The Mall of New Hampshire opened in Manchester with half its stores missing, and 49 years later it's 97 percent full

Sears unlocked its doors on South Willow Street on July 18, 1977, two months before the mall it belonged to was ready for a grand opening.

When that ceremony finally came in September, 42 of an eventual 83 stores were operating.

The Mall of New Hampshire is the enclosed regional mall at 1500 South Willow Street in Manchester, the first big one the state ever had.

Sears, Filene's and Lechmere anchored it. Lechmere had never opened a store outside Massachusetts before that one.

A $50 million rebuild between 1996 and 1998 moved Filene's into a store nearly three times its old size, added JCPenney, and turned the T-shaped concourse into a loop.

Simon Property Group bought into the place in 1999. Most of Lechmere's box became Best Buy. Filene's became Macy's. Sears closed in 2018 and was partly demolished.

At the end of 2025 the mall was 97.2 percent occupied. Toys "R" Us had just moved into the space Forever 21 walked away from. Here's how a mall that opened half-empty ended up nearly full.

The Mall of New Hampshire opened in pieces

Sears got there first.

The store opened on July 18, 1977 at 1500 South Willow Street in Manchester, two months before the building around it was ready for a grand opening.

Plans went public in April 1976, and construction started that July.

State Properties of New England, a developer based in Newton, Massachusetts, spent about $12 million on the job.

Boston architect Sumner Shein drew one level of enclosed concourse shaped like a T, with a department store at each end of it.

New Hampshire's shopping plazas had never reached this scale: 525,000 square feet under one heated roof, with three full-size stores hanging off a T-shaped concourse, 2.7 miles southeast of downtown Manchester and a minute from the interstate.

Filene's dedicated its first New Hampshire store on August 11, 60,000 square feet on a single floor.

The grand opening came on September 20, with 42 stores open out of an eventual 83.

Anyone who walked the place that fall walked past a lot of unopened storefronts.

Lechmere finished the lineup on October 3. Sears had 110,000 square feet, Lechmere 62,000, and the mall entered its first autumn still filling up.

Lechmere left Massachusetts for South Willow

Lechmere had never opened a store outside Massachusetts until this one.

It sold televisions, appliances, sporting goods and housewares out of 62,000 square feet at the end of one arm of the T, and for a lot of southern New Hampshire it was the reason to drive over.

The rest of the tenant list was pure late-1970s: B.

Dalton Bookseller, Casual Corner, Chess King, Music World, Wallach's, Cherry, Webb & Touraine, and a Hickory Farms of Ohio.

The food court had eight bays. McDonald's, Orange Julius, Blake's Creamery, Alamode, Yogurtime.

Almost every shop opened only to the inside.

The anchors and a few restaurants had doors to the parking lot, and everybody else lived on the concourse, which is the whole point of an enclosed mall in a Manchester January.

Lechmere remodeled its store in 1982 under a new chain design. CVS moved in at the end of 1992.

By then the neighbors were getting serious. Pheasant Lane Mall opened in Nashua in 1986. The Mall at Rockingham Park opened in Salem in 1991.

Both were bigger, and both had newer department-store names. In 1993 the owners started talking publicly about a rebuild.

$50 million turned the T into a loop

Work started in March 1996 and ran for most of three years, at more than four times the cost of building the original mall.

Filene's went first.

A new two-level store at the southwest corner, 165,000 square feet, nearly three times the size of the 1977 one, opened on November 21, 1996.

Then the old Filene's came down.

JCPenney was built on that cleared ground: two levels, 101,300 square feet, opened April 18, 1998 at the far end of a brand-new wing.

That wing connected back around to the relocated Filene's, and the T-shaped mall of 1977 became a circuit.

Shoppers had two ways to get anywhere, and the new corridor had storefronts down both sides.

Sears was stretched to 136,400 square feet in the same program. The food court reopened in June 1998, bigger.

By the end of that year the mall carried more than 120 stores and services across roughly 930,000 square feet.

One anchor didn't make it through. Lechmere closed in November 1997 while the chain was being liquidated, leaving a wide, low box near the food court.

Best Buy took about 41,000 square feet of it on October 16, 1998, and Kitchen Etc. took what was left.

Simon bought it, and the names kept changing

In February 1999, Simon Property Group agreed to buy 14 malls from New England Development for about $1.7 billion.

The Manchester property was priced at $166 million inside that deal, and Simon has run it ever since.

What a shopper noticed was the signs changing.

Kitchen Etc. closed in August 2004 and A.C. Moore took the space. B.

Dalton's lease ran out in early 2005, and its store plus a few neighbors were knocked together into an Old Navy that opened that May.

On September 9, 2006, Filene's became Macy's in the same 1996 building, which is why the name over the door is younger than the store under it.

Ulta arrived in 2011, the same year CPP Investments bought 36.9 percent of the partnership that held the mall for $350 million.

The Disney Store, open since the spring of 1996, closed on July 19, 2013.

Apple took that space, opening about 6,800 square feet in October 2014 with first-year sales projected at $48.6 million.

The nearest other Apple store was almost 20 miles away.

Buffalo Wild Wings opened that November, using food-court and mall space and cutting its own door to the parking lot.

Sears lasted 41 years, then came apart

In 2015 Sears put its Manchester building into a joint venture, half owned by Simon and half by Seritage, and stayed on as a tenant.

Three years later, on August 22, 2018, the store was named on a list of 46 Sears and Kmart locations being closed.

Liquidation started within the week.

It shut for good on November 25, 2018, after more than 41 years.

Of the three stores that opened in 1977, Sears was the only one still trading under its original name.

Then the wrecking equipment came.

In 2019 the auto center and a chunk of the main store were demolished for parking, and what stayed up was divided into several units with their own outside entrances.

Dick's Sporting Goods opened in roughly 45,000 square feet around Halloween.

Dave & Buster's leased about 35,000 square feet and set an opening for March 30, 2020.

It didn't happen. Simon closed the mall on March 18, 2020, along with its other two New Hampshire malls.

The doors reopened on May 11 with shorter hours and distancing rules, and by the end of that first week back, 71 of the mall's 120 listed stores still hadn't reopened.

Dave & Buster's finally opened on August 24, 2020.

A $256 million mall appraised at $154 million

In June 2015 the owners refinanced with a $150 million loan, fixed at 4.1 percent, interest only, due in ten years.

It cleared $124.5 million of older debt and handed $23.2 million back to the owners.

The appraisal that month valued the financed property at $256 million.

July 2025 came and the loan wasn't paid off.

It went to a special servicer that August, and a modification pushed the deadline to July 2027, with an option to stretch to July 2028, in exchange for a $1.5 million fee.

The loan was current again by May 2026.

The June 2025 appraisal came back at $154 million, 39.8 percent below the 2015 number.

Yearly cash flow ran $9.7 million, 38.3 percent under what the lenders had assumed.

One figure needs a caveat.

The mortgage covers a smaller piece of the property than the mall itself, because Macy's, JCPenney and the old Sears sit on land their owners hold separately.

That smaller piece was 85.3 percent leased in February 2026.

Simon also sued Manchester to lower the assessed value of its share. The city rejected the abatements for 2020 through 2022.

New black-and-white Simon signs went up around the property in November 2022, and plenty of locals said out loud that they preferred the old ones.

The Mall of New Hampshire at 97 percent full

The last few years took some regulars out. Olympia Sports closed in September 2022. Eastern Mountain Sports in September 2024.

TGI Fridays served its last plate on January 6, 2025, and Forever 21 closed on March 28, 2025 in the chain's bankruptcy.

The empty spaces started filling again. Boot Barn opened in the old Olympia Sports unit in March 2025.

Toys "R" Us came back to Manchester in October 2025, in the space Forever 21 gave up.

An arcade called Catchmania, built around prize claw machines, was running by early 2026.

At the end of 2025 the mall measured 801,800 square feet and was 97.2 percent occupied, with more than 115 specialty stores.

Every original anchor site is still doing something. Macy's and JCPenney hold the two-level stores from the 1990s.

Best Buy is in Lechmere's old room. Dick's and Dave & Buster's are in what's left of Sears.

New Hampshire still charges no sales tax, which is why the parking lot fills with Massachusetts plates in December.

And three Manchester Transit routes, 8, 10 and 12, all stop at the Dining Pavilion doors.

For a lot of people, that entrance is how you get to the mall at all.