Showing posts with label norwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label norwell. Show all posts

Saturday, March 4, 2017

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth Of The Hanover Mall


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.



Tuesday, October 25, 2016

South Shore Leaf Peeping


As fall foliage season peaks, we hit the South Shore again to see what was what....



There are disadvantages to working this turf. In a county where the tallest place is Manomet, we're not going to get those panoramic mountain valley shots where you can see 10,000 trees. Sorry 'bout that. I tend to aim at one tree, often- as you can see above- one that is in someone's yard. If you're upset about the lack of sweeping ROY G BIV vistas, take some comfort at the fact that A) many of these pictures are taken while the person inside the house is loading a shotgun nd saying, perhaps to no one but themselves, "I'll find out why thaat stony looking dude is parked in front of my house," and B) my number is going to come up at the deli some day, perhaps even some day soon. I worry not about stuff like that... "The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast."



Whoever owns this house can do a fall foliage drive just by idling their car in the driveway. Added bonus: basketball hoop. Nothing says "suburban white kid" like one of those not-planted-in-concrete basketball hoops. Ally McBeal could tear down that backboard if she dunked on it. Imagine if Shaq threw down on that? He might snatch it up by the pole after and beat you with it, just for not having the planted-in-concrete type of basketball hoop. Your author here is a tall man, and he sometimes wastes a tangent on stuff that only 6'5"+ people care about.


Orange is the essential fall foliage color. Red and yellow can be found in spring or summer, in the form of roses, glads, marigolds, what have you... but you're not getting orange until Autumn. With the prominent place in Autumn/Halloween ascribed to the pumpkin, orange sort of wins in a rout.  


Since you asked, our road trip this time went 1) Bourne, 2) Plymouth, 3) Kingston, 4) Duxbury, 5) Marshfield, 6) Pembroke, 7) Norwell, 8) Hanover, 9) Rockland, 10) Hingham, back to 11) Bourne.


The good Lord works in many a strange and wondrous way, and even a non-drinker knows better than to cross the Great Spirit when He pretty much smacks you in the face with a suggestion. A pre-noon Mudslide or two never hurt anyone.



Not a lot of people know this.... but when you're drinking and driving, the way to keep safe is to introduce a second negative integer into the equation. Shooting a camera while driving counts as a negative. Two negatives will, uhm, negate the negative charge of each other into a positive. The mathematics work


You know that the green trees are all jealous...


"Foliage and fenced-in meadows" go together like "F5 Tornado and trailer park."



This tree, normally yellow, wore pink in October to raise awareness for breast cancer.


This tree cares not for the affairs of wood-burning humans.


I got the house level in this shot, but the street was, like, on  hill or something.


Lake shots are as close as n EMass shutterbug can get to Vermont-style views. My camera and skills hold me back personally, but I didn't see any overly colorful horizon foliage.

Ignore the times and dates on the shots, my camera changes the time/date every time I turn it on and off. I took these last Friday or so. I did the South Coast on Saturday. The Cape is coming soon.




Not many places have less foliage than sand/scrub/pine-dominated  Duxbury Beach. I had to jump a fence and stomp on some beach grass to get this color.

The one below came easier:

Check back for South Coast and Cape Cod!

Monday, October 26, 2015

Halloween Displays Around SE Massachusetts: Part One

We had a fairly good series of thoughts the other day.

- We should do a Halloween Display article.
- Very few singular people can give a list of 250 or so houses with cool displays (I am now one of these people).
- Why not use Facebook (I spam our articles over every You Know You're From ____ When... page in the region, and have access to scores of such groups) to get a good list going?
- Gather up the suggestions (we had a few hundred) and start mapping routes for several road trips.
- Spill our results out over a series of pre-Halloween articles.

We rarely start off with that much of a game plan, so this will probably end up working out OK.


We got a bevy of suggestions for where to look. We ranged from Plymouth (the Slenderman-looking Tim Burton guy at the top of the article) to the skeletal Wizard of Oz scene we saw in Weymouth, to wherever else our travels took us.

Facebook was very handy. We got a pile of street names. Some got repeated, always a good sign. I'm still getting suggestions as I write this, but fear not- we have enough pictures for several days of articles on this subject.

We got a few bum steers (we had several in a row on our first run), but we also stumbled onto some cool stuff, so it sort of balanced out. I'm not into Wicca, but I think they're big on Mother Earth and all, and nature loves a balance. My own logic is witchy enough that we went home happy most of the time.


Rich people plaza.... nice setup, though. It needs a Zombie, right in that empty spot near the hay bales.

We drove down a lot of Massachusetts streets doing this series of articles. Some towns stood out more than others, but not by a wide margin (editor's note: we haven't done Deluxebury yet) Most people don't decorate at all. Among those that do, most are subtle. A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a few cornstalks... you know, the regular.

We set out to find people who went in a little deeper. I'm talkin' ten-foot-spider-swallowing-a-human-in-front-of-a-two-hundred-sixty-one-year-old-historical-register-property deep.


Apparently, things get a little more ultraviolent on Bartlett's Green than I was previously led to believe.

The spider also looks like hes doing the Baby Bird with some poor intern, but that was most likely not the intent of the sculptor.

That spider, a Kingston resident, doesn't dare try that act in Duxbury. If he did, he'd get tuned up by Duxbury's legendary Green Dragon. The GD holds it down off Route 3A in Duxbury. There are those who say that he stares into your soul as you drive by him.

The Green Dragon does year-round duty, but he gets extra powers on Halloween. If you ever look up at the nearby Myles Standish monument and wonder where his sword went.... well, it got busted off quick-fast when Myles tried that St. George stuff with the Route 3A Dragon. You know... back in the day.

Kids dress in all sorts of costumes. They sometimes favor horror (my kid had to be carefully edged away from Creepypasta-themed costumes), but they sometimes go out as a Princess or a Cowboy or an Astronaut. Its not always horror, although it was for most of the history of the activity.

However, people who decorate their lawns almost always go for Horror. I checked out almost every town, including yours. I saw a lot of chainsaw massacres and MacBeth-ian witch gatherings, but I rarely saw innocent Haloween decorations. I can think of one, a Peanuts-themed setup in Halifax that I'll get to in another article.


We'll throw in the obligatory warning that I am a much worse photographer than Jessica is. As you see below, we also have some trouble shooting at night.

I may take another crack at this shot above, It's off Herring Pond Road in Plymouth, and I pass it all the time. Even a hack photographer will get lucky if Stephen he shoots enough.

Our principal value to you is our legs. We covered a lot of ground doing this article, and we aren't done yet.

We'll try to drop an article a day up until Halloween hits. If your town got jobbed this time, fear not. We'll probably get to it in a few days.


Stay Spooky!

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Enter The Hoodsie....



So, what is this Hoodsie that the author speaks of?

No, it's not the little ice cream cup with the wooden spoon in the picture above, although those are good and I want one right now.

Basically, a Hoodsie is a female teenager from the South Shore. It's more complicated than that, but that's the short answer.

Usually, the author finds out the answer to the question and then writes the article. That's not going to be the case here, as I am expecting the real answer to this question to turn up in the comments.

Here is what I don't know about the term, which makes for a longer article than if I told you what I know for sure:

- Why are South Shore girls known as Hoodsies?

- How far does the term range?

- When did the term come into use?


WHY?

I have no idea on the Why? The Hood company was founded in Charlestown, though they may have got the actual milk from Bridgewater. From what I have heard, the term is used by city people when speaking of South Shore girls. It seems pretty complicated for a nickname.

Boston University has The Wicked Good Guide To Boston English, and the term makes an appearance in there. It is not ascribed to the South Shore in there, nor was it listed so in the Universal Hub definition.

A thread on Yelp said that a Hoodsie was a sexually promiscuous girl below the legal age of consent, but they may be confusing that with "jailbait." The author may also have heard the term in his youth, when he was hunting South Shore snuggling from younger girls.

I have also heard, on Facebook, that the nickname stems from girls sitting on the hoods of cars.

As near as I can tell, Boston guys would go to the South Shore to get girls. Both dictionaries list "scoop" as a term for picking up girls. Hood was the dominant local ice cream, a Hoodsie is an individual serving, and here come Donna from Weymouth! The girls, equated with something you scoop like ice cream, thus became Hoodsies. I suppose that the fact that there aren't many reasons for a Boston guy to go to Abington beyond "scooping" also led to the association.

More than one source said that the Hoodsie's slogan of "small and sweet and good to eat" played a role in the name, but only one source notes the Hoodsie cup size connotation with the smaller breasts of the teenager.... which has to be true, because I read it on a site called Swing Batta Batta Swing.

I could be 1000% wrong about this, I'm speculating about something that barely merits a mention on the Internet.


EPICENTER, TIMING AND RANGE

If I'm not wrong about the South Shore ownership of the term, I'd assume that it came to us with the development of the highway system. I'd especially associate it with Route 3.

I say this because Route 3 either A) made it feasible to drive from Dorchester to Hanover to get a little somethin'-somethin', or B) led to an exodus from the city, which brought a term generally associated with Boston girls into the South Shore suburbs. SBBS listed the term as a Dorchester/Southie term, and the South Shore filled up with people from Southie, The Dot, JP, Roslindale and Hyde Park right around when busing started.

I actually like Option B the best, with Hoodsie as a White Flight import from the city. It makes the most sense, and it follows the path of least resistance. Boston schools went from 100,000 kids pre-busing to 55,000 kids in 1988, and many of the refugees ended up in the Irish Riviera.

Duxbury, for example, went from 4700 people in 1960 to 11,000 in 1980. That's a remarkable growth rate, even before you factor in the town's more elderly demographic. I, personally, was in Dorchester in 1970 and in Duxbury by 1978. I was not the only Dorchester kid in my Duxbury classes by a long shot. Plymouth went from 18,000 people in 1970 to 35,000 in 1980. Ol' Marsh Vegas went from 6000 in 1960 to 20,000 in 1980.

A lot and maybe most of that spike is the Baby Boom, but a lot of it is White Flight. It is, in my completely uneducated opinion, enough oomph to transfer slang from city to suburbs.

So, the date would either be the late 1950s (Route 3 goes through the South Shore) or the 1970s (White Flight). I'm hoping that some old-schooler enlightens me in the comments section. It may be a bit of both.

The range of the Hoodsie term becomes the issue here. I have only heard it ascribed to South Shore girls, but I also can only claim Duxbury, Halifax and Buzzards Bay as my last three hometowns. There could be Hoodsies running around in Natick or Woburn or Concord or Mansfield for all that I know.

If my White Flight theory is correct, the term would move out to the suburbs with the city kids. Enough white kids remained in the city for the term to remain there, but enough white kids had left that the term became suburban. It's sort of how the country with the most black people isn't African, it's Brazil... but, just about the opposite of that. I digress...

To determine the range of the Hoodsie by operating along this theory, you just have to go through some census numbers on Ye Olde Wikipedia. I already fed you Duxbury and Marsh Vegas data... how does the North Shore and Metro West stack up? Does the White Flight reach New Hampshire or even the South Coast?

I'll pick random towns, or we'll be here all day. We'll go 1970 population to 1980 population.

Stoneham... 17K to 21K, nine miles north of the Bean

Framingham... 64K to 65K

Middleboro... 13K to 16K

Foxboro... 14,218 to 14,178, and that's with the Patriots moving to town during the era in question.

Andover... 24 to 26K

Marion... 3400 to 3900

Manchester-by-the-Sea, 5100 to 5400

OK, what I'm seeing here and not listing in numbers is that Massachusetts suburban towns tended to have population explosions from 1950 to 1970, but the South Shore also had a Busing Boom in the 1970s that doubled the population of some towns.

To this day, people who know this stuff tell me that Geography isn't why the Cape Cod accent doesn't get across the Canal, it's that the Boston accent stormed South in the 1970s with all the White Flight kids. I can recall getting SPED-type help for my speech in 1978, my first year in Duxbury. All that I can remember of it was the lady making me say "barter" and "martyr" over and over.

SUMMARY

So, my research leads me to believe that "Hoodsie" is a Boston term, most likely distinct to the Irish parts of town like Jamaica Plain and Southie. When busing came, those cities disgorged their wealthier Irish-Catholics onto the South Shore, and those people brought the concept of the Hoodsie with them. By 1980, it had become a South Shore term, and by 2015, it had been South Shore long enough that city folk- the original Hoodsies- now referred to the South Shore girls as Hoodsies.

Yup, it's that confusing AFTER we try to summarize it. But I'm pretty sure that the theory is correct.

I thank you for your time.

Not hoodsies, just cool enough to pose for Cranberry County Magazine...