A three-phase plan for a shopping mall built to lure Canadians to Champlain, New York, is ready for its next stage, with a search for about $2.25 million. But town officials wouldn't use those funds to expand the sprawling retail facility.
Instead, they want to demolish the Miromar Factory Outlet, a retail center that has sat abandoned since it closed Sept. 9, 2000. The town has tried twice to arrange government financing for the demolition, but the proposals failed because the owners didn't express interest in that plan and have paid their property taxes in full and on time.
“I’m trying to get that torn down. I am trying to get funds to help an investor to do it so it could be redeveloped for commercial purposes,” Champlain Town Supervisor Thomas Trombley said in an interview. “It has been a struggle. It is a dinosaur sitting there that needs to be removed.”
The 28-store strip mall, built in 1993 in the hopes of luring Canadian shoppers across the border, now symbolizes how the magnetic allure of American retail has lessened in recent decades along with the value of Canadian currency compared to the U.S. dollar, making bargains harder to find.
The stores were built when the Canadian dollar was nearly on par with the greenback; at the time, $1.12 was equivalent to a single U.S. dollar. Cross-border shopping habits were so commonplace that Montreal Expos major league baseball pitcher Bryn Smith told Sports Illustrated magazine in 1989 that he routinely traveled to New York state to purchase Doritos chips without the signature spice — a product that wasn't sold in Canada.
Now it takes about $1.44 to convert to 1 U.S. dollar. That has made it more costly for Canadians to shop across the border, from Vancouver area residents heading to Seattle to those living in Montreal and Toronto who frequent stores in northern New York state.
Changing cultural dynamic
The mall's demise also represents cultural differences between the neighboring countries. With Sunday shopping outlawed in Quebec, residents would head to the Miromar Factory Outlet; that ban was lifted in December 1992. The novelty of U.S. retail outlets also declined as American chains frequented by Canadians opened stores in Canada.
The mall's fate was further sealed when Quebec's economy slowed in the early 1990s and the U.S. Air Force closed its base in nearby Plattsburgh, New York, in 1995. The latter resulted in a decrease of potential customers.
The Miromar property was a retail project undertaken by the real estate arm of Montreal-based Future Electronics, a company that pledged to expand the 125,000-square-foot mall to 318,000 square feet in early 1994. But that second phase never took place. Then outlets such as clothier Donna Karan and crafts store Welcome Home closed in 1997, while the clothing retailer Levi’s and nutritional specialist GNC left in 2000.
The remains of the outlet mall are 2.5 kilometres, or 1.5 miles, from the border and serve as a monument to a project that aimed to offer a closer alternative to the shopping options in Plattsburgh, a 20-minute drive further south.
But it's not all gloom and doom in the area, according to Kristy Kennedy, who has promoted tourism in the region for the past 16 years as part of the North Country Chamber of Commerce. Kennedy said Canadians still shop in the area, and the chamber’s effort to attract visitors remains its “No. 1 thought every day.” The group also airs tourism ads on Quebec television stations in an effort to lure visitors.
Shoppers sometimes find the weaker Canadian dollar is offset by better prices and lower sales taxes of 4% to 8% per item in New York state as compared to 14.975% in Quebec, she said. And the currency conversion rate hasn't stopped Canadians' appetite for stateside shopping, as those trips are passed down from generation to generation, she added.
“There is a connection to the area,” she said.
Shattered glass, broken dreams
Some small sections of the mall were sporadically converted to office space and other uses in the early 2000s, but the mall has been entirely empty for about two decades, said Trombley, the Champlain town supervisor.
Shattered glass underfoot offers an echo of an era where the sharp shards formed parts of shiny display windows admired by travelers seeking shoes, jeans, luggage and more.
“I hadn’t been by the mall in 20 years and was up in the area last month," said Chris Goodsell, who has since relocated elsewhere in the country after managing the American Tourister luggage store there in the 1990s. "It looks like a set designed for a zombie movie. It’s so sad.”
Memories of the mall are still fresh for Champlain's town historian, Calvin Castine, who recalls outlets in the lengthy horseshoe-shaped mall enjoyed the layout, which gave shoppers access to other stores by internal doorways connecting adjoining retailers.
Like Trombley, Castine said he feels an affinity with the lost shoppers from Quebec, a land their ancestors inhabited.
“It's sad that it didn't survive. There were a lot of jobs and a lot of stores," Castine said in an interview. "It is really disappointing that it didn't make it. But it will get turned into something else and reestablished."
Now the Miromar Factory Outlet, once a sign of economic hope for its owners and Champlain officials, is a literal symbol of neglect and vandalism. Trombley would like to see a developer build a hotel, conference hall and restaurants at the site, as the property and its undeveloped future phases would feature complementary infrastructure, including roadways with a modern traffic circle and stoplight to handle the flow of cars.
Ownership shift
The retail outlet was built by Margaret Miller and her billionaire husband Robert Miller, founder of Future Electronics. After the couple split up, Margaret remarried another Future Electronics executive and opened Miromar Outlets in Estero, Florida. That is one of about 36 properties owned by the Miromar Development Corp., led by Margaret, who has taken on the last name Antonier.
For his part, Robert Miller stepped down as CEO of Future Electronics in February 2023 following a televised news report accusing him of sexual misconduct involving minors. Miller, who founded the business in 1968, sold the company in September 2023 to Taiwan-based WT Microelectronics for US$3.8 billion.
Now 81 years old, he faces lawsuits and criminal charges related to the accusations, but the legal proceedings have been delayed by his deteriorating health. His attorney, Karim Renno, wrote of the civil lawsuits in an email to CoStar News that no trial date is set nor has anything noteworthy taken place since the plea of not guilty.
Trombley said the new owner, WT Microelectronics, has been paying property taxes, but he has been unable to reach a company representative who could discuss development propositions. A Montreal-based representative of WT Microelectronics declined to comment when reached by CoStar News by telephone, as did a representative of Margaret Antonier's Miromar retail outlet in Florida.
Trombley has applied for state grants to redevelop the property, but said the government is "very reluctant to give private entities millions of dollars if there is no commitment to redevelop and create jobs. It's not enough to just take down buildings."
But Trombley said he will keep pushing to have the mall's remains knocked down and carted off.
“It’s the first thing that people see when they come into town,” Trombley said. “If I had a developer saying, 'I want to build a hotel on this spot,' I would welcome it, but the town cannot build it ourselves.”