“At this point, our lease is up at the end of January,” said Tom Maudlin, who owns the Hallmark shop with his wife, Carolyn. “At this point we are planning to close the Fort Dodge location at that time. We just haven’t been able to come to terms with the developer.”

Deb Schmidt, who has managed the store for 23 years, described the situation as “heartbreaking.” She said everyone at the store was happy and excited about the plans to redevelop the mall site into a complex called Corridor Plaza..

“We didn’t see this coming,” she said.

Angela Voigts, the manager of clothing and fragrance store rue21, said her store will also close at the end of January.

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Angela Voigts, store manager of rue21, shows off some of the store’s fragrances on Sept. 12, 2020. Rue21 is closing at the end of January.

Voigts, Schmidt and Maudlin all said that attempts to find another location for their stores in Fort Dodge have been unsuccessful.

“There’s nothing empty in this town,” Voigts said.

Maudlin said he and his wife have been looking for a new site for the last two years with no success.

BJ Stokesbary, a spokesman for Ankeny-based Crossroads Plaza Development LLC, confirmed that the company has been in discussions with the Maudlins and the real estate staff of rue21, which is a national chain. He declined to comment on the specifics of those talks.

He said he had not been directly told that the two stores would close. He added that the real estate staff of rue21 told him the company was in a kind of a holding pattern because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stokesbary said the stores in the mall have been “experiencing really suppressed, reduced rental rates.”

“The real estate was declining in value,” he said. “There wasn’t enough money to put back into the property and the result was something becoming an eyesore in the community.”

He said with new construction or renovations the rental rates “are naturally going to be higher.”

“It’s not going to work for everyone,” he added.

According to Stokesbary, the plan for the site now calls for renovating part of the current mall’s east wing by the old Younkers store to create some retail spaces that would have lower rents than those found in the new buildings to be constructed on the site. He said about 60,000 square feet would be there. Entrances to those stores would face the parking lot, rather than the interior corridor of the mall.

Maudlin declined to discuss details of the talks with Crossroads Plaza Development.

However, Schmidt said the store would have to be temporarily relocated to another part of the mall for 10 months to a year. Then, she said, the store would be moved to a new spot with higher rent. The Maudlins would also have to pay to finish the interior of that new space, she said.

Voigts offered a similar account. She said the store would have to move to a temporary spot, possibly to where FootLocker used to be, before being moved to a new permanent home. She said she heard that rent at the new spot would be triple the current rate.

“That’s what the talk has been,” she said.

Voigts said she believes Crossroads Plaza Development is more interested in a proposed new hotel at the site, the UnityPoint Health — Clinic Express now under construction and a planned gas station on the east side of the property.

“This whole new development doesn’t sound very retail friendly,” she said.