Author: Caldor

Jason Damas is a search engine marketing analyst and consultant, and a freelance journalist. Jason graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern University in 2003 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and a minor in Music Industry. He has regularly contributed to The Boston Globe, PopMatters.com, Amplifier Magazine, All Music Guide, and 168 Magazine. In addition, he was a manager for a record store for over two years. Currently, he focuses on helping companies optimize their web sites to maximize search engine visibility, and is responsible for website conversion analysis, which aims to improve conversion rates by making e-commerce websites more user-friendly. He lives in suburban Boston.

Newport Mall; Newport, Rhode Island

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.
Labelled 1995 satellite view of Newport Mall in Newport, RI
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.

1995 satellite view of Newport Mall in Newport, RI

Name Change Has Hurt Macy’s

Macy's Logo

According to an article in today’s Columbus Dispatch (again with the Columbus newspaper! What’s going on?), a study recently completed on Columbus-area Macy’s stores since the changeover from the retired Lazarus nameplate has found that foot traffic was down 4.5 percent in 2005, or nearly 50,000 customers. Columbus is the first city where such a study has been conducted, so it may prove to be an indicator that (as many of us suspected) Federated made the wrong choice in retiring the dozens of regional nameplates around the country in favor of Macy’s.

Anecdotally, it seems that most here in Boston had long preferred Filene’s to Macy’s, who took over the local Jordan Marsh chain in 1996.

Dutchess Mall; Fishkill, New York

In keeping with the theme of late, I wanted to post another find about a long-dead mall here in the northeast: The Dutchess Mall in Fishkill, New York. According to the website of the Dagar Group, the mall’s management company, it has very recently (finally) been torn down. I wouldn’t believe it, but this picture seems to prove it’s for real.

Located at the junction of US-9 and I-84, this ragged old mid-70s vintage mall has sat abandoned for nearly a decade. This half-a-million square-foot, simple-dumbell-style mall simply couldn’t compete with the larger titans further north on US-9; it’s actually one of four enclosed malls on the same strip. While one of those four is quite small, the other two–the massive Poughkeepsie Galleria and the large-yet-flailing South Hills Mall–both dwarf this poor old relic.

According to Dead Malls, the place once housed a Mays Department Store and local Poughkeepsie grocery chain Luckey Platt, but neither truly lasted long. The mall apparently was open until 1999, though when I first visited it in March 2000 it was already completely shuttered and had the feeling of having been abandoned for a very long time. The former Jamesway store at the north end of the complex sported a large, barn-like canopy that was eerily foreboding, and the Service Merchandise at the opposing end of the plaza had been converted to a flea market. There were few other signs of life, and the concrete interior floors had about as much charm as a subway station. While plenty of malls die due to demographic reasons or competition–and both certainly played their part here–I really think this place was just plain ugly.

I can’t take credit for this excellent set of photos— I found them all on a really cool website made by someone who refers to himself as Comrade Mr. Yamamoto. His website has even more than the sampling I’ve featured here, but he focuses mostly on road and transit geekery. As our crew is made up of across the board planning wonks–not just retail–we definitely feel like we’re kin. If you have an interest in photos of upstate New York freeway sign gantries, check out his site.

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

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

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).

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!

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?

Mystic Mall; Chelsea, Massachusetts

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.

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.

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.

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.

Berlin Mall; Berlin, Vermont

Thanks to the long weekend, I was able to take a day trip up to Vermont to visit a few of those crazy upnorth malls. Now, going to Vermont to see malls is a bit like going to Florida to see penguins, but, hey–even Florida has Sea World!

Vermont is possibly the most rural state in the country, and it’s one of the few places left that barely has any Wal-Marts or Home Depots or things of that sort. Similarly, the state has done a fantastic job of maintaining its quaint, well-preserved downtowns packed with local character. Because of all this, it feels strange that we at Labelscar are cheerleading their malls–I actually think they’ve done an admirable job of keeping them out, thankyouverymuch. Still, I can appreciate all kinds of shopping centers and even downtown shopping districts (as we’ll be discussing in a future post about downtown Burlington), so to us, all retail districts, especially pedestrian-friendly ones, are created equal.

There are but five enclosed malls in the state of Vermont (at least that I know of) and there used to be two others that have been razed.

Berlin Mall is one of my favorite tiny northwoods malls. I love malls that have character, and am famously unimpressed by what I derisively classify as “skylight malls”–the generic, mid-80s-present vintage centers that are nearly identical. And Berlin Mall is most certainly not a “skylight mall,” and it does have character in spades. This is the only mall serving the twin cities of Montpelier and Barre, each of which sport a population of around 10,000 people, which still makes them among the larger cities in the state. Unlike many of these smaller malls, however, Berlin Mall does quite well. It’s well-tenanted, attractive, and both convenient and manageable, and some of the decor (those cool wooden beams!) even retains a bit of the local Vermont character. This small yet bright and optimistic mall is anchored by a Wal-Mart and JCPenney and has about 30 stores total. I do know that the Wal-Mart (one of the few in the state of Vermont) moved into the Berlin Mall in 2000; I’m not sure what was in the space previously. If you know, leave a comment!

I actually think Berlin Mall is a nice model for what small town malls and smaller suburban malls should be like: hassle free, convenient, and attractive. I don’t know why malls of this size can’t succeed in dense suburbia, where it takes a lot of time to drive two or three towns over to visit a super-regional center. It seems centers of this size would be effective community malls, offering stores that sell necessities close to home and without the hassles associated with larger malls.

Bristol Centre Mall; Bristol, Connecticut

Bristol Centre Mall is one of the stranger and more forgotten malls we’ve found in New England. Located in the downtown area of Bristol, Connecticut, an old, sprawling, blue-collar city about 20 minutes southwest of Hartford, it has almost no national chain stores and has very little internet presence–it’s even snubbed by the International Council of Shopping Centers, despite being plenty large enough!

DeadMalls is one of the only places to find historical information on this strangely charming mall. It was very visibly structured in the 1960s, and a visit to the site makes it very obvious that a large swath of the center of their downtown was demolished to make room for this beast. Located very, very far off of major highways and not even located on a state route at all (though it is close to three), this center is so poorly-located that I wouldn’t be surprised if residents of surrounding towns are even unaware it exists.

By and large, it’s a relatively straightforward, small dumbell mall that’s typical of its vintage–complete with blonde brickwork and lime green details on the exterior–but Bristol Centre Mall is interesting for a few reasons. First of all, there are several very, very old local storefronts (including a really groovy looking restaurant) that appear to have been fixtures for decades. Also, the anchor store at the northern end of the Bristol Centre–the former “The Grand,” later Sears Outlet space–has a rather irregular border with the mall, facing it at a jagged diagonal that gives great visibility into the old space.

Another favorite is the tall, glassy access hallway next to this large anchor seen in the picture at the top of this post. While it’s a bit worse for the wear, it symbolizes the kind of optimism and grandiosity that architects used to design into even smaller malls like this one. Newer malls just don’t have the same gravitas. Interestingly, on my first visit in 1999, I can recall that Styx‘ mid-seventies lite-rock abortion “Babe” was blaring through the corridors, and I still associate that relic with this relic. Music, retail, and roadtrips are all intertwined for me, though mercifully not usually in such a dreadful (albeit amusing) manner.

Today, the Grand/Sears Outlet space is vacant, and Bristol Centre’s other anchor–which was a Raphael’s when it was built but later became a Sage-Allen store–is occupied by Ocean State Job Lot, one of New England’s favorite retail cockroaches.

EDIT 6/29/2006: In the month since I initially made this post, a lot has gone on at the Bristol Centre Mall (more, frankly, than in the seven years separating my first visit and when I took all these photos). The mall was bought by the city in late 2005, and most of the tenants were forced out. This caused Ocean State Job Lot, who is the mall’s main tenant, to actually sue the city because they did not want to leave. They even registered the domain name at www.bristolcentremall.com, which is already showing up as a Network Solutions dummy page. Check out the Google cache if you want to see what was there. Perhaps most interesting of all is this set of photos, posted by one of our readers (see the comments to this post to see what he had to say). They were all taken on June 15, 2006.

According to this article in the Bristol Press, the mall’s final days are now near, and the Bristol Centre Mall redevelopment is imminent.

All pictures on this page were taken September 2, 2005.

Assembly Square Mall, Disassembled; Somerville, Massachusetts

The redevelopment of the Assembly Square Mall has been long and complicated, but the first chapter has been written after years of delay.

The Assembly Square Mall in Somerville, Massachusetts, opened in 1981 inside of a former Ford Motors Assembly Plant along the banks of the Mystic River. The site had more recently been a distribution center for First National Supermarkets (who were later Finast, later Edward’s, then bought by Stop & Shop). A Jordan Marsh store located in Malden Center relocated to the northern end of the mall, and a Kmart store anchored the southern end of the center. At 340,000 square feet, it was like many smaller “dumbell” style malls of its era, with an anchor at each end of the mall and a straight hallway between, with a food court in the center that was likely added at a later date. At the time it was lauded as a creative reuse of a former industrial property. Sometime later (probably the early 1990s), a big box center with Home Depot and Circuit City was added to the site, with frontage along I-93. You can see a satellite view of the mall property here, with the Home Depot and Circuit City building towards the bottom of the frame at New Road and Mystic Avenue.

By all accounts, Assembly Square did quite well until 1997. In 1996, Macy’s acquired the local Jordan Marsh chain and re-branded their stores as Macy’s. Macy’s and Kmart made for strange bedfellows in this little mall (as did Kmart and Jordan Marsh, frankly), but Macy’s must’ve felt it wasn’t worth keeping this undersized store open, and it closed. I first visited two years later, in 1999, and by that time the mall was hurting severely. It felt as though the mall died very, very quickly as it still had updated storefronts from many recognizable national chains (Gap, CVS, etc.) but they had gone dark. The food court was almost completely empty. Mall management had blocked off the entire half of the mall leading from center court to the former Macy’s, and a Building 19 junk store was preparing to open in the former Macy’s, without mall access. It was surprisingly empty, given that, aesthetically, it was a reasonably nice mall. It was bright, with high ceilings and skylights and planters, and felt thoroughly modern inside. Similarly, parts of the interior were still a reflection of the building’s heritage as a factory, with many exposed beams and architectural elements, especially inside of the Kmart store.

Within six months, the mall would be shuttered, and Kmart would renovate their store, removing these very architectural details. Building 19 occupied the former Macy’s/Jordan Marsh, where it was possible to walk around and see the old jewelry counters and even old carts from inside the mall being used as store displays. Until 2004, it was possible to walk through Building 19 to the mall entrance and look through the glass doors down the vast expanse of empty mall.

These pictures were taken with my camera phone (sorry!) in early (February?) 2005, when construction was just beginning on the Assembly Square Mall. Note the still-quite-clear “Jordan Marsh” labelscar in one of these shots, as well as the boarded up McDonalds, which had a greenhouse seating area adjacent to the food court entrance of the old mall.

May 2005, when the building was completely torn apart:

The redevelopment of Assembly Square has been complicated and politically-loaded, which is part of why it’s already dragged on for seven years. Unlike most dead malls, Assembly Square is located in an area with a shortage of buildable land and high property values, only a couple miles from downtown Boston and near a variety of transportation corridors. There’s been a major tug of war between one small residents group, the Mystic View Task Force, the city of Somerville, and the developers about what should be done with the site. At the root of it was a proposed IKEA store, along with whether *any* big box uses should’ve been permitted at the site. The Assembly Square Mall site is located on the banks of the Mystic River, adjacent to mass transit (though there is not currently a stop), and only a few miles from downtown Boston. It’s often been remarked that Fenway Park is closer to downtown than Assembly Square.

There have been a variety of plans to develop the property, and they’ve changed dramatically over the years. Most involve incorporating some big box with denser, pedestrian friendly development organized around a gridwork of streets and facing towards the river. I doubt this is the last time Labelscar will be posting about this mall, because it’s a major redevelopment story here in the Northeast, and the battle is far from over.

Map of proposed Assembly Square Mall development
As it stands today, the original mall building has been transformed into a relatively attractive big box center, complete with the very snazzy pylon (shown at the top of this post) facing route 28. The former Jordan Marsh/Macy’s has been converted to a Christmas Tree Shop and Staples, and the remainder of the mall has been carved into A.C. Moore, The Sports Authority, Bed Bath and Beyond, and TJMaxx ‘N More.

Note the former Jordan Marsh (Macy’s, Building 19, etc.) in early 2005, versus today:

Other photos of the center today, including the outbuildings:

Prangeway: Here are some photos I took of then-shuttered Assembly Square Mall on August 24, 2001. Notice the inside of Building 19. It’s apparent they never did anything to renovate or alter in any form the former Jordan Marsh/Macys space; they simply just put out their junk for sale and that was that. Also note the several pictures into the then-shuttered mall: one is looking from the Building 19 anchor into the mall, and the others are looking inside doors which were open that day due to construction work on the mall. We were very curious about the work and conjectured that possible activity such as demolition or even re-operning of the property was imminent. However, nothing happened – the mall remained closed and sat quietly until it was demolished in 2005.