Note: When it opened in 1990, Steeplegate Mall quickly became a center of city life. The Monitor asked readers to share their memories of the mall and how it helped shape their lives. Among the respondents were Ramey and Chuck Murphree, whose life together started with sweet but awkward interactions in the Steeplegate hallways.
Ramey Brown, working at Spencer’s Gifts at the Steeplegate Mall 24 years ago, didn’t buy what the Burger King employee was selling.
A Whopper Junior and fries were not on Chuck Murphree’s menu – instead, romance was. But first, he had to think quickly on his feet during that first-ever encounter with Brown, back in 1998.
Right around closing time, Chuck ventured past dozens of stores clear across the mall, to the opposite end. Near Spencer’s, as it turned out.
“What are you up to?” Ramey asked her future husband.
“I’m trying to catch the 9 p.m. bus,” an embarrassed Chuck answered.
Chuck knew the last bus from the mall had already left. Ramey knew too. She also knew that the mall’s bus-stop area was nowhere near her neck of the woods. Chuck knew that as well.
“I remember standing outside our storefront during closing and I saw him walk by,” Ramey said. “The mall was closing, so I thought it was odd that he was wandering to that end of the mall for no reason.”
He had a reason, though: Ramey.
They dated and eventually tied the knot. They’ve been married for 18 years. They’re part of the anecdotal history of the Steeplegate Mall, a huge addition to the city 32 years ago, when malls were cool and the setting offered much more than a routine of parking, shopping, leaving.
The 480,000-square-foot mall opened in 1990 with space for about 60 stores. Most of the spaces have been empty for years, and three of the four anchor stores are now unoccupied.
Once, however, malls represented independence to school kids back in the day. Sometimes, love could be found at the mall. Young lovers were finally unsupervised until mom and dad picked them up.
Today, teens and 20-somethings would never fathom a trip to the mall. Recently, the remaining five businesses in the mall’s interior – Jeweler’s Workbench, Blue Sky Hair Studio, Mt. Everest Goods, The Arch Threading and Spa, and Wireless Zone – were evicted and forced to relocate.
Six others, including The Hatbox Theatre, Zoo health club, Altitude trampoline park, Chico’s, Talbots and JC Penney, the last anchor store, have exterior doors and permission to stay in business. The main doors leading to the mall’s interior closed on Friday.
Meawnhile, it’s lifeless inside. The food court where Murphree once bellowed out his customers’ orders is now devoid of even a vending machine. Empty storefronts and echoing voices have replaced the energy the Steeplegate once had. All malls had, as a matter of fact.
Once upon a time, people like Ramey and Chuck noticed each other. At the mall. Well, in this case, Chuck noticed Ramey from afar, while Ramey first noticed Chuck up close.
“He noticed me more than I noticed him,” Ramey said. “I thought he was an idiot, to catch a bus in the middle of the night, when there was no bus stop there.”
Chuck persisted. He had seen Ramey walking past Burger King wearing a Spiderman costume, part of Spencer’s Halloween promotion.
“Wow,” Chuck remembered thinking. “What a woman.”
He slipped Ramey free food. He bought her Cokes and frozen drinks, to her side of the mall.
“I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t like them,” Ramey said.
Still, something clicked.
“He was so eager,” Ramey said. “So sweet. The friendliest guy who wants to be everyone’s friend. He wanted everyone to be happy.”
Especially Ramey. Chuck, who attended Winnisquam Regional High School, canceled his plan to start a family real estate business in Arkansas. He stayed with Ramey.
Ramey, then 17, invited her 22-year-old boyfriend to her home in Deerfield.
“He loved me so I brought him home,” Ramey said. “He stayed for a while. My mom loved him. She thought all my dates were losers.”
They married in 2004, about six years after their initial meeting. They grew together. They struggled together. And they stayed together.
“We were so poor, we only had our mall jobs and we struggled for years,” Ramey said. “We were poor little college kids. We were so broke that we shared a bank account, and a week later we moved in together.”
At Burger King, Chuck, who labeled himself “whimsical,” built a local following by singing back the orders he’d taken from his customers. He’d mention whoppers and pickles and fries, mixing them into his own melodies, creating what seemed to be public-relations gold.
“Singing about a Whopper Jr. was a joy to my heart,” Chuck explained. “We had fun. But a lady wasn’t enjoying it, she had an issue, and in an outburst, she told me she didn’t want me there anymore.”
Today, Chuck is a security guard at the Merrimack County Nursing Home. Ramey works at Eversource. They have two sons, ages 3 and 18 months.
Recently, they brought the boys to the Steeplegate Mall. They rode the rocket ship, a forgotten-but-still-active piece of this fading landscape.
The kids had fun. But the family was told that only businesses with outside entrances, from the parking lot, could remain at the mall, and that rule – to lock general entranceways into the mall and close major portions – was to go into effect the next day. However, they remained open to the cavernous void bathed in natural light from the skylights until finally closing on Friday.
“At least we were able to show the boys where mommy and daddy met before the interior closed,” Ramey said.
That was 18 years ago, when Chuck devised a plan, the bus plan, to meet a young woman who, essentially, worked in a different zip code. Chuck didn’t care. He had to try. He needed an excuse.
“I would go down there to see her, not for the bus, but I wasn’t fooling her,” Chuck said. “She knew why I was there.”