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.

Between Two Bridges: Wendy Northcross

Talking Bridges With The CCC CEO

Wendy Northcross is the CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber Of Commerce. She's been down with COC since 1997, and has been running the ship for some time now. She is on the board of so many things that I don't even feel like listing them all, but some of the better ones include the JFK Museum and the Cooperative Bank Of Cape Cod.

She is one of the state and maybe the country's better tourism experts, and she wields a lot of power. If you're a little girl and still think women can only be nurses and Mashpee Ballet dancers, check out the swagger that Ms. Northcross carries around Cape Cod. When she speaks, heads turn.

Speaking of which....

She is also one of the weightier voices calling for a third bridge. That bridge may be a toll bridge. The good news is that it may ease traffic a bit. The bad news is that you'll be paying for it every time you drive across the bridge for the rest of eternity.

I sent Wendy a list of questions in the email, and she was cool enough to get them back to me in the same day. If you are upset about me not challenging her on certain points, hate the game and not the player.

Her answers are exactly as she mailed them to me, and were not altered. I switched the question order around on publishing to line up certain pictures I have.

Here we go:

- Jessica Allen: Tell us about the plans being discussed about building a third bridge over the Cape Cod Canal.....

Wendy Northcross: Because of the condition of the 80 year old canal bridges, and the now chronic maintenance cycle we find ourselves facing almost annually, community and state officials began to ask about the true safety of the bridges and what was the future plan?

The responses to our questions were “there is no long range plan” – and “there are no government resources to do anything like a new bridge for at least 20 to 30 years or more.”

So the discussion turned to the questions “how long can we continue to depend upon the bridges to carry freight, and for us to safely traverse the canal - how long can Cape Codders continue to suffer significant travel delays during shoulder-season maintenance on the bridges?”

To that end, community leaders and state officials have had meaningful conversations with a broad base of businesses and residents about their tolerance level for the current state of the bridges vs. a plan for the future. Fortunately, we now have a plan that everyone can look at and decide if it holds merit. 

- If we built a third bridge that was independent of the current bridges, what would it be named? 

I don’t know…. maybe “new bridge?”

- Is there no other way to get this bridge built without a permatax on commuters? 

Government officials have indicated that there are no federal or state resources available to build any new crossing infrastructure for at least 20 to 30 years. The question is, how long do Cape Codders want to wait and what does waiting cost? 

- Why should Cape Codders who don't have yachts or LNG interests pay tolls for a bridge over a Canal that they don't want, need, or benefit from?

The current concept is that only users of the new bridge would pay – the Bourne Bridge would be available at no charge. I believe that most Cape Codders well understand the need for stable infrastructure over which their goods and services and customers can pass.

- Should someone making $9 an hour who has to cross the bridge twice to get to and from his six hour shift be forced to give almost 20% of his day's pay to tolls? Will there be hardship exemptions to tolling?

The beauty of transponder technology is that high frequency users can be identified and calculated to pay at a different rate (or potentially no rate if they are an immediate neighbor). Remember, in this current concept, the Bourne Bridge – 2 miles up the road, remains free. 

- If we feel that many New Yorkers will balk at the prospect of paying a toll request from their Barnstable vacation the previous summer, and since we all know the tolls will never go away, at what point in history would the bridge be paid for solely by taxing tourists?

If a guest does not have the money to pay a toll, they are very unlikely to be visiting in the first place.

- In the event that the state says there are going to be temporary tolls and they instead make them permanent, can you get Randy Hunt or Bill Keating to insert some date or language into the bill now that allows us to sue the state to stop the tolls once the bridge is paid for?

The financial analysis will reveal the return on investment levels recommended to put this project out to a public/private partnership model of ownership.

- Would a new bridge substantially decrease the time we'd need to evacuate Cape Cod in an emergency?

It should give us more options. 

- Former clerk at the Market Basket playing urban planner here.... why not break off an off-ramp off of Route 25 at the Ingersoll Bend, while also breaking off an offramp from Route 3 through Bournedale.... both off-ramps form a "Y" and meet a new road, which feeds the third bridge, around Barlow's Clam Shack...... the third bridge enters the military reservation, where another Y breaks traffic onto Route 6 and Route 28 somewhere? Short of widening Routes 3, 6, 25, and 28, it seems like the only way to actually reduce traffic.

MA DOT traffic engineers, using the traffic counts on the key roads, and looking at land ownership vs. the cost of land takings, and using existing roadways versus building extensive new roadways laid out a variety of scenarios – and then estimated costs on all of them. And yes, some were very expensive without yielding larger increases in efficiency and safety. 

- If the short answer to the above question is "one billion dollars," the rebuttal is "We're going to have a permanent toll in place long after the bridge is paid for, why not build a hyper-expensive bridge that actually does lessen gridlock?" If it's going to cost me $10 a day in tolls to commute 2 miles to work for the rest of my life, I want to only know about gridlock in an abstract sense.

One of the questions you should have asked first is “what is the capacity of the roadway vs. the bridges?” The answer is that the bridges have much less capacity of cars per hour than the current road system, and if we give ourselves some shoulder room and separate the travel lanes – we’ll have a safer and more streamlined flow – reducing gridlock.

Fortunately for us, our state traffic engineers have found a scenario that bears further vetting based on creating safer and more efficient travel at a cost that bears consideration.

- I almost feel badly asking you this, but has anyone actually ever really seriously honestly looked into maybe building a tunnel? If so, roughly where were they thinking of putting it? Will permit decals be sold?

Yes – and we have been told and it is far more expensive. Although I do think most Cape Codders already have the decal!

- If the villages of Bournedale, Sagamore Beach, and Buzzards Bay were to secede from both Bourne and Barnstable County, could we sue for a share of the loot from the toll bridge? We are the ones who do nearly 100% of the suffering with traffic, and we benefit the least from bridges.

I liken the bridge flow to a clot in a blood vessel. One small clot affects the entire human body. Our narrow bridges affect the entire Cape’s flow and thus its well being. 

- All of those bridges should be lit at night, like the Zakim Bridge. I'd do each one in a different color. What other vacation destination has THAT?

Nice idea.

- How long can we expect the current bridges to hold up? Won't the twin bridge idea be a bit heavy for all that Great Depression concrete?

A new bridge would be (as currently proposed) about 15’ from the existing bridge on all new footings and made of materials that do not require painting. A new bridge could handle diverted traffic when we needed to fix the Sagamore – allowing the old bridge to be taken off-line for faster and deeper repairs.

- Are there any plans to erase that ridiculous on-ramp merge at the Christmas Tree Shop?

With the proposed plan – this lane would get its own travel lane outbound over the old bridge. Between now and new bridge completion – there are some things we could try – but Bourne residents would need to be up for the experiment of restricting use of the onramp during a peak travel day. 

- Imagine that you can wipe away Main Street in Buzzards Bay... what would you lay down in place of it?

Main Street in Buzzards Bay has a great deal of character and potential opportunity as well as a bright future. I see a mix of uses with residential places within walking distance of shopping, work, recreation and access to rail.

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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...