I know that I’m really keeping these posts coming fast and furious lately, but after I threw up my tome on the Fairgrounds Square Mall outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, I decided to follow it up with the other, better mall serving the Reading area: the Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing.

While the Berkshire Mall is in some ways very typical of a mid-sized mall serving a mid-sized city, it’s stuck in something of a time warp. The decor inside isn’t the most exciting, but it is certainly interesting (and kind of shabby) just by virtue of the way it hasn’t received much attention. In the comment strand to Fairgrounds Square, one of our commenters (Bruce) noted that “It amazes me how bad Berkshire Mall looks, especially given its prime location in upscale Wyomissing. The exterior alone looks like a dead mall and its large sign out front is the worst of 70s ugliness. The owners really need to spruce up this property.”

’70s ugliness? You be the judge:

I might have to agree.

Like with Fairgrounds Square, I wasn’t able to find much online about the Berkshire Mall. I do know that the Boscov’s seen in these shots is actually quite new. It replaced a Strawbridge’s that closed in 2003 or 2004, and was reportedly the worst-performing Strawbridge’s in the entire chain. The space was a Strawbridge’s for a relatively brief period of time; the store was built as a Wanamaker’s. The Sears, as far as I know, has always been here, and I think the same is true of The Bon-Ton, who is based in nearby York. Beyond that, these pictures mostly speak for themselves: the mall’s a pretty basic straight shot, with a small second level at the center court. But some of the various accoutrements sprinkled throughout are in poor shape; between the dried-up, swimming-pool-blue fountains and the bizarre quasi-industrial benches, this place clearly needs some good ol’ lipstick and rouge.

The Berkshire Mall was also the site of a controversy (or, if we want to be more colorful, hullabaloo) in February 2007 when a 29-year old nursing mother was asked to stop feeding her infant or to cover up. It became a bit of a cause célèbre amongst the, er, breastfeeding community, and they staged a “nurse-in” on February 24, 2007 in response. So far as I can tell, the result was… a whole lot of breastfeeding (there’s video at that link, but it’s not creepy).

Which reminds me! You should all ask Prangeway sometime about the time he was thrown out of a mall for (accidentally) taking pictures of a breastfeeding mother. That’s quite a story.

The Fairgrounds Square Mall is one of two major malls serving the Reading, Pennsylvania area. Fairgrounds Square is located on the northern edge of the city between the Allentown Pike and the Pottsville Pike, and at 718,000 square feet, is only slightly smaller than the more successful Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing, but I’m of the mind that it’s a bit cooler!

Reading is roughly an hour northwest of Philadelphia, and at about 81,000 residents is the fifth largest city in Pennsylvania. Reading is typical of many aging industrial centers throughout the Northeast United States, and compared to the many other old industrial cities that dot the landscape in eastern Pennsylvania, Reading’s malaise seems, at least anecdotally, somewhat more acute than most. Despite this, Berks County has actually registered a population increase since 2000, largely due to transplants from the Philadelphia area seeking a lower cost of living. Reading is also notable for being the home of Boscov’s, one of the last true remaining regional, family-owned full-line department store chains.

Those transplants are not enough to keep Fairgrounds Square thriving, however. Although Fairgrounds Square was reasonably well-leased and sported a decent amount of foot traffic on both of our visits (in October 2004 and August 2007), the center seems a bit forlorn, complete with second tier stores. This is too bad, since Fairgrounds Square’s distinctly 80s tinker-toy architecture and interesting stair-stepping design are actually pretty cool.

I wasn’t able to find much about Fairgrounds Square on the web, which isn’t that surprising since malls like these tend to get no love. The southernmost anchor is a large Boscov’s store–and its likely good ol’ Boscov’s is a hold out because they call Reading home (we love Boscov’s for this very reason). There’s a large anchor at the mall’s center court–today, this is a Burlington Coat Factory, but upon our visit in 2004 it was a National Wholesale Liquidators, and before that it housed Jason’s Discount Furniture (who were also in the mall–in a different space–in 2004, as shown in the photos). This large store was originally a Montgomery Ward. At the north end of the mall, there’s a large JCPenney Outlet and another, smaller, more mysterious anchor; this is the space occupied by Jason’s in 2004, and now occupied by a shoe store. There is also a Cinema Center in the mall.

According to this presentation, The mall is apparently in the midst of adding a food court to the area closest to the cinema, but otherwise it doesn’t appear much is going on. Since I’ve come up short on information–which is pretty pathetic given this is the first you’ve heard of me in two weeks–feel free to fill in. What do you know about Fairgrounds Square? What used to occupy the Super Shoes space? Was there ever a time that this mall was more dominant than Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing?

Want a treat? Of course you do! Everybody loves treats! Some longtime readers of Labelscar may remember the crappy old VGA camera phone, my 2004 Motorola that was my first camera phone, and which I used liberally for some time to take really piss-awful pictures of malls. I actually have some of those classic, poster print-friendly shots of this place, from before two of the anchors swapped (note the National Wholesale Liquidators, along with my own namesake discount furniture store!). These were all taken October 2004:

Hey kids–I’ve been really busy lately (in fact, it seems we both have), hence the dearth of new posts. But it’s not that I haven’t updated anything–in fact, we made some edits to a post from nearly a year back the other day thanks to some new vintage photos of the Leh’s Department store in Whitehall, Pennsylvania (outside of Allentown) at the Whitehall Mall. Since it’s unlikely any of you would’ve coincidentally stumbled across it (and it was posted before many people really even read Labelscar…) I figured I’d put it back out front, for all to see. And thanks again to Michael Lisicky for the great additions!

Original post as of June, 2006: Nowadays, whenever we go to look at a group of new malls, it seems that at least one or two in each metropolitan area is already gone or has been changed substantially. On a trip down to the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania in November of 2005, I found one of these weird FrankenMalls: Whitehall Mall in Whitehall.

Located just north of the large and successful Lehigh Valley Mall, which is the main mall serving the greater Allentown and Bethlehem area, the Whitehall Mall is located in a high traffic location. That’s probably why its owners felt it should be big boxed (PDF) (and from my research, its redevelopment was done quite awhile ago: 1998, to be exact), though this is one of the more bizarre big box efforts that I’ve seen at a mall. A large section of the Whitehall Mall’s interior has been preserved and was not renovated, and the part that was turned outward doesn’t include many large box stores.

Currently, the Whitehall Mall houses a Sears (which stands in its original location, but no longer has mall access), Weis, Bed Bath and Beyond (both in the strip center portion of the mall) and Kohl’s (which resides at the end of one long interior corridor. Confused? Don’t feel bad; I would be too. Here’s a current mall directory to clue you in:

Strangely, it appears to me that the original Sears entrance would’ve been the one that currently faces towards the plaza, but I did find an abandoned exit from inside the Sears that I assumed went towards the mall. I’m not sure which is true, though it could be either or both depending on the center’s old configuration. The most notable find here was obviously the old enclosed portion, which does not appear to have been renovated since the 1960s or early 1970s. There was a large atrium near the entrance and former “Plaza” movie theatres, adjacent to an anchor that is currently mostly occupied by a Weis Markets but which was originally a Leh’s Department store (and a Zollinger Department store before that). There’s also an area about halfway up the hallway where there was a set of stairs leading up to the mall offices. They were set in front of a very groovy and retro stone wall.

In all, this is hardly an inventive (or particularly successful commercially, it seemed) way to hack up an old enclosed mall, but it did leave a few cool vestiges for us vintage mall fans.

UPDATE 5/2/2007 11:52 PM: Michael Lisicky, a constant source of excellent vintage photos for Labelscar, sent over some shots of the former Leh’s anchor at Whitehall, as well as an advertisement/logo for Zollinger dating to the early 1970s. The Leh’s shots all date to May 1994.

Vintage Zollinger-Harned Logo, from the early 1970s:

Michael Lisicky’s 1994 photos of Whitehall Mall:

2005 photos:

More Leh’s, photos. From left to right, they are Quakertown, 1994, and Downtown Allentown, 1991:

It was the fall of 2004, and I was finishing up my first day of what was then the longest trip that I’d taken alone. After a long day spent trawling across the northeast, I found myself standing in the lobby of a Red Roof Inn in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, entirely by myself in a city that I knew nothing about beyond that it was a) the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and b) home of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

I knew full well that I’d spend the entire evening doing what I’d done all day–exploring the city and visiting malls–but something was strangely freeing about arriving in this strange city without a plan. My first stop was the Harrisburg Mall, just about a mile from my hotel.

At the time, I was going to seek out a place named the Harrisburg EAST Mall, but apparently the mall was in the middle of a major rebranding and renovation, and I stumbled into the center of it. Apparently the Harrisburg Mall (no “East” anymore), which is the largest enclosed shopping mall in metropolitan Harrisburg, hit some rocky times in the early ’00s. Anchored by Hecht’s, JCPenney, and Lord & Taylor until 2003 or so (though I think the Lord & Taylor may have once been a Hess’s), L&T pulled out of the mall as part of a larger round of closings. JCPenney and Hecht’s both announced their intention to leave soon after. The mall was sold, and management had to do something quickly to turn around the fortunes of the rapidly-emptying mall. Despite that the Harrisburg East Mall had been the area’s dominant mall quite recently, it seemed headed for a fast crash.

Thankfully, Lubert-Adler and Feldman Equities took a proactive approach to protecting the mall, which they detail in this case study. They renovated the two-level, 840,000 square-foot, 90-store center inside and out, introducing a rather Pottery Barn-esque design scheme, and convinced Hecht’s to stay on the property. The JCPenney space was quickly filled with a Boscov’s store, and the former Lord & Taylor was dramatically reworked to become a Bass Pro Shops, which today drives a large amount of traffic to the mall. In addition, a final phase of the mall’s renovation calls for the construction of a lifestyle-center-style streetscape to be built onto the front of the structure, creating space for additional outdoor retail. A movie theatre is also scheduled to be added to the rear of the mall, between Hecht’s and Boscov’s and presumably off of the food court wing.
When I visited in 2004, the mall had a surprising number of vacancies and Bass Pro Shops had not yet opened for business. As of a month ago, when I swung by again, the mall had rebounded dramatically and now boasts an 80% occupancy rate and seems to have reclaimed its role as the dominant mall for the Harrisburg area.

As you see from these pictures, Harrisburg Mall isn’t terribly exciting, bar its tall pylon or unrenovated basement court (the final picture). But it is an example of a mall that was quickly and strategically pulled out of an undeserved rapid nosedive and has been brought back to profitability. I wish all mall management companies were this stealthy.

For a vintage view, check out this 1988 shot of the mall’s parking lot! For a modern aerial view, check out this really neat-o black and white photo that shows the mall today, with the Harrisburg skyline in the background.

This is my sole photo from the 2004 trip. The fuzziness is arr-tistic, not simply a result of my old VGA-res style camera phone:

And here’s some that are a bit more current, all taken July 2006:

One of the more prominent retail sites vacated due to the Federated/May merger has been snatched up by PREIT (The Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust). According to GlobeSt.com, the developer has signed a purchase agreement for floors one through six of the former Strawbridge’s anchor store at Eighth and Market Streets in center city Philadelphia.

The historic Strawbridge’s store, which opened in 1931, is attached to the aging, 1,100,000 square foot Gallery at Market East shopping mall. The center–which, somewhat surprisingly, I haven’t been able to visit due to some bouts of bad luck–has reportedly under-performed for some time and failed to serve as the center of the city’s downtown retail district, which is what it was designed to be. In addition to the departed Strawbridge’s, JCPenney and Gimbel’s long ago vacated and now the mall counts Kmart, Pay/Half, and Burlington Coat Factory amongst it’s relatively indistinguished roster of tenants. The top floor of the four-level mall is mostly vacant.

One design feature that stands out about the Gallery at Market East is that much of the mall is sliced in half by the Kmart store, so on certain levels it’s necessary to walk through the Kmart itself to proceed straight through the length of the mall. The mall also has one level below street level, continuing the full length of the mall, while the third level of the mall also continues straight through the mall, leaving the street level sandwiched inbetween. The street level is severed at each cross street, so to access its stores its necessary to come from above or below. Essentially, depending on the floor of the mall, the structure flies over, tunnels under, or dead-ends completely at the crossing blocks. If I’ve confused you, check out PREIT’s detailed leasing plan (which is a PDF). I haven’t seen the Gallery, but am dying to.

Hopefully I’ll make it down in time to see the Gallery, because it seems that PREIT’s motivation for buying the Strawbridge’s store is to prepare for a much needed reset at the entire Gallery at Market East Shopping Mall. Joseph Coradino, president of PREIT Services, tells GlobeSt.com that the Gallery at Market East is “Defensive. It defends itself by turning its back on the street. We want to open it to the street, with cafes and retail that will capture the customers in that area.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to become outdoor (the multi-level nature of the mall probably means that wouldn’t make much sense at all) but it does seem to indicate a drastic and overdue repositioning of the mall is in place. If done correctly, it could give Philadelphia the kind of downtown retail destination that helped kick start urban revitalization efforts in Boston or Providence. Work is expected to begin in either 2007 or 2008.