New Hampshire - Labelscar: The Retail History Blog

Mall of New Hampshire; Manchester, New Hampshire

Mall-of-New-Hampshire-21 The Mall of New Hampshire is a 930,000 square foot enclosed shopping mall in Manchester, New Hampshire, the state’s largest city (pop. 108,580) and the largest single municipality in Northern New England. The center is also the third largest in the state, and is one of several serving the state’s populous “Golden Triangle,” a mostly suburban and urban area in the southern part of New Hampshire that grew significantly in population over the last several decades as people from Eastern Massachusetts sought affordable housing in an area that was commutable to Boston-area jobs.

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The Mall of New Hampshire is a 930,000 square foot enclosed shopping mall in Manchester, New Hampshire, the state’s largest city (pop. 108,580) and the largest single municipality in Northern New England. The center is also the third largest in the state, and is one of several serving the state’s populous “Golden Triangle,” a mostly suburban and urban area in the southern part of New Hampshire that grew significantly in population over the last several decades as people from Eastern Massachusetts sought affordable housing in an area that was commutable to Boston-area jobs.

Manchester itself serves as the media and transportation hub for most of the state, although it is–like many New England cities–an aging industrial revolution era mill town, packed with triple deckers and brick 19th century factories. Like many New Hampshire cities, it also boasts a significant retail trade due to the state’s lack of a sales tax, so many people from Massachusetts and Maine cross the border to shop in the state’s malls. The Mall of New Hampshire also benefits from its surrounding environment; it’s the lynchpin of the busy South Willow Street shopping corridor, which is one of the largest commercial strips in the region. Since Mall of New Hampshire is further from the border than some of its competition, it’s somewhat smaller despite serving a larger city.

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The Mall of New Hampshire first opened in 1977 as a smaller mall in a “T” configuration, and sported Sears, Filene’s, and Lechmere (I think?) as anchor stores, plus room for around 70 stores in-line. The mall wasn’t changed significantly until 1996, when the center underwent a significant renovation and expansion. The Sears store was expanded, and the existing (smaller) Filene’s was reconfigured to make room for a large expansion that turned the “T” shape mall into a loop. Filene’s constructed a larger, newer store in the new wing, and some of their old space was expanded and converted to a new JCPenney store. Lechmere closed their store at the mall in 1997 when the entire Montgomery Ward-owned chain shuttered; it was replaced in 1999 by a Best Buy and a Kitchen Etc., a locally-based kitchen supply store which itself went out of business several years later and was replaced by AC Moore. The Filene’s store became a Macy’s in the 2006 May/Federated merger; prior to this Macy’s had no presence at the mall, though they do have a large freestanding store several miles away adjacent to the Bedford Mall, the only other enclosed shopping mall in the area (though not for long…).

On the whole, the Mall of New Hampshire is a fairly standard middle-tier mall; lots of standard suburban fare but not too many higher-end or destinational stores. It’s a pretty successful place and well-located in an area without any major competition, but also doesn’t seem to have many interesting historical facts either. Have some stories about the Mall of NH? Offer them up in the comments.

Bedford Mall; Bedford, New Hampshire

The Bedford Mall opened along Daniel Webster Highway (US3), just three miles southwest of downtown Manchester, sometime in the 1970s. The mall was originally anchored by Purity supermarket at the northern end and WT Grant’s at the southern end, these would be replaced by–respectively–Alexander’s Supermarket and Montgomery Ward in the coming years.

These small malls always seem to be a big hit on Labelscar, so here’s your notice: This is one dead mall that’s about to go away. The Bedford Mall, in the affluent Manchester, New Hampshire suburb of Bedford, is not long for this world.

Manchester, New Hampshire, with a population of around 110,000, is the largest city in the state of New Hampshire and also the largest single municipality in Northern New England. Although Manchester’s heyday was during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s–when its brick mills along the Merrimack River made this city one of the most productive in America–the city has grown in recent years due to its proximity (50 miles or so) to the Boston area. The Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, located near the Bedford Mall, is one of New England’s busiest airports.

Interestingly, there was also a large standalone Jordan Marsh store constructed just south of–but not attached to–the Bedford Mall sometime in the early to mid 1970s. This store sports the standard Jordan Marsh architecure of its time, with signature sweeping copper awnings. The Jordan Marsh was separated from the Bedford Mall by a hotel and convention center, so it’s obvious that the department store and the mall were never meant to connect although they clearly did have a symbiotic relationship. The Jordan Marsh store converted to Macy’s when the brand was retired in 1996, and until the Federated/May merger of 2006 remained the only Macy’s in the immediate Manchester area.

In 1991, the Alexander’s left the mall after being acquired by Hannaford, and it was soon replaced by MVP Sports, a New England-based big box sporting goods retailer. Sometime in the 1990s, property management added a large extension to the front of the mall that included room for two additional anchors–filled by Marshalls and Paperama (which was a strange hybrid of a party store, a large drugstore, and a general merchandiser). Although the entire Paperama chain would close in 1994, the store would be quickly filled with a new Staples. In 1997, Montgomery Ward shut their store here (including most/all of their New England stores). Their store was split in half between Linens N Things and Bob’s Stores, effectively repositioning the mall as a mid-priced, big-box anchored alternative to the larger, more mainstream Mall of New Hampshire a few miles away in Manchester.

MVP Sports was acquired by the French chain Decathlon Sports sometime around 2000 (I’ve read 1999, but I seem to recall it being somewhat later). Decathlon managed the rebranding of the MVP Sports stores very strangely, leaving the branding up entirely at some or forgetting to replace signage at others. Or–as you see above–neglecting to clear off the MVP Sports labelscar! If you look at the photos above and below this paragraph, you’ll notice that although they updated the signage on the outside of the building, they never updated the signage facing the interior of the mall. Their rather shaky mastery of concepts like “marketing” would foreshadow things to come: in 2003, Decathlon closed all but 4 of their US stores, including this one. The company soldiered on a few more years with just four locations. In 2006, Decathlon purchased–and cleared–the former site of the WR Grace facility in Woburn, Massachusetts–most famous for its part in the movie A Civil Action–to build a destinational superstore. Soon after, and before they would ever break ground, the entire American division of the chain folded.

Unfortunately, this roster of tenants never did much to drive traffic to the interior of the Bedford Mall. I visited many times from 1999 to 2008, and the center seemed to be very slowly and gradually emptying, ultimately reaching a low of only 9 tenants out of space for 26. Increasingly, the mall has felt like a relic from “simpler times” (ha ha) and many of the interior storefronts, such as the CVS and Papa Gino’s facades, were neglected for a considerable amount of time. One of the best signs of the mall’s neglect is this sticker vending machine, which clearly has not been re-stocked since the late 1990s:

One faint glimmer of home arose in late 2007 or early 2008. The large Macy’s store located just south of the mall became involved in a redevelopment proposal that would wipe out the Quality Inn that separates the mall from Macy’s, and it was rumored that a new lifestyle center anchored by Whole Foods would span much of the distance separating Macy’s and the present day Bedford Mall. Although I don’t think anyone truly expected this to save the enclosed mall, there was at least some new retail activity happening around the site. Of course, the loss of Linens N Things to bankruptcy, along with the shaky financial situation of Bob’s Stores, didn’t necessarily bode well for the long term prospects of the center.

The final nail in the Bedford Mall’s coffin came in February 2009. Management announced that the entire enclosed portion of the mall would be demolished to be replaced with a Kohl’s department store, and much of the rest of the center would be reconfigured to appropriately hold all of the other existing big box tenants.

Mr. Yuk Goes to Hudson

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?

Fox Run Mall; Newington (Portsmouth), New Hampshire

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.

Nashua Mall and Plaza; Nashua, New Hampshire

Nashua Mall logo from an old mall flyer, circa 2000-2001

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!

And Here’s an old video of the Nashua Mall!