Rod McKay remembers the pomp and circumstance of the groundbreaking ceremony for the Bangor Mall. The mayor was there with a gold shovel in hand, a host of local dignitaries and media members looking on. McKay also remembers the smell of that day in 1978 to be a little pungent. "We were standing there in the middle of a cow pasture, with cows all around," says the city's director of community and economic development. "We moved a lot of them out of the way, but I remember the picture in the paper had cows in the background."
At the time, the intersection of I-95 and Hogan Road was a lot different than it is today. K-Mart, the first national retailer in the area, had gone up in 1974, and the 95er truck stop was already there, along with a few smaller buildings. There was little else, except the cows.
"By the time the mall opened, we had the animals fenced in a little better," says McKay. "But it was just all farmland and Stillwater was a little drive in the country all the way up to Old Town
Today, the mall area is anything but a country drive. The intersection of Stillwater Avenue and Hogan Road, with two exits from I-95, is packed with a growing selection of national and local retailers and restaurants, home to more than 2.5 million square feet of retail space.
The mall and the surrounding big-box stores, strip malls, and restaurants help to bring millions of people to Bangor. The area alone certainly didn't make the city a service center for much of eastern, central, and northern Maine and parts of Canada. But these days, it's an important piece, just as it's important to the city's financial picture, too, because 13.2% (assessed at $271.4 million) of its tax base ($2.059 billion) is in the Stillwater/Hogan Road area.
Growth, a constant since those cow-filled days, continues, with 443,000 square feet of retail space added since 2000. The Bangor Parkade, anchored by Kohl's, is just the latest piece, with two more major ones to come soon, and no end in sight. Soon, another 150,000 square feet will fill the space behind Circuit City, and another huge project, as much as 670,000 square feet-bigger than the mall itself-may follow.
McKay's office works to bring businesses to Bangor, but he and his staff don't work on filling up the mall area. It sort of happens on its own, a simple case of supply and demand. Still, when McKay does sell the city to a visiting company, he always ends the tour in the mall area, in part because it seems so big for a city of Bangor's size.
"You see a lot of chins drop when you get off 95," McKay says. "People wonder how all this development happened in a community of 34,000 people. Then they begin to understand that Bangor is really a center, a place people come to from all around."
They come for medical services -- Eastern Maine Medical Center is also huge for a city of Bangor's size -- for entertainment, and for financial and professional services, much of which is downtown. But the mall is part of the critical mass that makes Bangor what it is.
Jim McConnon, a professor at the University of Maine, Orono, who studies business and economics, cites a statistic called the 'pull factor,' which measures the number of shoppers a city brings in compared to its population. A 1.0 pull factor would mean the retail sector matches the population. Bangor's pull factor for 2004 was a 3.4, compared to 3.6 for South Portland (Maine Mall), 1.8 for Portland, 0.8 for Lewiston, and 2.3 for Auburn (Auburn Mall).
"People are willing to drive further and further," McConnon says. "North, south, east, and west, there's really no major competitor until you hit Augusta. Ellsworth is growing, and smaller markets have Wal-Marts and other retail, but nowhere in a large swath of Maine is there anything near the conglomeration of retail businesses that we have. In terms of Maine, it is unique."
The big retailers study demographic and economic trends before expanding, and the build-up of recent years suggests a real confidence in the region's future. According to McKay, the original mall develop developer's study found that it didn't make sense to build a mall here, based on population density. They forged on, and quickly found out -- especially in those days, when a favorable exchange rate and tax laws brought more Canadians to the city -- that Bangor is more than a small city or a region measured by traditional size standards.
"People in Machias and up in Aroostook come down to Bangor to shop," McConnon says. "People need to go to the mall, or to Target. Even for food purchases, they're coming down with coolers and loading up on products because they feel they're minimizing costs."
Why do national retailers and restaurant chains like Bangor, and, particularly, the Stillwater/Hogan area? The regional draw, keyed by easy access from I-95 and a lack of competition in nearby areas, together with a critical mass of retail, entertainment, and dining, makes Bangor a target. Plus, they've seen the success others have had.
Carol Epstein, of Epstein Commercial Real Estate in Bangor, says retailers' attraction to places like the Parkade is not complicated: the area is set up for it physically, with open land and infrastructure, just off the highway in a regional center.
"Retailers need to expand, improve their sales all the time," Epstein says. "They do that in two ways: by improving their sales in existing stores and by adding stores. They choose where to expand based on all kinds of factors, but when they choose Maine, Bangor is one of the top locations, because the retailers here are doing very, very well."
Retailers and restaurants follow each other, and enjoy the critical mass of a lot of their brethren in one area. It seems, in a way, counterintuitive, to be right next to the competition. It's not.
"You would think that McDonald's and Burger King wouldn't want to be on opposing corners of an intersection, but they do," says Kevin Kane, development manager and Bangor point man for Widewaters Group, the Syracuse, N.Y.-based developer behind Circuit City and other projects. "They recognize that they're going to get the fast-food shopper at that intersection, and then it's between them who gets those dollars. McDonald's could be out by itself, but the shoppers might never come to that intersection."
That's why the Bangor Mall and the Maine Mall sport two of the state's highest pull factors, and why so much has sprung up around the mall. Kohl's and Filenes may battle for the same customer, but they don't have to fight to get the traffic flow of customers to the area.
"If they live in Presque Isle or Lincoln or wherever, now the Old Navy customer who was going to Augusta is going to come here," says James Gerety, general manager of the Bangor Mall. "Kohl's does a lot of advertising, as does Target and everyone else, to bring people to their stores. And if the shoppers are across the street, I have the opportunity to bring them here."
The area's beginnings as a retail center followed national trends in the 1970s, when a stream of retailers began moving to the suburbs and building large, inexpensive, mostly single-story facilities such as K-Mart. This breed of suburban development now has its own set of terminology, and a familiar feel in just about every American city: the enclosed mall -- which, incidentally, doesn't happen much anymore outside urban areas, because of the large footprint of non-selling space, security issues, and costs; the big-box, such as Home Depot or Target; the strip mall, anchored (by Shaw's, for example) or not (like the strip where Blockbuster Video sits on Hogan). Now a new term has emerged -- the power center -- designating a Bangor Parkade-style development, with a large anchor store at either end.
Obtaining land, too, takes on several signature patterns: Big-box stores may buy the land on which they sit, as Circuit City did (from Widewaters), or sign a lease, often for 25 years with several five-year options to extend. Restaurants often sign a 10-year lease.
The structures they choose to build are "safe, but they're almost disposable," says Bangor code enforcement officer Dan Wellington. "In downtown America, buildings are significant in both size and architecture. These buildings won't be around long enough to be architecture. They're useful for a time, and when they get out-dated, they replace them, or someone else comes in and replaces them with another store. What's hot keeps changing."
K-Mart came in the 1970s, then Shop n' Save and McDonald's. Service Merchandise, Shaw's, and Burger King came in the 1980s. Home Quarters came in the early 1990s; Home Depot arrived in the latter part of the decade. Since 2000, Best Buy replaced Service Merchandise; Pizza Hut tore down its 1982 store this year, and started a new one. And in the last couple of years, Target, Chili's, Smokey Bones, and others have come to Bangor. It won't stop there, either. That the stores want to be here says something about Bangor.
"These people are very careful, and they do their homework," Kane says. "If they're coming, they know the area is growing, that it's going to be strong. They think highly of Bangor and its demographics or they wouldn't be there."
Typically, national retailers and restaurant chains look at concentric circles around the proposed location, studying an area in concentric circles with a radius of as little as 2.5 miles out to 20 miles or more. They look at the number of vehicles on the roads in the area, the density of households within the various circles, and the income levels within the area, and feed it into their proprietary formulas to see whether a store would work.
"It's not rocket science," says Kevin Kane of developer Widewaters Group. "Retailers are fairly cautious. The numbers have to be there now, and looking ahead. Because just starting the shopping center permitting process is a major undertaking."
Widewaters is in permitting and lease negotiations for a 150,000-square-foot development behind Circuit City and Chili's on Stillwater. The company owns a 27-acre piece of land there and will likely build an anchored strip mall with a sit-down restaurant.
That project will be small potatoes compared to what's next. W/S Development Associates, an arm of Boston-based S.R. Weiner and developers of Home Depot and Target, applied this summer for a traffic management permit for a center that could be larger than the Bangor Mall, off Stillwater behind Blue Seal Feeds. As of mid-October, no tenants were known. But they're coming. Wal-Mart still wants to build a super center (with groceries) in the area, and Lowe's Home Improvement, a Home Depot competitor, has also shown interest. One or both could end up as anchors.
"If you pay attention to national advertising, we don't have one of everything yet," McKay says. "The gauge I use is, if you're watching cable TV and you see something that's not here, you can anticipate that it's going to be here soon."
SIDEBAR: PERMIT ON WHEELS
Development today is very much like the old chicken-or-the-egg proposition. In order to secure tenants, developers need to be well along in the permitting process. But to get permits from the state and the city, developers need to have an idea of what the space will be used for.
"It's an intricate waltz," says Dan Wellington, Bangor's code enforcement officer. "There's a catch-22 of state laws, local laws, and everything else. Financing through the bank, finding tenants, getting everyone to sign on the dotted line. It all happens at the same time, and the process takes a while, sometimes several years."
Most developments start with a traffic management permit from the state; then developers must apply to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for a site license. DEP may study the site itself or pass some of the work on to the city. That review can take months or years in complicated areas. Meanwhile, there are numerous local permits, including site-plan approval by the town or city planning board. The application for that can fill several six-inch-thick binders, showing what the developer plans to do, that they have the financial backing to do it, and on down through how they'll deal with noise regulations, wildlife and fisheries requirements, cultural and historical guidelines, drainage and soils, wastewater, solid waste, flooding, odors and other emissions -- the list goes on and on. Often, there is some infrastructure work -- the traffic light on Stillwater by the Parkade is an example -- which the developer has to cover in order to get permits.
"There have been some site permit applications that I've had to wheel in here with a dolly," Wellington says.
