Mayson Foster likes to tell the story of visiting Hammond’s airport shortly after he took office as the city’s mayor in 2003. He went out to the approximately 1,000-acre facility with long-time Airport Authority board member Rico Masaracchia.  As they sat on a bench near the tarmac, Foster asked, “What do you see?”  “Mr. Rico looked around and said ‘I don’t see anything,’” Foster recalls. “And I said ‘Exactly! We’re an airport and we have no airplanes here.’ It was at that point that we said, “Hey, we really need to start working hard at this airport.”

Six years later, Foster lists the Hammond Northshore Regional Airport (HNRA) along with the renovation of Hammond Square and the rejuvenation of the downtown area, as a trio of top positives that are “putting Hammond on the map.”

While at the time of the mayor’s initial visit, the airport housed approximately 25 aircraft, today the airport’s director, Jason Ball, says around 140 aircraft are based at the facility, more than $5 million...

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Four days of ribbon-cutting and grand-opening festivities have put “the last big exclamation point” on the ambitious $100 million redevelopment of Hammond Square.

And “Hammond is getting, without a doubt, one of the newest concepts in retail that has evolved over the last 10 years,” James E. “Jimmy” Maurin says proudly.

The board chairman of Stirling Properties makes that statement with evident professional and personal satisfaction. Although Stirling has been developing shopping centers for more than three decades, Hammond Square is obviously a special project for Maurin. The estimated 850,000-square foot melding of a “power” (big anchor stores) and “lifestyle” (smaller retailers) shopping concepts that has risen from rubble of a smaller, less than successful regional mall, is located in his own home town.

 As Maurin did the ribbon-snipping honors on October 1 – which included laudatory speeches from area dignitaries, a second-line down Palace Drive where new retailers were opening their...

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