Posted by FluffyRumia I just looked up the name, it's called brass mill center, it was pretty big too. worth the trip if you're tired of the malls in your area
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I grew up 5 minutes from that mall. It's one of the most ghetto places in one of the most ghetto areas in the northeast. Allow me to throw a little smarts on this for you: The area the mall is in? It was declared blight, and taken by eminent domain, but they didn't clear up the entire surrounding neighborhood, just enough to plunk down a mall.
http://en.wikipedi.../Brass_Mill_Center That mall has places for 4 anchor stores, and there have only ever been 3 in the mall. That's something like 100,000 plus sq/ft of retail space that has NEVER been able to be filled in over 15 years. This mall has a lot of non-chain, local stores, like dollar stores. This is because they can't find enough retail chain stores to rent out space. It's so bad, that they've taken to shuttering some of the stores, and using just the storefront area to put little kiosk areas in, with soda machines and ice cream machines, candy machines etc.
At one point, this mall had *4* Cash for Gold locations at one time.
The problem is that Waterbury is, and has been for decades, a dump. The Naugatuck Valley mall was a small, dying mall, and the developers saw it as a chance to revitalize the area. In Meriden CT there was Meriden Square, another mall that was a lot smaller than the Brass Mill was projected to be, and it's only like 12 or 13 miles away. The Brass Mill developers assumed that building a great new spectacle of a mall would bring in enough shoppers that it would boost the entire economy of Waterbury and bring the city back into prosperity. That's the way they sold the project anyway. What they didn't count on was Meriden Square being able to easily raise the money and permits to expand, and become far larger. Meriden Square is still smaller, but it's in a **FAR** nicer area of the state. Even though Meriden is pretty dumpy too, the part that the mall is in is relatively removed from that, and is closer to the highway than it is to the hood.
The newly expanded Meriden Square has better stores, better foot traffic, it HAS to have more revenue generated per sq/ft rented, and it's just a far less depressing place to be.
So, yeah. I know the mall, I've just never heard anybody call it nice.