Photo / Maureen Milliken
Urban Air Adventure Park is opening in 42,000 square feet in Bangor's Airport Mall that used to house a mattress store.
July 8, 2020
Bangor Urban Air set to take off in Airport Mall space
Photo / Maureen Milliken
Anthony Dill, owner of Urban Air Adventure Park in Bangor, lit up by the neon glow of the Urban Warrior Course, is getting ready for Saturday's opening in the Airport Mall in Bangor.
By Maureen Milliken
In 2018, when Anthony Dill saw the 42,000-square-foot space at the Airport Mall in Bangor recently vacated by Discount Mattress and Furniture, it was love at first sight.
Yawning mid-century shopping-center spaces have become a tough sell in recent years, but the owner of Urban Air Adventure Park had very specific needs. Huge space, ceilings at least 16 feet high (the higher the better) and lots of traffic in an accessible area in the Bangor region.
The unit in the Airport Mall, at 1129 Union St., delivered on all. Two years, a major interior overhaul and a pandemic later, Bangor Urban Air Adventure Park is ready to open this weekend.
"One of the hardest things to find is the square footage and the ceiling height," said Dill, of Scarborough, who, with his wife, Staci, owns the Bangor franchise. The Dills also own the Urban Air Adventure Park at 333 Clark's Pond Parkway in South Portland.
Dill had looked for about a year for space for a northern Maine Urban Air that wouldn't pull too much from his South Portland site. The site had to be in the Bangor area, the only population center that made sense.
He'd found good space in industrial parks. "But no one would be able to find it," he said. "We need to be somewhere with some traffic."
An attractive vacancy
He heard about the Airport Mall vacancy before it was listed and made a bid the day it went on the market. He signed a 10-year lease in April 2019. His landlord is Acadia Realty Trust, represented in the deal by Mark Malone, of Malone Commercial Brokers. Dill was represented by Andrew Callahan, of Boston-based Venture Realty Partners.
Discount Furniture and Mattress moved to the former Macy's space, across town at the Bangor Mall, and is now Furniture Mattresses and More.
When the space was leased last year, Malone told Mainebiz he was "very excited." Finding retail mall tenants is difficult, but it's even harder to find tenants for space as large as the former mattress warehouse.
"We're not seeing larger tenants," he said. "That's why I'm so excited."
The 240,000-square-foot mall opened in 1970, at the beginning of Maine's indoor mall era. While it's considered an enclosed mall, most of the stores aren't part of the original indoor space. The indoor space itself is mostly empty. Major outdoor-entrance tenants are Hannaford, Ocean State Job Lots, Marshall's, Dollar Tree and Pet Pro.
The entrance to Urban Air is in the interior original mall space. There's extensive parking, and Dill said Urban Air customers are being urged to park on the west, Griffen Road, side of the mall, which is largely unused but has an entrance into the interior.
Photo / Maureen Milliken
One of the features of Urban Air Adventure Park is a play area reserved for those under 4 feet, 4 inches tall.
'All we need is an empty shell'
The landlord had to do extensive interior renovations to create the wide-open space Dill needed to build the adventure park. Urban Air, based in Dallas, has 140 franchises across the country, but Dill said he has a lot of leeway to create the interior that'll work. It takes about five months to fit out the interior.
"All we need is an empty shell, and we take it from there," Dill said. While Urban Air needs at least 16-foot ceilings, the Airport Mall space has 23-foot ceilings. The Bangor space is 15,000 square feet bigger than the South Portland space, which opened in 2016. Dill said once Bangor is launched, South Portland will get a retrofit.
Urban Air started out as a trampoline center, and trampolines are still the focus, but it's about more than just jumping around. The trampoline areas have ones to shoot basketball, dodgeball, one where a giant padded bar circles around and people on individual trampolines try to jump over it. There's the Urban Warrior Course based on the "America Ninja" TV show obstacle course, where participants can time themselves. There's a rope course that circles much of the ceiling, and a gravity-powered zipline that circles the rope course.
There's also an area for those 4-foot-4 and smaller, glassed-in rooms for birthday parties, with a backdrop of lots of flashing neon lights and music. The Urban Cafe even serves beer and wine for parents who may need something to steady themselves as they take it all in. There are different fee plans, including for those who just want to watch, or want to help their toddler through the little kids' area.
Photo / Maureen Milliken
The entrance to the Urban Warrior Obstacle courses includes a timer (the bright green poles) that the person tackling the courts hits when he or she starts.
A place for teens to work and play
When the park opens Saturday, it'll be with 55 to 60 employees. Dill said there was no problem finding workers — they got more than 200 applicants for the part-time jobs. Those who work there also can come in on their free time to use it.
"I want them to think of it as their club, more than anything else," Dill said. He grew up in Machias and knows how hard it can be for teenagers to find something productive to do — he sees Urban Air as the perfect solution. The father of two sons, he also understands the importance of activity and prying kids away from screens. "It's a way to trick them a little bit into getting some exercise," he said.
The South Portland site had about 150,000 visitors last year, and the Bangor space has capacity for 675 at a time.
The COVID-19 pandemic, naturally, has changed things though and Dill isn't sure what to expect. Most of Urban Air's traffic is traditionally walk-in, with reservations mainly for birthday parties. With the pandemic, the company launched an online reservation system.
Visitors are expected to spend two hours or less, and can check in at a self-service kiosk to limit interaction with staff. The park comes under gyms in the state's reopening checklist, and so is following all the cleaning and public heath requirements for capacity, cleaning, spacing and more.
"We never had to push people away before," he said. "We didn't think we'd have to do that in Bangor, but things changed."
Photo / Maureen Milliken
Workers get ready for Bangor Urban Air Adventure Park's opening this weekend.
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