The placement of enclosed shopping centers in urban cores and downtowns in America has always been a bit curious and fascinating to us. Perhaps it’s because their designs must be creative in order to weave the structure into the existing built environment. Or maybe it’s because they challenge the very notion of the traditional downtown, which struggled with its identity after the automobile age brought clusters of stores [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Not every mall can be exciting, and truth be told, the Capital City Mall in Camp Hill, a suburb just southwest of Harrisburg, isn’t terribly remarkable. It’s a fairly standard mid-sized one-level mall with 576,000 square feet and three anchor stores organized roughly in the classic dumbell fashion. Its greatest drama seems to be that [...]
Washington Mall opened in a former cornfield in 1968 near the intersection of US 19/Murtland Ave and newly constructed I-79 (Now I-70 and I-79 run concurrently on this segment) in Washington, PA (population 15,000). The cost of the mall then: $4 million. The mall’s condition today: priceless.
Today, Washington Mall is a relic. The 800,000 square foot [...]
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