Category: Rhode Island

Prologue: Like all of the enclosed shopping malls in the state where I grew up, Lincoln Mall holds a special place in my heart. It was an accidental trip there in January 1998 that began my modern fascination with malls, and–quite literally–how the “other half” lives. When I say “other half,” I’m talking about a geographic (not economic) disparity. I lived in the suburbs south of Providence, and Lincoln Mall existed in the northern suburbs. As such, I very rarely had cause to go there, and it was during one leisurely visit spent people-watching on a rainy day that the whole mall obsession really dug its claws in. This was the other side of my city, with totally different people shopping in a totally different shopping mall, yet I didn’t know it or them. From then on, I’ve always had (in every way) to know what’s around the next bend.

Rhode Island’s Lincoln Mall was built in the mid-1970s at the junction of routes 116, 146, and I-295 in Lincoln, Rhode Island. At a little over half a million square feet, the mall was mid-sized, and its design–one long hallway with a 45 degree crook in the center and anchors at each end–was relatively standard for the time. The mall was initially anchored by Zayre and Woolco, with three junior anchors: Cherry & Webb, Peerless, and a movie theatre.

Tenants would shuffle about over the years, and by the mid-1980s, Caldor would replace the Woolco and Kmart would build a rather shiny and attractive store in the former Zayre space. Despite these decidedly mid-market tenants, the Lincoln Mall did quite well and courted a large roster of standard mall tenants such as The Gap and Lerner. One long-time fixture was the Christmastime presence of “Randy the Talking Reindeer,” a Santa Claus-like attraction that was advertised heavily on Providente television every year.

The mall was also the only mall serving the relatively populous Woonsocket trade area, and is located near the sprawling CVS Pharmacy Headquarters, the Amica Insurance Headquarters, and a large Fidelity Investments office campus, all of which would bring well-paying jobs into the area for many years. There is very little other chain retail located around the mall, which likely served it well in its earlier years but hurt it in later years as it was impossible to cross-shop with other big box chains, all of which were 15 minutes away.

Like many malls of its type, Lincoln Mall took many hard hits through the years. Built as one of the first wave of enclosed malls constructed around Providence, it was the lone mall in the city’s northern suburbs until the late 1980s and had no immediate competition. In 1989, the massive Emerald Square Mall (with 170 or so stores spread across three levels) would open a few miles away just over the Massachusetts border, but the mall would be relatively unaffected by its presence, continuing its operations prosperously for another decade. In 1999, Lincoln Mall was hit with twin challenges: the even larger (and very upscale) Providence Place Mall opened up, also about ten minutes away, and the mall lost Caldor when the entire chain folded. For awhile, the mall limped a bit, but was given a major boost with an extensive (mainly exterior) renovation in 2000. Despite the loss of many of its junior anchors, the mall rebounded by replacing them: Pay/Half moved into the Cherry & Webb space, HomeGoods took the long-underused Peerless space, and the movie theatres were taken over by a medical center. The Caldor anchor was mostly demolished and replaced by a Stop & Shop, which (for obvious reasons) did not open into the mall. It did, however, drive traffic, and the mall continued on. Eventually, Marshalls took the remainder of the former Caldor space and a tiny bit of the old mall and acted as the mall’s eastern anchor. As recently as January 2003, the mall was almost fully leased.

Also, in 2002, another major contender opened just a few exits away at US-44 and I-295. Smithfield Crossing is a large outdoor shopping center that hosts many traditional mall tenants and wooed some tenants (such as The Gap) away from Lincoln Mall. It would have more of an impact on the Lincoln Mall than either Emerald Square Mall or Providence Place.

Unfortunately Kmart would close their 110,000 square foot Lincoln Mall store as part of a round of closings in 2003, and the loss would impact the mall severely. Stores began emptying out at an alarming pace and by February 2004 the mall was over 50% vacant. The still newly-opened Marshalls also shut their mall entrance, dooming the mall. The center was sold to WP Realty at about this time, and they announced plans to demolish much of the mall and replace it with an outward-facing plaza. Demolition began in mid to late 2004.

Now, the mall is an extremely strange mall and plaza hybrid. The majority of the western Kmart wing was demolished in 2004 and has been replaced by an outdoor strip plaza anchored by a Target. The eastern wing was also largely big-boxed, with Marshalls, Home Goods, and a party store having exterior entrances only.

Strangely, two pieces of the mall interior remain. The cross hallway (and eastern entrance) closest to Marshalls (former Caldor) has remained in place–and remained open–seemingly so patrons can access a nail salon hidden deep inside of the old mall. Notice that the Marshalls sign above their shuttered interior entrance actually remains! I recorded this anomaly with this picture:

Similarly, most of the center court area of the mall was not big boxed and in fact remains today exactly as it always has been. There is a mall entrance in the front to access the center court, and there remains room for about 20 stores in the mall’s interior. Many of them (well over half) are vacant. Despite having frontage with the side of the Target store, it does not open into the mall, and the other end of the mall faces Career Education Institute, a job training school that’s long been a tenant at the mall even when it was successful. They moved to this larger space, taking up much of the interior of the old hallway (and separating this part of the mall from the dead area near the Marshalls, shown above).

In addition, a rather large “Cinema World” movie theatre was added to the back of the mall as a part of this renovation. It seems that the center court of the Lincoln Mall is now acting as a de-facto movie theatre lobby, and in fact the only new tenant to open inside of the enclosed portion of the mall during this time has been a Subway.

I’m not sure why the enclosed portion of the Lincoln Mall was kept, but I’m grateful for it. It does raise some false hopes; if Target would knock down the wall separating them from the mall, and if the CEI space was removed, then about 66% of the original mall from Target to Marshalls could be reopened and could again function as the enclosed mall it always was. Will this happen? Sadly, almost certainly not. But is this one of the stranger repositionings that I’ve seen? Absolutely. It’s puzzling as to why WP Realty would keep the center court yet not have mall access to abutting anchors, such as Target. There’s enough of the mall remaining to have a substantial enclosed center still, but as it is now its doomed to be a low-rent haven with little visibility.

I took all these pictures a couple weeks ago, and in the time since that the Lincoln Mall was recently sold again.

Prangeway: I visited Lincoln Mall on August 25, 2001 and took the following pictures.  It’s interesting how mostly successful the mall was when I visited and how many changes it has gone through to become the “Frankenmall” it is today.  Hopefully the new owners have a long-term vision for the mall and aren’t essentially just winging it with this fragile little mall.

  

  

  

 

This is a tragic one.

When I was a kid, Rhode Island Mall was the mall. I always derisively labeled the neighboring Warwick Mall–the successful one today–as the “clothes mall.” Rhode Island Mall was the fun mall. It had the Aladdin’s Castle arcade, it had video game stores, toy stores, and everything else a kid would want. Now it has next to nothing: it’s one of the most notorious dead malls in New England.

What’s especially sad is that it didn’t have to be this way. The Rhode Island Mall had a long, long run as a big and successful center, and it died mostly due to a set of circumstances it couldn’t control and a few questionable management decisions.

Built in 1968 as the “Midland Mall,” this was the first suburban enclosed shopping mall in Rhode Island, and the first two level shopping mall in New England. Built on what was then remote swamplands, it was located next to I-95 and later I-295, and would be the catalyst for a massive amount of retail development that would turn this stretch of route 2 into “Rhode Island’s Main Street.” Providence experienced the greatest proportionate outmigration of any major American city in the post-war era, and Warwick, a suburb about 10 minutes south of the city, absorbed many of these residents, balooning to 85,000 people. To this day, Warwick is the second most populous city in Rhode Island, and many other suburbs in the area (such as neighboring Cranston, with a population of 75,000) are uncharacteristically large.

The Rhode Island Mall is a simple, two level dumbell style mall. It was built with a Sears store anchoring the mall’s west end. As far back as I can remember, the mall’s eastern anchor was a location of Hartford’s G. Fox chain, but it may not have been original to the mall. Despite a seemingly uninspiring layout, the mall is one of the widest and most open malls of its style that I’ve visited, lending the central common areas a certain grandiosity.

In 1972, the larger Warwick Mall opened just to the north of the then-still-Midland Mall. If you look at this satellite photo, you can see how the smaller Rhode Island Mall (at the bottom of the frame) is within a stone’s throw of the Warwick Mall. Warwick was more fashion-oriented from the start, and included Rhode Island’s first outlets of Boston mainstay department stores Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, so this presented a considerable challenge. However, because neither mall was terribly large and there was room for both to house stores without much overlap, they co-existed very peacefully for a long time. The presence of both malls made Warwick into one of the most major retail destinations in New England, and many of the shopping centers that line route 2 for miles in each direction sprung up during the era when both malls were thriving.

In 1984, The Midland Mall underwent an extensive renovation and rebranding, and this was when the Rhode Island Mall name was born. This was still relatively early for a mall to renovate since most of them were still in their infancy, and as such the mall received a substantial shot in the arm as a result. Mall owners added the glass elevator that’s present today, as well as a large food court on the second level outside G. Fox called the Greenhouse Cafes, which was the very first mall food court in the entire Providence metropolitan area. By the late 1980s, the Rhode Island Mall was so popular that management attempted to make room for more tenants by constructing temporary, cubicle-style spaces in the center of the mall’s wide first floor corridor.
Despite the opening of the 3-level, gargantuan Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1989 (the first of the larger, more modern enclosed malls in metro Providence), the Rhode Island Mall didn’t suffer–the bigger mall was just a bit too far away, and the two malls combined were still larger than it. Even when Warwick Mall finally renovated in 1991, adding an even larger food court than the Rhode Island Mall, it didn’t seem to have an impact.

The beginning of the end came around 1994, when the G. Fox chain, which was owned by The May Companies, acquired Filene’s. Because Filene’s was the stronger regional nameplate, the G. Fox stores were converted to Filene’s. For a time, this G. Fox store (which was relatively small) was converted to Filene’s, but as there was already a larger Filene’s at the Warwick Mall next door this was extremely redundant and it was closed within a year or two of the rebranding.

That began the long and very slow death of the Rhode Island Mall. Despite that Sears was the lone anchor remaining, most of the stores remained in the mall despite dwindling business, holding on to the hope that the G. Fox store would be filled, but nothing came. By 1997, the vacancies began piling up, and by 1998 there were rumors that the mall would be torn down and converted to another use despite a still-healthy occupancy rate.

In 1999 or 2000, it was announced that the G. Fox store and approximately 1/3 of the mall (including the Greenhouse Cafes food court area, which was now completely vacant) would be demolished to make room for two new anchors. A Wal-Mart would open on the first level, and the tenant for the second level was unannounced. Wal-Mart constructed a store in 2000, but it did not open into the mall, leaving a temporary construction wall to greet patrons inside of the mall. Many speculated that construction could not be completed until a second anchor built a store atop the new Wal-Mart. In 2002, Kohl’s announced that they would be the Rhode Island Mall’s third anchor, and many expected this strong trio of mid-market anchors to bring the mall back to prosperity.

Unfortunately, when Kohl’s was completed, it too did not open into the mall and it became obvious that both had every intention of turning their backs on the mall–permanently. Convinced that the mall would never be anything more than a dead mall again without more anchors, nearly all of the remaining tenants cleared out, leaving the mall extremely barren and empty. Miraculously, the Rhode Island Mall remains open but today there are only about ten stores (out of a high in the late 1980s of close to a hundred) still operating inside of the mall.

I firmly believe that if Kohl’s and Wal-Mart had opened into the mall then the Rhode Island Mall would still be successful today. The neighboring Warwick Mall, despite its size (about a million square feet) has room for only about 70 stores and Rhode Island could still house an additional 50 or so. There is plenty of market demand in the area for such purposes, and the roster of Sears, Wal-Mart, and Kohl’s is relatively strong for a value-oriented mall.

I’ve heard that Royal Ahold (the parent company of Stop and Shop Supermarkets) has leased much of the interior of the mall with the intention of blocking Wal-Mart from being able to expand their store into a supercenter should the mall itself close. I’m not sure if this is true, but if so, I would hope that Ahold would find it in their interest to try and sub-lease that space to tenants, even if they’re charity cases like local retailers or public interest groups.

The following is a 1970 photo of the Midland Mall that I found on Keith Milford’s excellent (in fact, it’s a must-see) Malls of America blog. I’ve also tried to repeat the same shot today, though the mezzanine level of the staircase visible at left was removed in the 1984 renovation:

There are more pictures below, all taken June 11, 2006. A decade after the beginning of its agonizing, slow decline, the Rhode Island Mall is in sadder shape than ever. There are a few things to note. One photo shows the strange way in which Kohl’s is stacked above Wal-Mart, as visible from I-295. Also be sure to pay attention to the shots of the “temporary” construction wall that blocks the mall from Wal-Mart and Kohl’s. That wall has been in place since at least 2000.

Prangeway: I visited Rhode Island Mall on August 25, 2001 and took the pictures below.  Note the Tape World store still in operation, the Thom McAn labelscar, and the fact that the Kohls and Wal-Mart “anchors” were under construction with a glimmer of hope that they may open up to the mall.  Unfortunately they didn’t, and as a result most of the stores open in the photographs below have closed since then and the mall is currently on life support.

  

  

  

  

 

When we created this blog, the main purpose was to study retail history–to document the way shopping centers are now or were in the past, so that people in the future could have some record of them. Unfortunately, we’ve arrived a bit late–hundreds of malls throughout the United States have already been shuttered, and we don’t have pictures to remember all of them. The Newport Mall is one.

I need to preface my entry about the Newport Mall with a personal anecdote: I was born and raised in the Aquidneck Island town of Middletown, Rhode Island, in a house about three miles from this particular mall. Growing up, the Newport Mall was never particularly successful, and any serious shopping trip demanded a trek off of the island. Since this was the ’80s, malls seemed like a true cultural emblem. I learned about them through TV sitcoms, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and, later, Saved By the Bell, and always felt that we were somehow missing out on this cultural epicentre because our own mall was never able to ascend past being “dead.”

Of course, this isn’t entirely true: Newport is a thriving coastal tourist city, and courts millions of visitors a year. A stretch of Thames Street a little over a mile long in downtown Newport houses hundreds of stores and restaurants ranging from national chains to local institutions, and it is (and always has been) the true cultural and retail center of this area. Apart from the restrictive geography of the island, this is truly why the mall didn’t make it, especially since downtown Newport was the location of choice for most of the better chains that would’ve made their home in an enclosed mall elsewhere.

Still, the allure of the elusive “mall” was probably a big part of why I became so enamored with them, and the fact that my own hometown mall was a “dead mall” likely has something to do with why I became so fascinated with the failure of shopping centers in general.

The Newport Mall opened in 1984. From its birth, it was kind of a hack-job; the developers merely enclosed an existing 1950s (or 60s?) vintage shopping center on J.T. Connell Road (Connell Highway to the locals) and added some extra sales space. The center’s original main anchor, WT Grant’s, had folded and was replaced with a JCPenney store (complete with a sit-down restaurant that had a separate mall entrance, a true rarity), and Peerless (one of the many local Providence downtown department store chains) opened a small outlet at the far end of the center. The center of the mall had been anchored by a Food Mart store with a garish lemon-and-lime color scheme that was distinctly of its era. When the mall was enclosed, Food Mart shoppers were forced to somewhat awkwardly wheel carts of groceries through the mall to get to their cars as the supermarket only had access into the mall. It would be replaced by a TJMaxx not long after the mall opened.

Consisting of about 300,000 square feet and with room for around 40 stores, the mall was not large but was relatively spread out. The decor was decidedly spartan, consisting of exposed steel beams in the ceiling, a large glass atrium at center court in front of TJMaxx, and relatively standard-issue planters and benches throughout the mall. The Newport Mall was also not located in one of the better parts of the city, surrounded on all sides by big city-style decaying public housing projects, and shoplifting was a terminal problem. During the peak of its life (around 1990 or 1991), the center housed about 30 stores, including Record Town, Waldenbooks, Foot Locker, Afterthoughts, Hallmark, Fashion Bug, and other stores that tended to flock to smaller malls. Unfortunately, throughout the center’s life, nearly every store that did open in the mall was located on the wing between JCPenney and TJMaxx. Bar longtime tenant Fashion Bug, no tenants were ever located between TJMaxx and Peerless, and at its best the mall reached about 60% occupancy. The Peerless store itself would not last long, closing a few short years after the mall opened and being replaced in the early ’90s by a West Marine that shunned the enclosed portion of the mall entirely, opening only into the parking lot.

The mall was barely able to survive throughout its entire 14-year existence. The fatal blow came in 1997 when JCPenney announced they were going to close their store at the mall on December 24, 1997. When the Christmas sales were completed, the store went dark and nearly every mall tenant followed shortly thereafter. By the following summer, only Foot Locker, Waldenbooks, TJMaxx, West Marine, and Fashion Bug remained. In fall of 1998, the enclosed portion of the mall (ironically the exact area that was added in the 1984 expansion) was demolished and the plaza was opened back up to the parking lot. The southern end of the mall was also expanded and reconfigured, and an entrance was added to Admiral Kalbfus Road (RI-138).

Because the mall began its life as an outdoor shopping center and is now again a strip mall (titled RK Newport Towne Center), anyone who visited the site today would find no trace of the center’s era as an enclosed mall. Anchored by Wal-Mart (who filled the former JCPenney), Super Stop and Shop (who demolished most of the always-empty southern wing), West Marine, Old Navy, a 99 Restaurant, and a slate of smaller tenants, it has been relatively successful in the past half-decade. Interestingly, TJMaxx and Foot Locker are the only two tenants who continue to operate in the exact same place they were located when the center was still enclosed.

Because the Newport Mall closed seven years ago and was never well-loved, I don’t have any photographs of the inside or outside. The best I can find is the black and white satellite view below, which shows how the enclosed addition (with the gray roofline with the white border) was grafted onto the existing shopping center (much of which has the black or white roofline). If you happen to know of some, I would greatly appreciate if you would email me and let me know.