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Say your last farewells to the South Hills Mall.
Not quite a dead mall yet, the Town of Poughkeepsie retail fixture’s remaining days are winding down, as a multibillion-dollar real estate trust plans to rip out the interior section of the pedestrian mall, build spaces for about 25 new businesses and change it into a strip mall.
While the transformation, pegged to cost some $65 million, will leave four tenants – K-Mart, Silver Cinemas, Burlington Coat Factory and the just-moved-in ShopRite – intact and operating during and after the rebuild, the space that once housed long-gone concerns like Teepeedashery, Orange Julius and the Dream Machine, and what for many Hudson Valley Gen-Xers contained their primal mall experiences, will be gone forever.
Victory, they say, has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan, and it was a hard thing to get people to say much about the once-dominant, now-dormant South Hills. A representative for Vornado Realty Trust, the mall’s current overlord and eventual destructor, asked that her name not even be attributed to her statement that work on the mall would begin, they hope, sometime in early 2008, “after necessary approvals are obtained.” From the documents on file at the Town of Poughkeepsie planning and zoning offices – the mall rebuild gained site plan approval in July and is currently undergoing architectural review – some facts can be gleaned. Aside from the four aforementioned tenants, Chuck E. Cheese and a currently vacant bank building will stay. In between those buildings and the central mall area, two 8,000-square-foot restaurant spaces and two courtyard-looking areas are planned, as are four 5,000-square-foot retail spaces to the south of the main complex. The new main part will have some 16 new retail spaces of sizes varying from 55,575 to 3,675 square feet, with most under 5,000 square feet. A total of 229,515 square feet of space is to be demolished from the current space of 747,111 square feet. Parking will drop a bit, from 3,447 spaces to 3,170, still far more than the 2,730 called for in town code. Some new landscaping will be put in and the Route 9D entrance may get an upgrade. The new storefronts will be continually covered by a series of awnings, canopies and colonnades. The west (back) and south flank of the mall would remain “essentially as it is today,” the documents state.
As far as new stores at the new mall, not much is known. The Vornado rep would say nothing on the topic – when you work for a realty trust that controls over $20 billion in assets and 60 million square feet of retail and office space in Manhattan, Washington D.C., Chicago and L.A., you don’t have to be badgered by journalists into answering questions – the minutes from an April Poughkeepsie town planning board workshop meeting state that The Christmas Tree Shops, a national retailer of all things Yule, has signed a lease, and documents for the architectural review show their logo on a storefront. Also rumored to be coming is gourmet grocer Trader Joe’s – a common co-tenant with The Christmas Tree Shops in other sites – but Poughkeepsie is not on a list of “coming soon” locations listed on their Web site and corporate representatives did not return calls seeking comment. That certainly doesn’t preclude their coming – the grocer has about a dozen stores in the New York City/Long Island/Westchester metroplex and companies generally wait until they’re ready to announce such things. We will keep our ear to the ground.
Another rumor circulating is that the apparent delay in getting the project going – mall retailers were told this summer that they had to be out by September, according to reports – is due to anchor tenant K-Mart being unhappy with the plans. K-Mart’s lease, which optimistically extends to the year 2051, states, according to the April minutes, that the mall must always have 3,490 spaces available (a doink more than is listed in the documents) and that the mall owners can’t change the exterior of the mall unless they sign off.
One of the few people contacted that would agree to talk on the record was Kim Freely, a spokeswoman for Sears, which now owns K-Mart. She denied that K-Mart was the holdup. “We haven’t received any plans from the developer at this point,” she said last week. “We’re trying to see what the developer is planning to do with the front.”
Swords, 20 percent off
These days, the mall is a very quiet place indeed. Only a few stores remain open, as most tenants have gone on to new locations. GameStop, which sells new and used video games, was open on a recent weekday afternoon, as was PCX, a place to get cut-rate hip-hop clothes, and Namco, a patio and pool supply concern. Shoppers were few and far between and the only operating eatery at the food court, a Chinese food place, was staffed by a man taking a nap on the counter very much like a kid would take a nap at his desk at school. The mall was still crisply air-conditioned and well-maintained, but spooky and sad in its near-emptiness, like it was a mall in Stephen King’s “The Stand,” minus the rotting bodies. The PA system playing such elegiac tunes as the Commodores’ “Sail On” and the Beatles’ “Let it Be” added to the funerary mood.
One of the stores still going strong is Nutz. An analogue of sorts to former mall stalwart Spencer Gifts, Nutz offers an eclectic mix of books, clothing, edged weapons, objets d’art and incense. (A sign outside the store recently indicated a 20 percent discount on swords and if you need a tie-dyed shirt or some skull-shaped items, they have plenty.) Owners Jim and Meg Freeman, who have operated the store for 12 years, said they were at first told they would have to get out in September, but now have heard they’ll be able to stay open through the holidays. “We’re waiting for the hammer to fall here,” Jim Freeman said, adding that they are keeping their mall location open (while seeking another) more for their employees’ sake than business opportunity. “We still do enough to stay alive,” he said. Freeman said the first eight years he’s been open at the mall were “fair,” while the last four haven’t been so great, which he attributed to “lousy mall management.”
Freeman said mall management “could have been more open” with what was going on, but took a “go with the flow” attitude toward the situation. “We’re just a flea on an elephant’s ass,” Freeman said. “Probably not even a biting flea.”
In remembrance of malls past
The South Hills Mall, spawned in 1974 out of a formerly freestanding Sears store on the Route 9 site, was Dutchess’ second pedestrian mall, with Fishkill’s now-defunct-and-post-apocalyptic-looking Dutchess Mall being the first. (The Poughkeepsie Plaza Mall predates South Hills by a couple of years, but started as a strip mall before becoming a pedestrian mall.) While South Hills helped along the death of downtown Poughkeepsie as a retail center, it quickly became “the” place to shop for Dutchess residents during the Disco and New Wave epochs, hosting such stores as Kay-Bee Toys, Up-To-Date, Record World and Spencer Gifts. Video arcade Dream Machine, across from where K-Mart is, was routinely packed with spotty teens cramming quarters into such classics as Asteroids, Frogger and Battlezone – this writer has a very vivid memory of a friend of his dropping several bucks on the Journey video game just so he could repeatedly and gleefully destroy Messrs. Perry, Schon, Smith, Cain and Valory — and the region’s first cineplex went up on the site of a former roller rink in the early 1980s.
But when the Galleria went up just to the north of the mall in 1987, things began to sour for South Hills, especially when Sears jumped ship to the new, gleaming two-level mall. South Hills, then owned by Dutch concern Sarakreek, attempted to reinvent itself into a collection of big-box stores, including Media Play, Bob’s and Pharmhouse, and the presumably cheaper space allowed atypical mall businesses like a gymnastics school and batting cages to flourish for a brief time, but the decline was inevitable and unstoppable.
There may be nothing more bereft than a dead mall, but South Hills will always have a place in the reminiscences of those of us who were teenagers when it was the best thing Poughkeepsie had to offer.
“It may be hard to imagine, for those who’ve only known the ghostly emptiness of the present-day South Hills, but it was quite a bustling place in its heyday,” recalled Dave Stork, then a Hyde Park resident and now living in Ulster. “I was a teenager then; and like teens of today, I liked to go down to the mall whenever I was able to scrape together a few bucks. I shopped at Record World and Spencer Gifts. I bought imported cigarettes at Briar Route. I played pinball at the Dream Machine arcade and ate lunch at Orange Julius. Sometimes I’d just sit down and enjoy a smoke by one of the planters that ran down the center of the main promenade. (Yes, there was a time when you could smoke indoors!). Everybody went to South Hills back then, so you were almost guaranteed to run into somebody you knew – which was either an attraction or a drawback, depending,” Stork said.
“I’m not prepared to admit to nostalgia for a shopping mall,” he added, “but it does make me a little sad to compare the moribund shell of South Hills to my memory of what it used to be. I had fun there, years ago, but I don’t go there anymore.”
For a California native attending Vassar College in the 1980s, South Hills was kind of a little slice of home. “My friend Cynthia and I managed to work our schedules one semester so that we didn’t have any classes at all on Tuesdays (I can’t remember now if that was on purpose, or just a lucky coincidence),” said the student, who asked that her name not be used. “So we would often go to a bargain matinee at South Hills on a Tuesday. At that time, Tuesday matinees were a special deal for senior citizens, maybe $1 a movie, so the audience was usually just a few really old people, and the two of us. I’m pretty sure I saw ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ in that setting,” she said.
“Other than that though, South Hills just reminds me of all of those times when Cynthia and I felt the need to escape the most Vassar-y of our Vassar friends, and get back to our roots as suburban mall bunnies. And South Hills was perfect for that!”
Lissa Townsend Rodgers grew up in Hyde Park in the 1980s as well. Now a teacher and a writer in Las Vegas, she too feels a bit of sadness at South Hills’ passing. “While neither I nor anyone is surprised, I do feel a twinge of sorrow. After all, it was my first mall. I whiled away many a weekend there during junior high and early high school, poking through the Waldenbooks, nibbling on the Panda Express, flipping through the ‘imports’ section at the record store whose name I have now forgotten. And, toward its end, it did have a distinctly ‘Dawn of the Dead’ vibe.”
