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For people living in small towns across eastern and northern Maine, a trip to the Bangor Mall used to be a big deal, especially during the holidays.
Moms pored over shopping lists. Dads grumbled at the traffic and parking. Kids couldn’t wait to meet Santa, or check out the arcade or the toy store. And teens were there to see or be seen, and to head off by themselves for a taste of independence.
For people who weren’t around for it, it’s hard to overstate how important the Bangor Mall was to the region, from the day it opened in 1978, right up until the 2010s, when shopping malls began to decline nationwide.
When it opened in a former cow pasture in 1978, the Bangor Mall had a near-equal mix of local and national stores. Maine chains like clothing retailer Porteous and jeweler G.M. Pollack and Bangor businesses like Bett’s Bookstore, Fannie Farmer Candies and Napoli Family Restaurant operated alongside national names like Sears, J.C. Penney, Dunkin’ Donuts and The Gap. Kravco, the mall’s original parent company, kept management local, slowly building the facility up as a major name in New England retail.
For its first few years, the Bangor Mall was the biggest enclosed shopping center north of Boston. It was a destination for people from hundreds of miles around — in the summer, you could make a weekend of it, visiting other Maine attractions as well. In the colder months, you could do all your holiday shopping in warmth and comfort, sheltered from the brutal Maine winters.
During the Christmas season, in the vast parking lots, you’d see cars from every corner of Maine alongside license plates from Quebec and New Brunswick. Inside, in addition to the shopping, on a given weekend you could expect to see anything from live music and children’s entertainment to singing competitions, beauty pageants and fashion shows.
Though we now remember them as hubs of community activity, malls and shopping centers contributed in a major way to urban sprawl and the decimation of downtowns across Maine and the country. Developers and shoppers viewed them as the way of the future — fun, clean, different and, above all, convenient.
By the 1990s, national chains began to overtake locally owned businesses, as Maine stores like Standard Shoe, Rines and Unobsky’s gave way to retailers like Foot Locker and American Eagle. In the late 1990s, an addition was built onto the mall, adding a fourth anchor store — New England department store chain Filene’s — into the mix, alongside other new stores like Victoria’s Secret and The Disney Store. When Filene’s went bankrupt, it was replaced by another iconic brand, Macy’s, in 2006. Among the last Maine chains to leave the mall was Porteous, which closed in 2003 and was replaced by Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Stores that were more openly trendy, like Abercrombie & Fitch, PacSun and Express, also opened, appealing to teenagers and college students. There was even a bit of controversy when Hot Topic opened in 1998, with some more straight-laced locals fearing the store was for “satanists” — a dust-up that seems positively quaint today.
Business continued to boom at the Bangor Mall through the early 2000s, but by 2015, it was clear the retail industry was in trouble. Between 2015 and 2016 alone, the number of people nationally who shopped online for the holidays nearly doubled from 11 to 20 percent, while brick-and-mortar shopping stayed flat — a trend that has continued in the years since.
2016 was the beginning of the slow decline for the Bangor Mall. Between that year and 2018, more than 10 businesses closed in the mall, including Macy’s, Sears, The Gap, New York & Company, Build-a-Bear Workshop, PacSun, Charlotte Russe, Ruby Tuesday and Dairy Queen. Of those, Sears and Dairy Queen were original tenants, opening with the mall in 1978. Closures have become so frequent in the years since that media outlets haven’t even reported on all of them.
Today, the mall is a husk — one of a number of failed shopping malls across the country, hollowed out by developers like Namdar, the group that purchased the Bangor Mall in 2019 and has allowed the property to deteriorate and hemorrhage tenants. It’s currently less than 40 percent full. 20 years ago, waiting lists for leases there were years long.
While there have been calls to reimagine how the mall is used, such as using part of the building for housing, or to try to attract warehouses or medical laboratories or offices, none of those options have yet materialized. Many of the local businesses that have attempted to make a go of it in the mall in more recent years have given up, citing lack of upkeep on the building and inaccessible management.
Ironically, downtown Bangor, from which retailers fled in the late 1970s for the greener pastures of the mall, has seen a dramatic revitalization. There’s been a rash of new retailers and restaurants, major developments like the Cross Insurance Center, Hollywood Casino and the Maine Savings Amphitheater, and municipal and community investments to beautify it and improve infrastructure.
Still, for several decades at the end of the 20th century, the Bangor Mall held a special place in the lives of Mainers and Atlantic Canadians. Those days are long over, and all that’s left is a crumbling building that once housed Bangor’s biggest and most important destination.
