The Shoppes at South Hills
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| File:811876803 l.jpg Main Hallway | |
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| Location | Poughkeepsie, New York, United States |
|---|---|
| Opening date | 1974 |
| Management | Dagar Group |
| Owner | Vornado Realty Trust |
| No. of stores and services | 21 |
| No. of anchor tenants | 2 open |
| Total retail floor area | 675,000 square feet |
| No. of floors | 1 |
| Parking | 2000 spaces |
South Hills Mall is a shopping mall on US 9 in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, not far from Wappingers Falls. The 675,000-square foot (60,750 m²) plaza opened in 1974 and includes over 40 shops, a small food court, and an eight-screen second-run cinema. South Hills Mall is owned and operated by Vornado Realty Trust, which purchased the mall from the locally-based Dagar Group in October 2005[1].
The mall is adjacent to its rival, the Poughkeepsie Galleria, and the two are linked by interior roads. The Galleria's existence has led to the slow decline of South Hills and, for several years in the 1990s, there were rumors of the Galleria taking over South Hills and expanding into that space.
History
South Hills Mall was the first true indoor shopping mall in Poughkeepsie (though Poughkeepsie Plaza Mall, a strip mall which was later enclosed, predated it) and the second in Dutchess County after Dutchess Mall in Fishkill. At the outset, anchors were Sears and KMart and an assortment of smaller stores common for the era. South Hills quickly became the dominant retail center in the Poughkeepsie area, leading to a realignment at Poughkeepsie Plaza and the closing of venerable downtown retailer Luckey Platt & Co. in 1981. A later expansion added Hess's and a food court Service merchandise relocated to this mall in 1995 after closing the location at the dutchesse mall.
In the early 1980s, an initial proposal for a two-story mall adjacent to South Hills was submitted; after several years of protests, this proposal became Poughkeepsie Galleria and opened in 1987. Though the malls co-existed successfully for the first several years of the Galleria's existence, as the 1990s began South Hills began to suffer. The decline largely began in 1991 when Hess's closed their location and Sears moved to the Galleria; the Hess's space was replaced by Burlington Coat Factory while the Sears space was divided between Pharmhouse and a (freestanding) Price Chopper supermarket.
Around this time, South Hills was sold to Sarakreek, a Dutch property holding firm which reimaged the mall into a "power center" in which "big-box" retailers would open locations inside the mall. Smaller stores were replaced by such stores as Media Play, Old Navy, Office Max, Discovery Zone, and Bob's Stores. This strategy lessened the decline for a short period, however in the long run the alienation of smaller stores only led to a further, greater decline to the point that all of the aforementioned stores either have all since closed their locations at the mall.
It used to be a place for people to hang out after the galleria mall began a new rule that banned teens.
Present
By the late 1990s, Sarakreek sold South Hills to the Dagar Group, a locally based retail ownership group that mostly owns strip malls. The decline of South Hills hastened after this change as many established smaller tenants left the mall. Filling those holes have been smaller, independent shops ranging from a pottery and craft store to a small lunch counter to a (now closed) gymnastics studio as well as some tenants more suited to strip malls (such as GameStop and Weight Watchers). The Service Merchandise location has been largely vacant, minus several months as an overstock book store, and now serves merely as a corridor from the mall to a parking lot. After Phar-Mor, parent of Pharmhouse, folded, the space has played host to two different furniture stores. The closings of both Media Play and OfficeMax in 2006 also have not been good news for the mall. One of the few remaining source of incomes for the mall is the Silver Cinemas, which shows second-run movies for $1-2 a ticket.
The remaining big box store tenants are K-Mart, Burlington Coat Factory and the newly opened ShopRite. Burlington Coat Factory recently underwent an extensive renovation to update the look of the store.
Future
Rumors and ideas to save the mall continue to circulate. One proposal has most of the space being bulldozed for a WalMart Supercenter while another has a realignment in which half of the mall is replaced with a Costco while the more successful stores are relocated into the other half. In May 2006, initial plans were submitted to demolish much of the mall and rebuild it as a big-box center with a few successful stores surviving.
Price Chopper announced on June 29, 2006 that the South Hills Mall location will close July 15. [2] On July 6, 2006, ShopRite announced that they will open a store in what had been the Price Chopper location. The store opened in the Fall of 2006. [3]
Vornado Realty Trust lists the property as a strip shopping center and excludes it from lists of shopping malls. The property profile begins with "Formerly the South Hills Mall..." [4], which suggests that the company plans to go through with the proposal to demolish the enclosed mall.
Media
Local sensation Cock Wrangler has even written a song about the mall. South Hills Mall Song