Category: Connecticut

Most of the attention in the “dead mall” phenomenon has focused on large, once-thriving (and often, once-dominant) malls that were done in by changing demographics or newer competitors. On the whole, the smaller malls are seen as necessarily casualties, centers that never really worked or aren’t large enough to miss.

Strangely, I’m as fond (if not more fond) of these little guys, and it seems that an awful lot of the regular readers of Labelscar feel the same. On that note I present to you the sad little Norwichtown Mall, in Norwich, Connecticut, a deeply troubled 241,000 square foot mall that I doubt has much life left in it.

The Norwichtown Mall opened just off (present day) routes 2, 32, and I-395 in 1968 to serve the Norwich area of eastern Connecticut. While eastern Connecticut is one of the more rural areas of the northeast megalop, Norwich is one of the larger cities in the area, with a population of just under 40,000. However, the loss of the manufacturing industry (and the frequent ups and downs of the defense related jobs in nearby Groton and New London) hit Norwich particularly hard, and it has suffered from a malaise worse than many similar cities throughout New England. Today, however, the mall sits in the relative shadow of two of the largest tourist attractions on the east coast: Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Casinos, which are each about 10 minutes away from Norwichtown Mall.

Before the region’s dominant mall, the large Crystal Mall, opened in Waterford to serve the entire New London-Groton-Norwich metropolitan area, there were two malls to serve each of the region’s two anchor cities. The appropriately-named New London Mall was the first enclosed shopping mall built in Connecticut, and was opened on the north Frontage Road of I-95 in New London. I’m pretty sure–though not certain–that the mall opened in 1958, with the first Bradlees store as one of its anchors (I suspect, though am uncertain, that a Sage-Allen was the other anchor). Sadly, this grand old relic–which remained very dated until its death–was demolished in 1998 to be replaced with a relatively bland strip mall that stands in its place today. I have no photos of this old place, and it’s near the top of my “want” list, so if you have any old New London Mall photos, please let me know!
The Norwichtown Mall, its northern cousin, was slightly smaller and slightly younger, with Caldor, Stop & Shop, and local department store Styles as its initial anchor stores. Styles was a smaller anchor that nonetheless was pitched as a somewhat high-fashion chain in line with G. Fox and Filene’s. I’m not exactly sure when they departed, but they were the first of the three anchors to shut.

In the mid-late 1990s, Stop & Shop modernized and expanded their store, eating some of the former mall space. At the same time, much of the mall was given a renovation and modernization. Not long after this was my own first trek to the Norwichtown Mall, in summer 1998. At the time, Caldor was still open, and the mall did surprisingly well for a mall of its size, and was tenanted with a diverse roster of tenants that would be appropriate for the kind of community-oriented shopping mall that would be anchored by a discounter (Caldor) and supermarket (Stop & Shop). There was a Waldenbooks, Hallmark, Radio Shack, an independent record store named University Music, and Bee Bee Dairy, a popular local creamery.

Unfortunately, Norwichtown Mall would not last long in this incarnation. Caldor went out of business in 1999, closing all of their stores, and several years later the space was occupied by a Bob’s Discount Furniture store, although they did little to drive traffic to the mall. Since Stop & Shop lacked mall access, there was not really a major reason to enter the mall, and tenants very slowly bled out of the mall until 2007, when Bob’s Furniture also left for a larger, newer store in East Lyme, leaving the interior of the mall barren and empty. During this time, a large big box center also opened in Griswold, just to the north of Norwich, siphoning off retail traffic from that side of the city and wedging Norwichtown between several more successful retail areas. Today, little remains beyond Dollar Tree, Radio Shack, a bank, and several other small stores.

There have been some rumors of big plans for the mall, with names like Target and Christmas Tree Shops being circulated, though presumably almost any plan to come along will (sadly) include disenclosure of the small and outdated (if still immaculate) center.

The Caldor Rainbow also took a trip to Norwichtown Mall last fall, and if you look at their set of photos in comparison to ours, you’ll note how much the place seems to have gone downhill in just a few short months. Our pictures are a little over a month old.

UPDATED 4/12/2009: Labelscar reader Bryan sent us these updated 2009 photos of the Norwichtown Mall, with a note that our old photos looked a bit “livelier” than the mall today. Seems hard to believe, but sheesh–look for yourself! The place is more desolate than ever.

  

  

  

  

I’ve long had a strangely antagonistic relationship with Connecticut. I’ve always had a suspicion that the state–which seems bizarrely undermalled–was hiding some enclosed malls from us. Too many of the ones that do exist there are too big or too new to have been the entire story, and my suspicions are correct. Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly discovered Connecticut malls (almost a half dozen) that went unnoticed, although most of them are at this point long dead. Here’s a good example for you: a truly, 100%, no-bones-about-it “dead mall.”

The Meriden Mall eluded radar in large part because of its name; because the larger Meriden Square Mall is often referred to as the “Meriden Mall,” I assumed references to this mall were in fact referring to the other, larger mall. In fact, Meriden Mall was the city’s first mall, opening as a quarter-million-square-foot center in 1970. Anchored by WT Grant’s, Stop & Shop Supermarket, a twin cinema, and a Walgreens, the Meriden Mall was the area’s first enclosed shopping mall. That would not be the case for long, as the larger Meriden Square Mall would open barely more than a mile away in 1971. As a result, the Meriden Mall, which was perched on the edge of Meriden’s downtown area, would never truly gain its footing. Connecticut is the wealthiest state in the United States, but its urban areas are notoriously troubled, and Meriden is no exception. With the decline in the area’s silver manufacturing industry in the second half of the 20th century, Meriden’s economy suffered and the city itself has never truly recovered. The Meriden Mall today is surrounded by many empty, historic brick buildings from the downtown area on one side, and a large, sprawling post-war style public housing project on the other. It is not exactly an inspiring backdrop.

Meriden Mall attempted to compete with Meriden Square for some time as the city experienced this decline in the 1970s and 1980s, but it was simply too small and poorly located. WT Grant’s went bankrupt in 1975, and their space would be filled briefly a few years later by local discount department store Barker’s, who also would last in the space for only a few years. The Meriden Mall was renamed “Meriden Hub” to address the same awkward naming issue that caused my own confusion, but this didn’t seem to make much difference. The Stop & Shop store left the center in the early 1990s, effectively killing its viability as a retail center. It did briefly serve as the home of a company called Canberra Industries–whose signage still remains, as you can see in these photos–but they’ve long since left the property due to its tendency to experience severe floods. I haven’t been able to pin down an exact date on which the mall closed, but I was able to discover that “Sal’s Barber Shop,” a tenant at the center from the time it opened, didn’t shut until June 30, 2003. The city council minutes from whence I drew this factoid state that barber Saolo F. Sforza was one of the first tenants to move into the mall in September 1970, and will be (would have been?) one of the last tenants when his barbership closes.
The city of Meriden took the blighted parcel by eminent domain in the fall of 2005. They plan to demolish the mall using funds authorized by Governor Rell and build a park and flood control area in its place. In some ways, the story mirrors that of the Bristol Centre Mall in Bristol, Connecticut, another hardscrabble Connecticut town who tried to change their fortunes by demolishing part of their downtown and building a small enclosed mall in the 1960s/70s. The city of Bristol also took the Bristol Centre Mall by eminent domain and is also in the process of shuttering and demolishing the last remains of Bristol Centre to reclaim the long-underused land for the city.

In a Labelscar first, these pictures were all taken TODAY, August 6, 2005. You can also find some more on the city of Meriden’s webpage, including some really fuzzy interior photos!

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.

New Haven has long had a bad reputation as a rough and dowdy city. Truth be told, this characterization has always reeked of sour grapes to me–it seemed like the only people talking about how “awful” New Haven is are those Yale students who are maybe just a bit bitter they didn’t get into Harvard. Sure, playing chess in Harvard Square while listening to a hippie blow on a didgeridoo may help get you in an academic mindset, but wouldn’t we all prefer to live in a “real” city where we’re part of the re-urbanization movement? No? Well, forget you then.

Truth be told, poor ‘lil New Haven’s feelings have been hurt numerous times over the years by those sneering Yaleys. During the 1960s and 1970s, which were a truly dreadful era for urban renewal ideas, the city threw its weight behind nearly every failed concept–a civic center! huge parking garages! a massive, concrete bunker-styled mall! a suburban-style office park!–all in the name of making itself just a bit more loveable. Today, these buildings–including the Coliseum, which is currently being demolished–help form a downtown graveyard of concrete tackiness. All those Yale kids didn’t realize that words hurt, man.

One of the most notable projects of that era was the Chapel Square Mall, built right on the edge of the city’s common near the intersection of Chapel and Church Streets. As usual, those scamps over at Deadmalls have a more complete history than I could offer, but this mall had a very strange configuration wherein the anchor stores (a large Macy’s and an Edw. Malley Co.) were each on the two southern blocks (on either side of George Street, along Church St.), and the mall was on the northern block closest to the common. Because the mall spanned three city blocks, it meant that each building had to be skywalked together, but since Macy’s was on the center block, both anchors were at the same end of the mall and it was necessary for Malley’s shoppers to walk through Macy’s to reach the mall.

When I first visited Chapel Square Mall in fall of 1999, it was already in a pretty severe state of decline, and Macy’s was already long gone. The mall itself still hosted a few national chains as well as a bevy of local stores (as detailed in this snarky Yale Herald piece) appealing mainly to an urban clientele, including a large (and seemingly very successful) independent record store focusing on R&B and Hip-Hop. The main mall area was a large, bright, wide two level corridor, with terracotta tiled floors and glass railings around the upper level. There was also a large fountain on the first floor near the common entrance. Still, it was showing severe signs of wear–I distinctly recall a lot of the metal portions of the railings to be rusting, and it was the last time I can remember witnessing a shell of a former Marianne’s/Petrie’s store.

Beginning around 2000, New Haven began to change. Yale University, apparently growing tired of cries from their student body that they didn’t have a convenient Starbucks or J. Crew, decided to take matters into their own hands. They bought many derelict buildings clustered around many of downtown’s boulevards, fixed them up, leased them, and resold them. While gentrification is definitely banging on the door now, New Haven is rapidly reclaiming its place as a destination city, with lots of nightlife and shopping and restaurants. Thusfar, it hasn’t gotten the same attention as other northeastern Renaissance cities like Providence, but it’s only a matter of time.

The renaissance of the Chapel Square Mall is part of this. The mall was shuttered in the early-auts and very slowly redeveloped as a mixed-use center that faces outward, instead of inward, and hosted foofier stores like Ann Taylor Loft and Cold Stone Creamery (and I bet those Yaleys love tormenting those creamery kids by making them sing!). We haven’t gotten to see the interior yet, but from what we understand the developers ripped the roof right off the original mall and turned it into an outdoor courtyard, with some retail, offices, and residential all facing a lush green corridor. For now, these construction pictures will have to suffice, but it’s likely due for a visit by the Labelscar crew.

I also swung by to take some fasincating pictures from the nearby IKEA store, which opened to much fanfare in 2004. Built on the site of a former Pirelli Tire office building, it replaces a failed proposal for the Long Wharf Galleria, which would’ve brought yet another large (and more upscale than Chapel Square) mall right downtown. Surprisingly, given that Chapel Square’s been dead for years, New Haven is one of the only cities in the northeast corridor that could be considered “undermalled.” The closest enclosed mall, the gargantuan Connecticut Post Mall in Milford, is over ten miles to the southwest and there are no others serving the city or suburbs. There was a much-ballyhooed controversy surrounding the construction of Long Wharf wherein some potential anchor tenants were strong-armed by mall magnate Westfield (the owner of most major malls in Connecticut) to abandon the project, and they did. Instead, the city got New England’s first IKEA, but because it was too costly to demolish the strange, floating Pirelli Tire structure, it remains today–completely vacant.

Like many older cities, New Haven is working towards reinventing itself and it’s nice to see it succeed.