load the Ask.com map page and zoom in and out intermittently, you can see the footprint of the mall before and after its conversion to a strip center!