Mall Madness: Inside the Past and Present of Rhode Island’s Malls

Illustration by John Rego

If you wanted a snapshot of my unanchored teenage years, you could do worse than observing the Starcourt Mall in the eighties-infused sci-fi/horror series “Stranger Things.” Minus the transdimensional monsters, all the elements of a youth misspent pouring quarters into video games are on display in fictional Hawkins: the noisy arcade, the pastel-colored food court, the movie theater, Orange Julius, and of course, the holy trinity of hair-band-era retail: Hot Topic, Spencer’s and Claire’s.

My mother’s contention that I seemed to live at the mall was hardly refuted when I graduated from mall rat to mall employee, working first at a clothing store before taking my first “real job” at a bank branch located in — yup — a sprawling suburban shopping mall. 

If it all seems in hindsight a rather shallow formative experience, well, at least I was hardly alone. “Anyone born in the eighties spent their middle school years at the mall on Friday nights or the roller rink,” says Seekonk resident Chris Gomes, thirty-nine. “That’s where the girls went.”

“I grew up walking around the Rhode Island Mall on Friday nights with friends,” says Katie Lyn Merolla, forty-nine, of Warwick. “My parents hated it, but they would always drop us off. We would hang in the food court and visit our friends who had jobs at the mall.” 

Shopping at the mall was “vital” during her early teen years, says Merolla. “School spilled over to there. You met your boyfriend and his friends there. Before dating was allowed, you could hold hands and walk around and no one yelled at you.”

The mall has a deeper meaning than most for forty-two-year-old Jaclyn Altieri: She met her husband, Ben, at the Warwick Mall in 1997. “A few of my girlfriends were meeting there outside the food court, and the rest is history,” she says. 

Fast forward to 2024, and the mall culture captured in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless seems as archaic as leg warmers and mullets; the combined blows of online shopping and the pummeling that brick-and-mortar retail experienced during the pandemic have many ready to give up on this once-ubiquitous symbol of suburban excess and teen angst.

The trends for shopping malls are pretty grim. The number of malls in the United States declined 16.7 percent annually between 2017 and 2022, with more than 1,000 closing each year, according to Capital One Shopping. Some projections suggest the country’s malls could decline from 1,150 today to a tenth of that by 2032.

Warwick’s Rhode Island Mall, opened in 1967 as the Midland Mall, is part of those statistics. The shopping mall shuttered in 2011; today the property is home to Walmart and Kohl’s stores — connected physically, but accessible only from their individual exterior entrances. 

“It’s doing well, but it’s not a mall anymore,” says Domenic Schiavone, general manager of the nearby Warwick Mall, which continues to succeed as a traditional indoor mall.

More Than Just a Mall

Amid this uncertain landscape — the “upside down” to the mall’s glory days, if you will — Providence Place is marking its twenty-fifth year as the centerpiece of the capital city’s urban renaissance and eyeing a future that seeks to restore the idea of the mall as an indispensable hub of community life.  

Originally anchored by Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor and Filene’s, Providence Place opened its doors at the tail end of the mall’s glory days: in 1999, when Amazon’s Seattle headquarters still shared a street with a needle-exchange program and a porn shop. The biggest public/private project in Rhode Island’s history, the half-billion-dollar mall sits on more than thirteen acres of what’s been called the most valuable piece of real estate in Providence. 

Photography courtesy of Nick Millard/GoProvidence.com.

Straddling the Woonasquatucket River and peering over Waterplace Park and the Providence Riverwalk, the mall has 1.2 million square feet of leasable space; its four-story, glass-walled Wintergarden was designed by architect Friedrich St. Florian, whose other works include the adjoining Providence Skybridge and the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

In addition to being a key architectural facet of the Capital Center District, the mall was intended to be an economic driver of the Providence renaissance that included the construction of the riverfront parks weaving through the heart of downtown. 

“The idea was to have the mall be a mechanism to draw and keep people in the central business district,” says Marion Orr, a professor of political science and urban studies at Brown University, who co-authored a 2000 report assessing the initial impact of the mall with political scientist Darrell West. “The hope was that the Providence Place mall might be able to recapture retail sales that had crept out to suburban malls.”

By many measures, the mall has delivered on that promise. According to city records, Providence Place has averaged more than $1 million per month in sales tax receipts since opening, and paid the city $8.7 million in lieu of taxes between 2005 and 2024. In 2022, former City Council President John Igliozzi estimated that the mall has accounted for $8.1 million in meal tax payments, $400 million in sales tax payments, and employed 2,000 full-time workers since it opened.

Former Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr., a real estate developer who helped get Providence Place built back in the 1990s, credits the mall with driving residential development in the city, which has included conversion of old Downcity buildings into apartments and construction of high-rise luxury condos. “I think the mall greatly complemented the rest of downtown,” he says.

Kristen Adamo, president and CEO of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, calls the mall one of the city’s top attractions and a major selling point for meeting and event planners.

“Having the mall contiguous to the convention center and hotel is really important,” she says. “When people are here for tournaments and team competitions you can keep everyone under the same roof. Providence has activities for young kids like the children’s museum, but for tweens it’s the mall with Dave & Buster’s, movies and shopping — it fills that niche.”

Attaining a New ‘Level’

However, the closure of the mall’s flagship stores, particularly the departure of Nordstrom in 2019, has fed doubts about Providence Place’s future. 

The mall’s tenants still include Spencer’s and Orange Julius, and preteens still flock to Claire’s to get their first ear piercings. Boscov’s, a value-oriented department store, replaced Nordstrom. Macy’s stepped into the Filene’s space in 2006 and remains open, but the company has been struggling and announced in early 2024 that it would close 150 stores nationally. 

The prospect of Providence Place becoming yet another “dead mall” on the landscape incites fear in Adamo. “The mall’s survival is critical,” she says. “Nobody wants to come to a city that looks like it has fallen on hard times.”

“If the mall closed it would be a real blow, psychologically and economically,” says Deming Sherman, a partner at the law firm Locke Lord LLP and former chair of the Capital Center Commission, formed in 1979 and tasked with creating the development plan for the seventy-nine-acre district that includes the mall. “I don’t think it will happen, but I also think the mall twenty years from now will look quite different.”

How different? What’s happening in the space formerly occupied by JCPenney — which closed in 2015 — offers some clues. Where shoppers once thumbed through clothing racks searching for bargains on St. John’s Bay shirts and Arizona jeans, guests at Providence’s new Level99 now roam in packs solving interactive games and puzzles designed to challenge both mind and body. 

Opened in January 2024, the 40,000-square-foot adult playground symbolizes the evolution of Providence Place from retail center to entertainment destination. It’s a trend occurring nationally as shopping malls seek to reinvent themselves. 

“While the traditional concept of shopping malls has faded over the years, leading some to be labeled as ‘dead malls,’ others have found innovative ways of adapting to the changing retail landscape,” Karen Meier, vice president for lead prospecting for Camoin Associates, wrote in a 2023 report, The Growth, Decline, and Rebirth of the American Shopping Mall.

Officials at Brookfield Properties, the current owners of the mall, are tight-lipped about the specific plans for the future of Providence Place. “We always want to keep our options open, whether it’s retail or entertainment or something else,” says Janell Vaughan, the company’s vice president of property management.

However, a 2022 proposal to renew the mall’s tax treaty with the city hinted at some possibilities. 

“The continued growth of e-commerce has required mall owners to reinvent the shopping center experience, and redevelop the environment to become a modern public gathering place that combines retail with office/workplace, dining, entertainment, health and wellness facilities, arts, education, residential, medical, community fulfillment services and together with other commercial uses in one location,” according to the plan submitted by Igliozzi.

Joe Hope, senior vice president of leasing for Providence Place, has worked at the mall since it opened and describes his job as “curating what’s of interest to people.

“That was retail at first, and has expanded to be more experiential entertainment and food and beverage concepts,” he says. “The mall is becoming a community hub of daily living for customers. It’s no longer this apparel-centric offering it used to be.”

The idea that the mall could someday include a residential component is particularly intriguing. In a 2023 report on 153 mall redevelopment projects, the consulting firm JLL found that more than half of such projects included a residential housing component. 

The Laguna Hills Mall in California is one example: Opened in 1973 and anchored by Sears, the mall closed in 2018; plans are to rename it Five Lagunas and include a 988-unit apartment complex, a movie theater, pedestrian plazas and a mix of new and existing retail.

The tax treaty and ground lease for Providence Place would have to be amended for a residential redevelopment to happen, since both require the property to primarily be used for retail. But Meier says that malls have the square footage, parking and infrastructure needed to accommodate a diverse range of nonretail functions. 

“The opportunity for space reutilization is vast,” she says. “Malls are becoming places where you can live, work and play. I don’t think malls are dead; they’ve been on life support for a while and are slowly being revitalized.”

The Tactics of Tactile Experiences

As at Providence Place, increasing entertainment options is part of the way forward at the Warwick Mall, which opened in 1970 and has maintained occupancy rates of over 90 percent by evolving with the times, says Warwick Mall’s Schiavone. A Blissful Selfie Spot recently opened at the mall, for example, and Schiavone contends that the threat posed by online retail has been overblown.

“There are still things people want to feel, touch and try on,” he says — something that malls can offer more readily than Amazon or newcomers like Temu. Plus, customers who come to the Warwick Mall’s Target and Macy’s stores to pick up their online orders often stick around to do more shopping; an unexpected benefit, says Schiavone.

Level99’s founding principle — providing tactile experiences without video gaming consoles — aligns neatly with the evolving mall environment, says Matthew DuPlessie, the company’s founder and CEO. 

“To be competitive, malls have to offer experiences you can’t get at home,” he says. “Malls that have reinvented themselves are doing as good as ever.”

Courtesy of Nick Millard/GoProvidence.com

Entertainment has always been in the mix at Providence Place, of course. The mall’s sixteen-screen cinema, IMAX theater and food hall debuted with the mall in 1999, and the family-friendly Dave & Buster’s arcade and billiard hall opened a few months later. 

The difference is that Level99 is effectively serving in the role of “anchor store” for Providence Place. Brookfield Properties’ Vaughan says Level99 has been shown to “drive foot traffic even better than a big box retailer.” DuPlessie estimates that the original Level99 has drawn 400,000 people annually to the Brookfield-managed Natick Mall in Massachusetts. 

The experiential revolution taking place at Providence Place extends to some of the new retailers at the mall as well. Akira, a midpriced women’s clothing, footwear and accessories store that opened in 2023, offers personalized service by encouraging shoppers to work with a stylist when they walk in the door, which a website can’t duplicate, says Dee Nguyen, the company’s head of partnerships. 

“When you walk into a high-end retailer, you get service from the minute you walk in until the minute you leave,” she says. “Other stores may have the same things on their shelves, but our stylists are there to enhance that experience for you so you can express yourself fearlessly through fashion. They try to get to know you — almost like welcoming someone into your home.”

Crime and Taxes

Filling storefronts isn’t the only challenge facing the mall. Some high-profile robberies and clashes between rival gang members have stoked fear about Providence Place that suburban malls rarely have to deal with. 

Nor does Gen X nostalgia about teen years spent at the mall readily translate into fondness for an urban mall. “I only go to Providence Place out of necessity, such as to the Apple Store,” says Altieri. “I’ve heard horror stories about the parking garage. It doesn’t feel safe.”

The very prominence of Providence Place has sometimes contributed to the perception of the mall as a dangerous place. In June 2020, for example, rioters broke windows and looted shops at the mall, and a Providence police cruiser was set ablaze in front of the mall’s Francis Street entrance. 

Providence police statistics, however, indicate that the mall doesn’t have a crime problem disproportionate to other parts of the city. Lindsay Lague, a spokesperson for the Providence Department of Public Safety, says that while about 10 percent of larcenies reported in the city take place at the mall, half of those are for shoplifting — a common problem for malls everywhere. 

“The mall parking lot has very little reported crime,” says Lague. “Relatively speaking, it is safe to state that there are no major safety concerns pertaining to the mall.”

Potentially more significant for the ultimate fate of Providence Place is the expiration of the mall’s massive tax break in 2028. 

Igliozzi’s proposal, which never got a vote, called for another twenty-year tax treaty that would require the mall to pay more, but cap annual payments at $4.5 million. Providence’s chief financial officer, Lawrence Mancini, recently told Providence Business News that the mall should be required to pay more. 

“On a square footage basis, the Providence Place valuation still would result in a tax payment more than 2.5 times the annual payment that is being proposed,” he says.

“There’s no way the mall will be able to pay the full tax rate,” says Paolino. However, he says, the tax issue “gives the mayor of Providence a tremendous negotiating tool” over the future mix of tenants in the mall, including greater integration with the surrounding community.

Paolino says the mall should do more to open its doors to local retailers and the city’s artistic community. Level99 includes murals and sculpture by local artists, for example, and Vaughan says the pop-up makers’ markets hosted in the Wintergarden show that Brookfield is open to the idea of making space for local artists and small businesses. 

“The mall is going to have to bend the knee to the city to get what it needs,” says Providence artist Michael Townsend, who famously lived in a secret apartment in the mall. “I’d love nothing more than for the mall to become a well-organized collection of community resources rather than just retail.”

Passage of a new tax deal for the mall remains far from certain, however.

“You can’t tax the masses and expect others to get a sweetheart deal,” says Providence City Councilwoman Althea Graves, whose Ward 12 district includes Providence Place. “I don’t know if the City Council is going to continue to support that.”

A Lasting Legacy

Despite her reservations about the tax treaty, Graves says the mall “has been a good neighbor.

“A lot of people from Smith Hill don’t have cars, so it allows them to go out for entertainment and shopping,” she says. “Boscov’s is reasonable. People park at the mall for events in the city rather than feeding the meter. There are reasonable options for workers to eat lunch, and it’s near the state offices and city hall.”

If entertainment and experiences are the future of Providence Place, John Zilliken might be the perfect person to be at the helm: The senior general manager of Providence Place spent a decade running the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas before coming to Providence two years ago.

“We’re in control of our own destiny here,” says Zilliken, noting that Providence Place has retained more than sixty of its original tenants while adding “first-to-market” tenants like Level99, Uniqlo and the Fogo de Chāo Brazilian steakhouse.

Zilliken notes that food and beverage represented nearly 20 percent of sales at the mall even before the latest additions, and internal surveys by Brookfield also show that social interaction is a leading reason why people visit Providence Place. 

“Almost nobody comes to the mall by themselves; they come with family, friends and co-workers,” he says. “It’s overblown that online retailers make malls less attractive.

“Our company is well-positioned to make Providence Place a very useful and enjoyable place to gather and spend time,” says Zilliken. “I think there’s always a halo effect for others when something this central is doing well, and I think that’s going to play out here. If anyone is going to lead the second renaissance of downtown Providence, it’s going to be us.”

On a recent Sunday, Providence Place is abuzz with activity. At Dave & Buster’s, a birthday party is in full swing, with tweens shuttling between the arcade and tables strewn with plates of pizza. Cheerleaders in full uniform — in town for the Spirit Fest Grand Nationals — crowd tables in the food court; out of view of their parents, a few giggle as they browse the aisles in Spencer’s.

Sipping an Orange Julius, my own mall memories come back in the kind of flood that only taste and smell can trigger. My days of marathon sessions at the arcade are in the past, but Providence Place is alive with possibilities. Maybe I’m not ready to make the mall my home, but I still hear the siren’s call of mindless fun as I make my way upstairs to Level99. It’s the weekend at the mall, and I’m playing games again. 

I’ve evolved over the decades, and so has Providence Place, but we’re both embracing new experiences. Today, that means using Kaiju-sized chopsticks to maneuver giant balls onto pedestals, rather than trying to topple Donkey Kong. Nobody’s quite sure where the mall is going in the future, but I’ll bet a pocket full of quarters on Providence Place — changed, yet still familiar — still being around twenty-five years from now.