Civic Center Mall
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The Civic Center Mall, located in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, was a three level, enclosed shopping mall and office complex built in 1974 as part of a large downtown urban redevelopment project. It was the commercial portion of a four block square megastructure-type development called the Hartford Civic Center complex, which also contained a multi-purpose coliseum, an exhibition and trade show center, structured parking and a 330 room Sheraton (now Hilton) hotel.
The mall featured approximately 50 small shops and restaurants and initially was anchored by a 'new' specialty department store, Luettgen's Ltd, created and operated by William Luettgen, who was previously the president of local department store chain, G. Fox & Co.. This anchor space would later be split with the upper level operated for a short time as a branch of another local apparel store, D&L, and later a T.J. Maxx. The mall contained a number of unique and national specialty shops such as a Hartford Whalers gift shop, Sam Goody, Waldenbooks, Ann Taylor, Koenig Art Emporium, Rising Sun Japanese, Chuck's Steak House restaurant, Athlete's Foot, Eastern Mountain Sports, Munson's Chocolates, B. Dalton Booksellers, Al Franklin's Musicworld, Gaetano's Ristorante, Margarita's, Unique Antique, Radio Shack, West Side Wines and Spirits, Motofoto, Arthur's Drug and Foot Locker. A third level contained approximately 65,000 sf of office space overlooking both the mall interior and the adjacent streets.
Funded and supported in an earlier era of local corporate involvement in urban redevelopment, its construction and for a period, its operating expenses were heavily subsidized by the real estate division of local conglomerate, Aetna Life and Casualty. In fact a local 'in-joke' was that the Luettgen's Ltd. anchor store was snidely referred to as the 'company store'.
Architecturally, it refelcted the brutalist and insular character of many early 1970s megastructure-type projects. The exterior of the L-shaped mall was constructed of eggcrate-like, prefabbed concrete panels and was surrounded by overscaled concrete landscape planter beds that cut off any facade to the sidewalk. Called "the bunker" by its critics, the mall was however, moderately successful in its early years, and was an economic catalyst that for over a time stabilized the decline of the downtown retail district. Its construction was also partially credited with kicking off the office building boom that began in the late 1970s and would eventually add nearly five million square feet of new office space in and near downtown Hartford during the next decade.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s its fortunes took a turn for the worse, with nearby Westfarms and The Shops at Buckland Hills malls both expanded and built, the center began to feel the effects of competition. With its limited physical scale, the accelerating decline in the downtown retail district and the severe recesssion that took hold of the regional economy by the early 1990s, many of its tenants left or ceased operations and the mall fell into severe decline.
In 2004 Northland Investment Corporation, the State of Connecticut, the City of Hartford, and Aetna began working together to redevelop the former Civic Center Mall complex. The project, called Hartford 21, essentially replaced the the aging retail, office and restaurant mall portion of the Hartford Civic Center Coliseum into a new and sleek, contemporary-styled residential, retail and entertainment complex. The mall was partially demolished and reconstructed starting in 2004 and a majority of the new development was completed in the summer of 2006.
The project includes a new 36-story residential tower that contains 262 luxury apartments, sidewalk oriented retail space of 45,000 sf and 90,000 sf of office space. The new residents and shops are located adjacent to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which remains in operation and is the home of the AHL Hartford Wolf Pack, UConn Basketball, and hundreds of concerts and trade shows each year.
