Looking back, one of the few store owners still standing at the Bedford Mall found his first year at the mall to have been the best for business.

“Back in 1998, I wanted to go into a mall-type location,” Dr. Paul Noury, owner of Bedford Eye Care. “Changes were being made at that time; they were adding Marshalls. There were a few other stores. I was kind of anticipating a lot of traffic,” Noury said.

In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad.

“I liked it better because even when things were quieting down, there were still people out there. There was still visibility,” Noury said. “The past three or four years, though, there’s been zilch for visibility. When your first year is the best year you’ve ever had, what does that say? The second year was pretty good, and the other ones after that were not that bad – until we reached the bottom of the staircase.”

As the years went by, Noury watched the mall begin to fade.

“The first thing that happened was that paperback book store left. That was the first one that left that I noticed the difference,” Noury said. “People weren’t coming in quite as much. Each time a store left, that was even that much less traffic. It was the domino theory.”

According to Noury, when Marshalls was installed to recapture mall traffic, its separate entry actually absorbed most of the shoppers and allowed people to get in and get out without ever entering the mall itself.

“Marshalls has their own entrance. It’s the same thing with Linens ‘n Things and Bob’s,” Noury said. “People walked into Marshalls, did their shopping and left. They didn’t have to access the interior of mall. … You could spend a lot of time shopping there and not even realize there was a connection.”

Over time, as the mall struggled, Noury cut down his staff and took on most of the store’s responsibilities himself, he said.

“There weren’t enough people coming in to have two doctors here, and I’m not going to work seven days a week, so I had to cut down,” Noury said. “Not so much for financial reasons, but for lack of business. When the place first opened, we had people coming in all the time making eye examinations, buying glasses. … Over a 12-year period, you start going down a staircase, one step after the other, and at the end, you’re at the bottom the staircase.”

The financial investment Noury put in prevented him from changing locations.

“It cost me a lot of money to build this thing up,” Noury said. “They gave me this place with four vanilla walls – it looked like a shoebox. I had to build an examination room, a kitchen, a frame room in the front. I had to pay for all the construction, the optical displays and optical equipment. I had to pay for plumbing – it was like building a house.”

Michael Kapos, owner of Michael’s School of Hair Design and Esthetics, a Paul Mitchell Partner School, also owns and operates the K. Milan Salon in conjunction with the school. Kapos has experienced similar trials and tribulations with the deteriorating shopping center since he decided to move from his Manchester location in 2004.

“The business was getting bigger and I needed a bigger place to work,” Kapos said. “I got the opportunity to come to the Bedford Mall and I saw that I could bring 100 women, plus 40 from the staff, and the clients, to the mall. The stores rely on women rather than men for the shopping. I thought I’d come into this place, fix it the way I like it, and between the businesses here and me coming in, I would fill up the mall.”

Kapos spent approximately $1.5 million making the space his own – including his installment of Grecian columns. But as time went on, and the mall dried up, things didn’t go according to plan.

“A lot of people left. We’re a beauty school – we work with clients walking in. The students have to practice on clients,” Kapos said. “Papa Gino’s closed, but it was surviving because my students were buying lunch there. Now they have to go outside or call and have it brought in.”

Papa Gino’s is the latest tenant to bite the dust at the Bedford Mall. The pizza restaurant recently shut its doors and put up paper signs reading, “Sorry, we’re closed.”

Along with Noury and Kapos’ businesses, the only other stores left include Key Nails, Cobra Cahn’s Martial Arts Academy, Marshalls, Bob’s Stores and Staples. Outback Steakhouse is also operational on mall property.

Noury’s eye care business, like any other optometry office, survived mainly on patients and customers he had built up with his practice before the Bedford Mall. Shopper traffic, he said, was simply “frosting on the cake,” so when it decreased, it didn’t hurt Bedford Eye Care as much as it hurt other tenants.

“I’ve got my own following. People come in for eye examinations and contacts,” Noury explained. “If you decide to go to the dentist, you go to his address. It’s probably not inside the mall, but people that come here do the same thing.”

Kapos said Michael’s and the salon function in a similar way, flourishing on patrons and customer loyalty rather than living or dying by mall traffic.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people that come in now, come in directly, just for here,” Kapos said. “They’re only salon customers. Fourteen girls here have their own clients, and the school has about 40 stations.”

Things were better when there were opportunities for walk-ins, though, Kapos said.

“There used to be three or four restaurants here. There was the movie theater. You have your little brother or sister, you could leave them at the movies and say, ‘Let me get my hair done for an hour,’?” Kapos explained.

“We have some regulars, but still it’s over 100 students to teach,” Kapos said. “We use mannequins, we work on each other.”

With plans in the making to tear down a portion of the mall and replace it with a “power center” plaza of stores, Noury and Kapos are both making decisions about the future of their businesses.

Noury, 67, said he has been planning on retiring anyway after 40 years in the eye care business, so the mall’s future will not really impact him.

Its decline has, however, affected his aspirations since he became a tenant in 1998.

“I would say my goal had been to do a lot better here financially, to make it a nice business that would be sellable, but I wasn’t able to do it,” Noury said. “I can sell some assets, yeah, but I can’t sell a whole growing business.”

Kapos, on the other hand, according to renovation plans, will occupy some of the remaining mall infrastructure while most of it around him comes down.

In the plans for the incoming shopping center, Michael’s is not slated to move. It plans to continue functioning while larger anchor stores, like Kohl’s, and a couple of smaller businesses, go into newly constructed, separated spaces around Michael’s.

“The only mall is going to be me,” Kapos said of the plans to demolish most of the original Bedford Mall.

Michael’s, which currently hosts 116 students, will still take on full classes in August and September, despite the plans to begin construction.

“I do what I have to do,” Kapos said. “You come as a student – I have to teach you.”

Though Kapos said malls tend to be more attractive to shoppers, especially during winter months when people walk from store to store, he was positive about the proposed renovations.

“I’m excited (for the changes) because the mall is dead,” Kapos said. “They told me Kohl’s would be here by October 2011. A year goes by – I keep going. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I just keep going.

“We have to be optimistic. I think it will work,” Kapos said.

Maryalice Gill can be reached at 594-6490 or mgill@nashuatelegraph.com.