A local icon is about to get a major face lift in an attempt to Get Modern.
The Hanover Mall was sold recently (to PECO Real Estate Partners, for $39.5 million), and the new owners came out this week and debuted their plans for the Route 3 landmark.
The plans are radical. it involves the Hanover Mall becoming a sort of outdoor mall, along the lines of Shops At The 5 in Plymouth or even- keeping it Plymouth- the Colony Place mall with the Wal-Mart. Rather than enter one big building with all the shop entrances inside the mall, you can pull up to whatever store you want to go to.
Malls, aka large scale public shopping centers, have been around at least as long as Rome, and actually predate Rome if you're willing to break out the dictionary and argue Semantics for a while. Trajan's Market in Rome is the first one with a name I can find, but Istanbul, Damascus, Tehran, Oxford, Paris and St. Petersburg have malls that are older than America. Timbuktu, technically a city, was essentially a mall that was fortunate enough to have culture spring up around it.
America mastered the mall, and we were/are the catalyst behind the advent of the modern mall. America is big, and we spread ourselves further out than European or Middle Eastern people do. This led to us getting into cars and highways and- most importantly- Suburbia.
Notice that all of the old malls that I named are based in cities. For much of history, people would take their goods into the cities, where the large numbers of people gave them the largest market possible for those goods. Cars, trains and highways allowed Americans to flee the teeming industrial cities, and they didn't want to have to trek back into the Metropolis every time they needed a vacuum cleaner or a manicure.
In the same vein, the low population density of a suburb means that you can't set up a vacuum store in town and sell enough of them to earn a living. Americans also need a great variety of stuff, and there is only so much room on Main Street. You can't fit every sort of store that someone needs in one town.
Keep in mind, this is pre-Internet. If you need a part for your wood stove and it's 1972, you can't just order it online. You can't even Google up a location for the Wood Stove Parts store a few towns over from you. That's just how it was back then. "The Internet must have sucked in the 1920s," as one of my students once said.
The solution? Build an airport-sized building, and fill it with every sort of shop that a person could want. Space these buildings out, maybe one or three per county. Soon enough, rather than trekking town to town in search of an obscure product that you need, you can walk through a mall full of more stuff than you could possibly even take a crack at buying in an average life span. Walk through your local mall today, and you'll probably see several dozen stores that you will never set foot in. "This place has got everything," as Joliet Jake once said.
Laws opening up land for development and tax dodges where real estate investment trusts could avoid corporate income taxes spurred mall growth. Retail Stores dominated America. The enclosed suburban mall style (like Hanover) came about in the 1950s. By 2015, there was 48 square feet of retail space for every American.
Malls are deeply ingrained in American culture. While I lack the fashion knowledge, several girls in Duxbury that I knew in high school could tell where someone was from by a formula of A (what they're wearing) = B (which mall had an Old Navy or whatever), which = C (the kid must be from the region which had that mall), so A = C.
Every kid in every 1980s movie who wasn't babysitting or selling drugs worked in a mall. I think that all of the non-Spicoli kids from Fast Times At Ridgemont High worked in a mall. The best car chase in The Blues Brothers went through a mall.
The Hanover Mall has stood in place since 1971, and was the only mall in the region until they put the Independence Mall (now known by the newly redesigned and ridiculous Kingston Collection moniker). If you commute to Boston up Route 3 from anywhere south of Exit 13, you look at the Hanover Mall twice a day.
Any kid from the 1980s Irish Riviera who was too far from the South Shore Plaza didn't have many mall choices. Hanover was your mall. It's where you did your school shopping, where the cinema was, where to try to get girls before you figured out Beer... it was where you could buy jeans and have a pretzel while someone was fixing your brakes. If you couldn't knock off your Christmas shopping in one trip there, you weren't trying hard.
Still, as the child of the 80s grew up, he saw the Decline setting in. I can recall being very angry when the York Steak House left (one YSH remains in America, and it's in Ohio), I still miss Friendly's and Brigham's, I disagreed with the closing of Zayre's and a big part of me thinks that the mall people deserved what they got when they uprooted the fountain.
The Hanover Mall never really died, and the tail still wags. They just became marginalized. It's funny, because it is straddled by wealthy towns like Duxbury and Cohasset, but here's what did in the Hanover Mall that you know and love. Keep in mind,the guy doing all this urban planning talk peaked in life as a Sportswriter, and has very little experience planning malls and analyzing market trends.
1) They were slow to adapt to the Food Court idea. When the Independence Mall opened and you could get Taco Bell in these parts, it was very bad for Hanover when the best non-Brigham's meal you could get in their mall was an Orange Julius. Much like a house with shag carpeting, the Hanover Mall had a very 1970s look during an era of rapid Mall Change.
2) The Independence Mall came when the Hanover Mall was getting complacent. Hanover was the only dog in town for a while, and when the Kingston mall opened, people had shopped themselves out at Hanover's long-term offerings. "Let's go to Hobbytown again!"
3) Hanover had a highway project going right off Route 3's exit that took 35 years or so to complete, and the left turn towards the mall for someone coming up from Plymouth was a death wish.
4) We're getting into Square Footage talk that I'm not really smooth enough to discuss, but Hanover was very poorly equipped to accommodate the big Box Stores that came into vogue after Hanover was constructed.
5) Wal-Mart kills everything else, why not the Hanover Mall? You can carry a dozen shopping bags full of goods through 40 stores like a homeless person at a mall, or you can get all of that stuff in shoddy, Made-in-Chine mode and run it through the register all at once in a Wally.
6) The Hanover Mall eventually went into business with the devil and gave Wal-Mart a corner office, but it's one of those weak Wallys without the supermarket. More modern malls are built to accommodate free-standing Super Wal-Marts.
7) Hanover finally went for a food court, but they did so when Kingston was kicking their ass. The food court was never profitable, and they ended up putting an Old Navy there instead.
8) We had a backbreaking recession kick in by 2008, and there was trouble with gas inflation long before that. Those things bring about the Want/Need question among belt-tightening people.
9) The Internet slit a lot of Mall throats. Why wander through gangs of teenagers when you could instead just order stuff online? While a mall has great variety, the Internet has more stuff.
10) Hanover is set in a wealthy area of the South Shore, and those towns tend to trend Elderly. Old people buy less stuff, and towns with lots of elderly are bad places to open up a Hot Topic in.
11) The growth of Southern Plymouth (and the explosion of shopping options south of the Independence Mall) both drew away customers and illustrated the new open-mall game plan that Hanover would either adopt or perish before.
12) Malls in general went into decline. Malls were still being built in the 1990s, but a marked decline was present by the turn of the century. The fight-or-flight period for many struggling malls went down during the Great Recession.
13) Store owners balked at the high cost of heating the common areas in an indoor mall.
Hanover is now rolling the dice on the outdoor mall approach. This will be a sort of retail cul-de-sac formation, based around several box stores.
They'll pour millions of dollars into it, snarl up the traffic some, and a whole new entity will emerge in the following years. It will be a major economic base in the central South Shore, and it will employ or supply many of her residents.
We'll miss the old Hanover Mall, but progress is inexorable, Several "dead" malls (Hanover, which is still somewhat vibrant, qualifies as a "dead" mall among mall-labeling people because it is seen to be underperforming) have been restored to their former glory through just this sort of bulldozing, and Hanover is in a prime commercial region.
Even the guy who paid $39 million for the Hanover mall described it as a "B+" 1970s mall that "started to diminish." I doubt that's what he has in mind as an end goal, so we should end up with a pretty cool mall sitting in a prime location just off the highway.
Only time will tell us what ends up in there. He could change his mind and fill it with low-income housing, for all that I know. For now, we're looking at a bulldozing and rebuilding project, and a brand new, redesigned Hanover Mall that will confuse elderly people for a generation.
Construction is set to kick off at the end of 2017, so prepare yourselves. We'll be back with an update as they get closer to Bulldozer Time.
