I don’t know about you, but as one of those old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes, culinary sticks in the mud, I drew a deep breath and fairly panicked the other day when colleague Dave Brooks announced he’d heard a Nashua institution was closing.

No, not an institution in the academic or medical sense, but one of endurance and popularity whose tenured position on Nashua’s landscape always seemed as permanent as the hills in the distance and the river that flows past it.

But Al Lew isn’t closing his venerable Haluwa Restaurant, he’s simply passing it on to what appear to be capable hands.

I’m relieved. But you might say, “So what if Haluwa closes? We have what, a couple million Asian restaurants around here?”

OK, maybe not that many, but there are a bunch. And it wasn’t the prospect of losing just another Asian restaurant that worried me, it was the thought of losing an old friend, a longtime Nashuan that, although I visited seldom compared with most of its patrons, I would surely miss if it were suddenly gone.

It’s like my favorite old shirt hanging in the closet: I may have not worn it in forever, but as soon as the wife gave it to the guys in the donation truck, I really wanted to put it on.

At any rate, I quickly recovered from my shock and started wondering just how long Haluwa has been with us. A couple of official-looking online documents say Lew opened it in 1977, which could be, but the more I asked around, the more answers I started getting.

But let’s use 1977 for this little experiment: How many Nashua restaurants have been in continuous operation, with the same name (or close), for longer than the Haluwa?

My first thought was, “Oh, there must be a bunch.” Then I tried to name some. Hmmm. If we can count Martha’s, which went from Martha’s the lunch counter to Martha’s the full-fledged restaurant, that’s one. And there’s Poor Pierre’s, which has ruled the corner of Lake and Main streets for at least 40 years.

There’s also Chicken and Chips, which goes back to the early 1970s at 12 W. Hollis St. And Roland’s, the landmark store/lunch counter combo, was around then.

The Nashua House of Pizza came along around the same time as Haluwa; I remember helping celebrate Nashua House’s 30th anniversary in 2007.

Trying to research and remember things like this comes with a warning label: “Someone will probably remember one or two places you didn’t.” But because I don’t pretend to always be the final word or the infallible official source of anything – just an old Nashuan who has a bunch of people, places and things stuck in the corners of his memory – I welcome finding out about stuff I may have missed.

During my Haluwa research, I found a bunch of names of places I’d forgotten about, but recalled instantly as I scanned old city directories and phone books.

First, I must say I was puzzled the other day when a fairly new newsroom colleague from outside the area asked me, as I spun through reels of microfilm, why the collection of stores and eateries off Broad Street is called the Nashua Mall.

“Well, it’s a mall, and it’s in Nashua,” I said with a sprinkle of sarcasm on top.

“Actually, it isn’t. It was, but hasn’t been for a while now,” a much younger colleague chimed in.

“Wow, that’s right, there’s no inside anymore, so I guess it’s not a mall now, right?” I countered sheepishly, avoiding the squinty gaze of colleague No. 1.

That shows how unobservant even we paid-to-be-observant types can be.

Anyway, who recalls the Pink Power Puff?

It was a beauty parlor at the mall when Haluwa was the new kid on the block.

Denny’s was already there (I’m not counting chains in my older-restaurants survey).

Remember Tech Hi Fi? And Child World was somewhere in the middle of the Home Depot parking lot.

Strawberry’s, where we got our huge vinyl discs of music.

I think the anchor stores – the big ones that bookended the mall – were Woolco and Almy’s. And when it opened, the mall, which is reputedly the first indoor mall built in New Hampshire, was called Gate City Mall.

I recall the big buzz around town that summer of 1969: “Wow, 30-something stores in one building? Amazing.”

I found online what appears to be an accurate, well-researched account of the Nashua Mall’s history and timeline, posted by a blogger called
zayre88 on the Google.com sites pages.

I copied the highlights in an accompanying box; see if you agree.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).