Take a drive up Costco Hill, bear sharply right, follow the guard rail to the curve, pull over and take a look to the east.

You’d be looking out over an 80-acre-plus retail shopping mecca straddling the state line and featuring clusters of brick, glass and metal buildings with striped asphalt buffers on every side. Central to the beehive of 21st-century commerce is the sprawling, Y-shaped complex called the Pheasant Lane Mall.

Three decades ago, the vista was a different sight.

Imagine rolling farmlands stretching to the Merrimack River to the east and to the right and left as far as you can see. Imagine little moving dots in big hats and overalls methodically plucking seasonal bounty from the alternately towering and ground-level greenery.

Now picture a willow tree, about halfway between a colonial clapboard farmhouse and a rough gravel roadway, and not far away, clear, crisp water splashing from a natural spring.

Long ago, before automobiles, residential electricity, running water and central heat, even before pasteurization, dynamite and typewriters, such a scene needed no imagination to recreate: it was a real-time snapshot of daily life in a chiefly agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-retail-as-we-know-it Nashua and its predecessor in name, Old Dunstable.

All of that changed in the 1980s as the mall went through its lengthy approval and construction process.

The mall was initially dubbed The Rivergate Mall upon conception, then Pheasant Run Mall before it was tweaked permanently to become the Pheasant Lane Mall.

And like the changes to its name, the mall’s profile has altered since its week-long, gala grand opening in July 1986, from tenants and amenities to configuration and accessibility.

The mall’s opening was a significant milestone for Nashua, because it literally put the city and Daniel Webster Highway on the map for thousands of retail shoppers.

As many upgrades, renovations and facelifts as the shopping mecca has undergone, one thing that hasn’t changed much over the years, if at all, is its overall boundaries.

“Even with the development of Dick’s and Red Robin, our footprint really hasn’t changed significantly,” general manager Vin Cosco said.

Store names, though, are a different story. “There’s been significant change just in the anchor stores alone,” he said, adding that just two – Sears and JC Penney – remain today.

The other originals – Lechmere and Jordan Marsh – have been replaced by Target and Macy’s, respectively. The recent construction of Dick’s Sporting Goods created a fifth anchor.

Cosco, the man, not the store with a “T” in its name, came to Pheasant Lane in 2006 from the Mall of New Hampshire, where he also served as general manager. He was recruited chiefly to oversee the comprehensive renovation the mall was about to undergo, but that assignment ended up being put on hold. More pressing matters, namely weathering a declining economy, instead took center stage.

“Naturally, with the economy the way it was, people’s expectations were we’d be slowing way down here,” Cosco said. “But we weren’t seeing significant changes in (customers and revenues), partly because of proper planning by Simon but also because of our location.”

In retrospect, Cosco said, the decision to postpone renovations in favor of brainstorming ways to get through the recession paid off.

“We picked up some significant tenants – Apple was a big one – during that time, though you’d think we would have had trouble doing that in that kind of economy.

“As it turned out, our ability to make those upgrades is what helped us weather the storm, so to speak,” Cosco said. “They also helped us continue driving forward with our renovation plans … when they started, we were able to bring in additional new tenants.”

Eventful history

Though the area is dotted with malls, today’s Pheasant Lane is simply known as “the mall,” to many of its loyalists and frequent shoppers. The project perhaps earned that right of assumption by virtue of its size, scope and significant impact, for better or for worse, on Nashua’s tax base, transportation infrastructure, sudden designation as a premier shopping destination and to some extent, the local social and cultural scene.

But it’s doubtful many present-day shoppers, and even fewer so-called “mall rats” – the tweens and teens who doll themselves up and spend hours roaming the mall in giggly packs – have any idea how close their retail and social paradise came to not existing at all.

The tale of Pheasant Lane goes back to 1977, when Yankee Greyhound, principal owners of the 44 acres on the New Hampshire side of the border, brought to aldermen a request to rezone the property to accommodate the possible construction of a “large-scale, regional shopping center.” At the same time, the Tamposi family, principal owners of a similarly expansive parcel in Nashua’s North End – the former Kessler Farm property – were submitting to the board a nearly identical proposal for the Amherst Street site.

Aldermen, predictably, began drifting toward one camp or another, their impetus a mix of personal, political, civic and constituent allegiances. Also in play were a couple of sub-groups, those who either opposed or favored rezoning both parcels.

What ensued, said Alderman at Large Jim Donchess – who happened to hold the same office at the time – was “one of the longest and more colorful periods in the annals of city history.”

While the issue was hot-potatoed around the aldermanic chamber for more than a year, its first screen test didn’t come until late 1979 – five weeks after the ’79 election that put three new faces on the 1980-81 version of the board.

On Dec. 11, the outgoing board voted 8-6 in favor of rezoning Kessler Farm, but minutes later voted 7-6 against rezoning the Daniel Webster Highway site. Donchess was absent that night, and Ward 9 Alderman Jerry Arcaro abstained on the second vote.

Acting on advice of the city attorney, Mayor Maurice Arel called an emergency meeting for Saturday, Jan. 5 – a day before the 80-81 board was to be sworn in – to consider requests to rehear both issues and perhaps change their earlier rulings. After lengthy back-and-forth, members ultimately left both matters to the new board.

The incoming board, which featured two new faces, didn’t waste any time confronting the issue, scheduling a public hearing on both properties for the evening before their Feb. 12 meeting.

More than 400 people showed up, almost all voicing opposition to both proposals, according to a Telegraph story. Their meeting the following night began with feuding aldermen Jerry Arcaro and Carl Andrade burying the hatchet, after which the board, in order to digest the earful they’d gotten, tabled the issues to their Feb. 27 meeting – which some predicted would go down in history as “Mall Night in Nashua.”

Mall night

About 100 people showed up for “Mall Night,” filling the chamber and standing in the hall to take in the proceedings. During a lengthy comment period, Arel cautioned aldermen that even if they denied both proposals, it wouldn’t halt the increasing stream of prospective developers coming to City Hall with similar large-scale proposals.

The late Russ Marcoux, an alderman-at-large at the time, urged fellow aldermen to turn down both proposals, if for no other reason than to push the issue out of the chamber and unburden aldermen.

“Let them go to court,” Marcoux said, adding that aldermen were in effect doing the work the property owners should be doing. “We’re buried in this. We’ve been malled to death for more than two years now,” he said.

The board took Marcoux’s advice, effectively killing both proposals by voting for indefinite postponement.

As expected, both appealed, which launched what turned out to be the final leg of the years-long journey. Later that year, the state court, city officials and representatives of the Tamposi family and Yankee Greyhound reached an amiable solution.

In exchange for dropping all litigation, the South End parcel, which everyone agreed was considerably more suitable for a huge mall, would be rezoned, while Kessler Farm would remain unchanged.

While Indianapolis-based mall developers Melvin Simon Associates fueled up the bulldozers and started sketching out blueprints, Kessler Farm principals altered tack a bit, turning their focus from commercial to a largely residential development.

The new direction gave rise to today’s hilltop village of apartments, condos and small, detached homes and a compact retail cluster a fraction the size of the original mall proposal.

Down on Pheasant Lane, meanwhile, site prep and construction got underway in earnest. As girders and beams began to form outlines, the project’s sheer size alone was enough to stop many a sightseer in their tracks.

Telegraph reporters and photographers visited in intervals, documenting the latest changes as work progressed.

From farming to shopping

There’s some pretty interesting history behind the south mall site. For one, it was home to a circa 1685 saltbox farmhouse, believed to be Nashua’s oldest house until its demolition in the late 1950s. Known by different generations as the Bancroft House, the Willow Spring House and the Sally Epps House, it did in fact boast a pure, natural spring, to the delight of its generational inhabitants.

Legend has it, according to the late historian Florence Shepard, one of its 19th-century residents, a man named Harold Sargent, bottled the spring water and sold it as Willow Springs Ginger Ale.

The house’s demolition 50-some years ago to make way for a Gulf service station happened “quietly,” with little if any news coverage, according to Shepard, who joined other historians in lamenting the loss of a valuable piece of Nashua history.

After that, the parcels that make up the mall site today were owned by a series of people – Bancroft heirs, Myron and Evelyn Hartford (of Hartford Farms fame), real estate broker Angeline Kopka (today the state’s most senior representative), the Kerwin family, and Dr. Clarence Bent, the late veterinarian whose home and practice stood on the property.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).