When I was a little kid — around preschool age, 3–5 — my parents would take my younger brother and I to Emerald Square Mall in Attleboro, Massachusetts, every few weekends or so. Even though we rarely bought anything besides lunch at the food court, it was always an exciting reward or treat for us. It was one of the larger malls built at the time, and as a kid in the 90s, it looked cool as hell. Neon lights everywhere — especially near the food court — glass ceilings, all of it looked larger than life. My favorite place in the mall was the Disney Store. One time my parents bought me a Belle dress there — yknow, from beauty and the beast. Once I was old enough to go to school regularly, visits to the mall became less common. On top of that, the road leading to Emerald Square became more and more built up. Traffic got so ridiculous that even if we wanted to go to the mall, we would avoid it due to not wanting to sit in traffic for 40 minutes.
The next time I went there, I was 18 years old. It was 2011, a few years after the great recession, and me and one of my friends decided to go there based on a shared childhood nostalgia surrounding the place. When we arrived there, I was shocked. The outer building looked in dire need of a power wash, and the interior wasn’t faring much better. IT was clean and everything, but it was…. empty. At least, it was on the top floor. Well. Either every floor except the third floor was empty, or the third floor was the one completely empty. Wandering around there was like exploring a ghost town you had memories of as something far more…. thriving. That experience alone sparked my interest in dying and dead malls.
Ever since that visit, I was curious as to how Emerald Square was faring. I checked on its status on google every so often to see if it had closed or not. It never did, and seemed to go through it’s share of ups and downs (in 2012 it reached 90% capacity again for example), though it never reached the peak spectacle I remembered as a small child. How was it doing in 2019? My brother and I decided to find out.
Before I go any further, I should point out some details about the mall itself. It opened on August 10, 1989. It was a pretty large mall: 3 stories, with 3 anchors. The glass roofs and skylights provided a lot of light, and the escalators and stairs were built in a central location: simple, accessible, and no need for too much walking. Its original anchors were JC Penney, Sears, and G. Fox. Lechmere, a New England based discount department store, was added in 1992. The G. Fox eventually became Filene’s — one of my most vivid memories was always entering the mall through the Filene’s — then became a Macy’s in 2006 once Macy’s bought out Filene’s. There was a lot of tumult throughout the years over the anchors, which is the case with most dead and dying malls. It’s hard to know, when filling a mall, what stores would be good anchors. I’m sure in the late 80s, Sears seemed like a really good bet. After all, it had been around for AGES. How could it be anything but a mainstay? Of course, we know how that’s turned out. Other anchors, such as Lechmere and Lord and Taylor (The latter of which added in 1998), also turned out to be faulty bets. All Lechmeres closed in 1997, and Emerald Square’s Lord and Taylor location moved out in 2004. A thing to note about all anchors chosen — outside of Lord and Taylor and Filene’s/Macy’s — were that they were discount or lower-end stores. Was it a conscious decision for Emerald Square to be a lower-end mall, despite its size? Did that affect its image in any way, and for better or for worse?
In the beginning, Emerald Square mall was pretty devastating to the economy of downtown Pawtucket, RI and it was the death knell for the smaller Lincoln Mall in Lincoln, RI. It was located right off 295 and could also be reached via a simple non-highway route through Pawtucket into Attleboro. In the late 80s and early 90s, malls were extremely in vogue. By the late 90s, however, Providence Place Mall — an upscale mall in downtown Providence — was built. I assume that this in turn marked the beginning of the downfall for Emerald Square. Some kind of fucked up capitalist circle of life: one mall destroys a local economy, then another bigger fancier mall gets built that eats up the original mall. So it goes.
Anyway, let’s go back to 2019. Entering the parking lot, I noted that the exterior of the mall still looked a bit worse for the ware. The concrete was old and suffered some water damage and staining that wasn’t really being attended to. The JCPenney and Macy’s were still open. The first floor of the mall, for the most part, was actually far busier than it was in 2011 which was surprising to me. Of note was a very large H&M which wasn’t there in 2011, which was probably a very nice grab for the mall. By the end of the 1st floor, though, near the Sears, we happened upon what i deemed “the reject corner”: or, a corner filled with empty storefronts, almost completely hidden from view from the front of the mall. Smart.
The second and third floors were worse for the wear. Each floor was about 75% filled, but many of the storefronts weren’t really stores: or if they were, they were things like dollar convenience stores or typical mall mainstays like Bath and Bodyworks and GNC. I took pictures of some of the more amusing ones: a dentist office, an eyebrow place, an EMS training facility, a mystery escape room. Many of these places are typical to see in dying malls: things that fill up space, that give the illusion of business and activity; places that can at least pay their rent. The food court itself, which looked extremely dated in 2011–2012, was unchanged, and half of the restaurant spaces were empty. There were only 5 restaurants in the main food court: Burger King, a Japanese food place, a Thai food place, a sandwich shop, and a Dunkin Donuts.
I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to visit dead and dying malls in the future: mainly because I currently don’t have a car. but I got the ide awhile I was wandering around the mall of using the conservation status for ranking animals to rank the…. well, conservation status of malls. There are 8 labels on the animal conservation status, but since one of them would be superfluous for my purposes (extinct versus extinct in the wild), i would dial it back to 7 rankings: from Extinct, to critically endangered, to endangered, to vulnerable, to near threatened, to conservation-dependent, to least concern. It was impossible to tell how popular the mall was based on foot traffic since I went there on a weekday afternoon, but based on how full the mall was, the condition of the exterior structure, and the quality of the stores within the mall, I would rank Emerald Square mall as “Vulnerable”. It’s definitely in better shape than it was when I last went in 2011, but not in a way that will last very long if things don’t change. Since Sears, one of it’s anchors, is in such bad shape, I think the closing of that anchor would indeed bring this mall’s ranking down to “Endangered”.
info sources:
http://www.thesunchronicle.com/devices/news/local_news/north-attleboro-s-emerald-square-and-malls-like-it-face/article_81b81782-61dd-11e6-b621-3f905d6b06c7.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Square
