The Bangor Mall is dead. Long live the Bangor Mall?

Mixed emotions as the doors close on a monument to consumer culture

A BDN archive image from the Bangor Mall groundbreaking nearly 50 years ago. Last week, the Bangor Mall was condemned. Cue “The Circle of Life.”

The year is 1996. Or maybe it’s 1984, or perhaps even 2005. Regardless: it was a while ago. Long enough that it makes you feel old just thinking about it, whatever your actual numerical age is as you’re reading this.

You live in a small town in eastern or northern Maine; Millinocket, say. Milbridge. Dover-Foxcroft. Searsport. Something like that. You are 15 years old, and it is the first weekend of April break. Today, your mom is driving you, your cousin and your friend to go shopping at the Bangor Mall. You have a small amount of money in your pocket. Today is going to be a very good day.

It’s hard to overstate what a big deal the Bangor Mall was to several generations of people growing up in rural Maine communities, for whom Bangor was the “big city.” People newer to the area or too young to remember likely can’t conceive of it being such a draw when they look at the crumbling, depressing husk of a building that sits there now.

Who would want to go there? Right now: no one, considering the majority of the building was condemned by the city of Bangor last week after years of decline, deferred maintenance and financial disarray. Only JC Penney, Dick’s Sporting Goods and that furniture store that is also sometimes a craft fair remain open. Otherwise, the doors are locked, the lights are off and nobody’s home.

In its heyday, however, the Bangor Mall was, arguably, the number one attraction for the entirety of eastern and northern Maine; only Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island could realistically come close to it. Though its origins are not particularly different from any other enclosed mall that sprang up in the latter half of the 20th century - Kravco, the company that built it, developed more than 30 malls across the country - it served an outsize role in the economic and recreational landscape of the region. When it opened in 1978 on land that formerly belonged to dairy farmers, it was heralded as a major step forward into the future.

Newspaper clippings and photos from throughout the years at the Bangor Mall, as well as a store directory from the early 1980s. See anybody you know in any of these?

For small town teens starved for anything to do, going to the Bangor Mall was a huge deal. Holiday and school shopping at stores like Chess King and Weathervane. Prom dresses. Getting your ears pierced. Record Town and Tape World. Orange Julius. Playing Donkey Kong at Space Port. Eating lunch at York Steakhouse with your grandparents. Band t-shirts at Hot Topic. Seeing your first sex toys in person at Spencer Gift. Seeing other people from other towns and maybe even talking to them. Busloads of Canadians descending on Porteous and Sears. Smoking sections, back when that was a thing. Fake plants and fountains. So many fountains. It may not have been high-end, and it may have been a year or two behind in terms of trends and new chain stores, but for Gen Xers and Millennials, the Bangor Mall was the place to be.

Here’s the thing: for all the neon-tinged nostalgia of the glory days of the mall, it’s also 100 percent true that it was, in many ways, really bad for Bangor. Though downtown Bangor had been in trouble since the urban renewal project of the 1960s and early 70s demolished much of the city’s historic economic center, the opening of the mall in 1978 sped up the process dramatically. Shiny and new! Everything in one spot! Indoors! And an absolutely endless sea of parking! The mall area was booming, while downtown went to bed at 5 p.m. and had as many vacant buildings as it did occupied ones. It stayed like that for more than 30 years.

At some point in the past 15 years, a major reversal of fortune occurred. Malls across the country declined as online shopping became dominant, and over-saturation in brick-and-mortar retail broadly reached a tipping point. The Bangor Mall - like any other mall in any other city anywhere in the country - suffered the same consequences. When you hitch your economic wagon to consumer culture, big corporations and property developers, don’t be surprised when they drop you like a hot potato as soon as you stop making money. That’s capitalism, baby! Namdar, a parasitic property management company that feeds off the remaining life force of malls until they have sucked them dry, bought the mall in 2019. By then it was, essentially, over.

Meanwhile, downtown Bangor continues to bounce back thanks to committed local efforts to revitalize the district, with its lowest vacancy rate in decades and new businesses opening all the time. There’s a vocal minority in the population that believes that downtown is a filthy cesspool populated only by homeless people and that hypodermic needles are not only everywhere but are also somehow sentient and able to stab people of their own accord. But the reality is that, despite the challenges it faces, downtown Bangor is in better shape now than it has been in at least half a century. There are a lot of people living and working there who care a great deal about their community and put that care into action, whether it’s in the form of opening a business, making art, cleaning up public spaces or feeding people who are hungry.

But I digress. It’s possible to hold two thoughts in your head at once: that there’s something bittersweet about the end of the Bangor Mall and all its associated cultural memories, and that it’s not such a bad thing that it’s closed. There’s the question, of course, of what the hell is going to happen with this crumbling, ugly old building - I’d like to think it could be transformed into affordable housing or some sort of mixed-use facility, but as we all know, big projects like that have a way of never coming to fruition. I’ll stay hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

For now, there’s a crumbling old mall sitting in a former cow pasture, surrounded by other, standalone businesses that are open and thriving; I imagine that, indoors, it feels a bit like the movie “Backrooms.” I also sometimes imagine the Bangor Mall as having human emotions and feeling sad as it watches the other buildings around it fill up with people. I used to be a shining example of the boundless prosperity of American capitalism. I used to welcome families and couples and teens and children every day of the week. I used to be so busy people sat in gridlock traffic just to visit me. What am I now? Who am I now? And what - if anything - could I be?

I know some of you reading this have Bangor Mall memories to share, and you know we would all love to hear them. Drop them in the comments, and I’ll highlight some of them in a post later on this week!