The Swansea Mall will close her doors for good on March 31, 2019.
The mall has been in a downward spiral for some time now, a retail ghost town, an indoor shopping death ship. Even the optimists were checking casket prices. They made it through Christmas, but not much longer.
Once home to 88 stores and a sparkling future, the mall was down to 30 stores. The former Walmart part is actually close to ruins.
The announcement of the closure of mall anchor Macy's was the deathblow, but-as is usually the case in business- this was more Death By A Thousand Cuts than a sudden Jason Vorhees-style decapitation.
The mall death looks to kill a hundred or two jobs, create a huge void in tax revenue and make a lot of people sad. It stands as an object lesson in the death of the American Mall.
Today, we shall explore the rise and fall of Malls, and tie it to what is happening in Swansea.
Malls exist because A) Americans buy a lot of different things, and B) you can only fit so many stores on Main Street in Smalltown USA.
With a mall, you clear out a bit of forest or swamp in the middle of a region, plop down a building about the size of a college campus,fill it with stores and let business take her course.
There may not be a Macy's in tiny Plympton, but the residents can still get a nice sweater if they are willing to drive into nearby Kingston and visit her mall.
This is important, as old people of rural upbringing can remember when everyone was essentially dressed in the same clothes from the same Sears catalog.
The mall, in turn, houses local businesses or at least local franchises of national businesses. Some of these businesses can't stand alone... have you ever seen a free-standing Spencer's, for instance?
These businesses employ locals and fuel the regional economy.
Shopping malls date back to Rome, but the indoor mall dates back to the 1950s. Sweden had the first one (named "Shopping"), and they were going up in the USA soon after.
Malls dominated through the 1990s, when 140 were being built per year. Box stores and online shopping then began to inflict killing blows. 2007 was the first year in which no new malls were built.
The mall bubble had peaked, and then it began to contract. That contraction will now perform the coup de grace for the Swansea Mall.
Swansea got her mall in 1975, not long after Dartmouth (1971) and during a mall boom that also put area malls in Hyannis (1970) and Hanover (1971). Developers sought to ape the success of malls in Framingham (1956's Shopper's World, the first enclosed mall in Greater Boston), Brockton (1963) and Braintree (1961, enclosed in 1976).
Dartmouth and Swansea were malling not 20 years after Route 195 was built. Towns like Swansea and Somerset had doubled in population between 1950 and 1970. A mall seemed like the thing to do.
Originally anchored by Sears and Edgar's, it expanded in 1979 to include Caldors and Apex.
Edgar's was bought by Almy's, could not compete with Bradlees and Zayres, and closed during a 1989 mall expansion that put Jordan Marsh in his spot.
The 1989 expansion also doomed the water fountain. While I have no logical reason to believe this and am most likely mistaking the sneeze for the cold, I see removal of water fountains as a sort of mall doom omen.
The 1980s and 1990s saw newer, nicer malls with Food Courts go up in Attleboro (1989), Taunton (1992) and Kingston (1989). The Swansea Mall was suddenly about as dated as a disco album.
Caldors and Apex went under between 1999 and 2001. Wal-Mart took Caldors' spot.
The introduction of a superheavyweight like Wally seems like a positive if you can avoid wondering why the Walton family has as much money as the bottom 40% or so of Americans.
When Wally moved in, they squeezed a struggling mall for many concessions. Essentially, they have veto power over the mall, meaning no discount stores, grocery stores, no booze joints, etc...
"Wal-Mart essentially owns the Swansea Mall without having to own the Swansea Mall," said Swansea selectman Chris Carreiro.
Wally dipped to an adjacent lot in 2013. If the closure of Macys was the final swirl down the bowl for the Swansea Mall, the 2001 arrival of Wally was a well-fed man sitting on the toilet, and Wally's 2013 flight from the mall was a dirty hand flicking the toilet lever.
A flood of fleeing businesses like Yankee Candle, The Shoe Dept, Hannoush, GNC, Claire's, Kay, Payless and everything in the Food Court set Swansea up for the Macy's money shot. Macy's and the mall itself have announced their closures within a month of each other.
Swansea hopes to redevelop the mall.
Carreiro has floated the idea of seizing the mall by eminent domain. This would allow the town to get around the Wally Whammy and get some businesses in there.
There's not much you can do with it, otherwise. Here's what our staff came up with:
- Let the laser tag crowd have it for Urban Warfare games. This would go poorly with "Let elderly people take walks in it," but we can burn that bridge when we get to it.
- Set an anti-ship gun up in the parking lot, and let people demolish the mall one artillery shell at a time for $1000 a shot.
- Hide treasure in each store, fill the mall with bears and monitor lizards and traps and serial killers, then charge Ren Fair people X amount of dollars to armor themselves and play real-world Dungeons And Dragons there.
- Establish a first-of-her-kind Mall Museum there.
- Turn it into a Voke Tech high school that prepares children for the retail economy.
-Try to take over the burgeoning Recreational Marijuana business by making a Weed Mall. In addition to stores that sold weed, you could also throw in stoner-type stores. This would just be like taking sections of a head shop and making a store out of them, i.e. Candles, Tie Dyed Shirts, Cookies and what have you. A few dry ice machines to keep the mall constantly shrouded in mist would be a good touch.
-From October 1 through Halloween, decorate it and run it as a Spooky World sort of Haunted House. Take two weeks to clean up and set up, then run it through New Year's Eve as a sort of La Sallette holiday light show. Let it sit until May, and then turn it into an indoor wave park until Labor Day.
-Set up a bar with a great view, leave all the mall signs up, and let the locals laugh at confused shoppers as they come to realize that, no matter how often they drive up and down Swansea Mall Road, there is no Swansea Mall off of it.
- Let it hit the auction block, where it is bought for $7.99 by a publication called Cranberry County Magazine, who then begin making subtle inquiries as to where someone might be able to purchase a monitor lizard.
All kidding aside, this is a bad day for Swan City.
Jobs will vanish, tax revenue will dry up, nearby businesses will lose traffic and Swansea will lose a little bit of her swagger.
The psychological damage will be immense. Many people's first job was folding sweaters there, some long-married couples may have had their first date there and there are at least two or three generations of locals who will have their Christmas routines altered.
A man might see an icon of his youth meet the wrecking ball and start to think that maybe it's time for him as well to move on to greener pastures.
All is not lost. The shopping areas near the mall seem to be faring well. Selectman Carreiro seems to give a damn. The spot is right off a major highway and not far from some populous cities
Perhaps they raze it and put in a Wareham Crossing sort of unenclosed mall. Those seem to be the rage these days. Swansea occupies a nice gap between Wareham Crossing and wherever the next mall of that sort is.
Only time will tell. Until then, let's pour out a little liquor for an old friend
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