In 2019, 20,000 people filled the Bangor Mall to attend a local Christmas craft fair, where Maine vendors lined the interior of the mall and its empty retail spaces to hawk their wares.
Since then, attendance at those fairs has dropped due to COVID, but the fair begun by businesswoman Kathy Harvey still fills the mall with visitors two weekends a year. Harvey, who owns the nearby Furniture, Mattresses and More store on the mall campus, pays the mall owners $15,000 to rent out the space for the fair, which returns this weekend and next.
Now, “my business brings business to the mall,” she said. “The mall doesn’t bring me business.”
Harvey’s craft fair is one of the only times of the year when a large number of shoppers is guaranteed to enter the 60-acre indoor retail center. Though it’s now home to a growing entertainment hub, large amounts of space inside the sprawling building remain empty, a fact the Bangor Mall’s owner, Namdar Realty LLC, has used in its repeated requests for lower property tax bills.
As Bangor faces a housing crunch that has resulted in rising rents, first-time homebuyers getting outbid and a growing homeless population, conversion projects that have turned malls elsewhere into complexes that combine housing with smaller-scale retail show one potential path forward for the largely vacant Bangor Mall.
While Bangor’s efforts to encourage more housing have largely focused on existing residential neighborhoods or the creation of new subdivisions, the city has taken some steps that could lead to the mall area being used for purposes other than pure retail.
The city last year rezoned parts of the mall area to allow industrial use, in addition to retail, and the city’s comprehensive plan that’s in the works could include proposals to rezone the area to allow for more uses, like a mix of residential and commercial units, said city planning officer Anne Krieg.
“Our role, really, is to offer options and zoning to welcome different uses,” she said. “What we’re hearing from people is they’d like to see [the mall] either continue as retail and commercial, or go to some residential use.”
A handful of other communities throughout the U.S. have taken this approach, as developers have repurposed vacant malls by turning them into buildings that house a mix of apartments, retail stores and medical offices in cities like Lakewood, Colorado and Providence, Rhode Island.
The Arcade Mall in Providence, which claims to be the U.S.’s oldest enclosed mall, closed in 2008. It reopened in 2013 with studio apartments, art galleries, a bicycle garage, clothing stores and restaurants. The apartments, marketed as 48 “micro lofts,” ranged from 275 to 800 square feet, and rented for as low as $550 a month until they were converted to condominiums in 2020.
Developer and owner Evan Granoff touted the building as a “diamond encased in rock” whose redevelopment would breathe new life into downtown Providence, according to a 2012 New York Times article.
Developers took a similar approach with a mall in Lakewood, a Denver suburb, outfitting the former indoor mall into a downtown shopping center that now houses artists’ studios, shops, offices and residential units, including 61 reserved for affordable senior housing.
Efforts to take a similar approach with the Bangor Mall would be up to its owners, Namdar Realty, since the mall and its surrounding land is privately owned, Krieg said.
A spokesperson for Namdar did not respond to a request for comment.
“What we’re trying to do at the city level is offer a diversity of options,” Krieg said. “We don’t want to hold back the [owners’] ability to either do a complete redevelopment of the parcels or reuse of the building as it stands.”
Will Hesketh, the co-owner of the Bangor Toy and Comic Con storefront in the mall, said the era of the Bangor Mall as home to exclusively big-box and chain stores was effectively over. He said he saw its future in welcoming more local businesses like his own.
“I think it’s great to see them do more with local business, like us, and G-Force [Entertainment], Messology, becoming almost like a community,” he said.
Mall management has been receptive to new businesses like his, though he has little contact with Namdar representatives, Hesketh said.
“People ought to think outside of the box and realize that the mall is not what it was,” he said. “There’s a lot of purposes that can be done, or things that can be done there, if people put their imagination to it. People need to be more willing to be creative and adaptive to areas and make things work.”