Category:Whitehall Mall

Whitehall Mall 

shopping mall in Whitehall, Pennsylvania
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Instance of	shopping center
Location	Pennsylvania
Date of official opening	1966
40° 38′ 07.08″ N, 75° 28′ 59.88″ W
Authority file  Q7995993 Reasonator Scholia Wikidocumentaries PetScan statistics WikiMap Locator tool KML file WikiShootMe OpenStreetMap Search depicted

The Whitehall Mall was the Lehigh Valley's first indoor shopping mall. It formally opened in September 1966.

The Mall's origins date back to October 1957 with the opening of Two Guys From Harrison, a precursor to today's big-box store. Two Guys was built on a large tract north of Schadt Avenue on MacArthur Road and had a 4,000-car free parking lot. It was open seven days a week, from 10am to 10pm and was a major force in the eventual elimination of the "Blue Laws" prohibition of retail shopping on Sundays in Pennsylvania.

For Allentown residents, which had long had to pay for parking and limited shopping hours in Allentown, Two Guys was revolutionary and the store caused long traffic jams on weekends on MacArthur Road. Other merchants saw this and MacArthur Road began to open new stores and begin to be a growth pole for business.

In late 1963, Sears Roebuck and Company, located at North Seventh and Allen Streets in Allentown, had begun to outgrow the store it had opened in 1948. Unable to expand due to its urban location, Sears began to look for a place in the suburbs to build a new, larger store. Working with a developer in Philadelphia, who had built several shopping Malls in the Delaware Valley suburbs, it made plans for it's new store to be located at the intersection of MacArthur Road and Grape Street, near Mickley Road, on a large tract of then undeveloped land. By late 1964, Donald Vollmer, chairman of Zollinger-Harned Department Store on Hamilton Street, saw the potential of a suburban store and decided to expand into the new Whitehall Shopping Mall, which was announced in November 1964. F. W. Woolworth, another longtime Hamilton Street store, which had already opened satellite stores at Crest Plaza and the Lehigh Shopping Center, became the third major company to agree to expand into the new proposed mall. Ground was broken for Whitehall Mall's construction in February 1965.

A foreshadowing of things to come also began in 1965 when the Lehigh Valley Mall was first announced to be developed on a site south of Grape Street that was once owned by Max Hess, Jr. Hess had bought the site in the late 1950s to develop a shopping center there but plans never worked out and it was sold to developers from the Philadelphia area. Lehigh Valley Mall, however, was not financed and constructed for another decade 1975/1976) When it opened in 1976, it was both a two-story mall and was far larger than Whitehall, with double the number of parking spaces.

The first store to open at Whitehall Mall was actually the Plaza Movie Theater on 8 July 1966. The first anchor store, Zollinger-Harned opened on 15 August and Sears on 18 September. After finishing construction of the indoor mall, which contained 47 stores, the official opening of Whitehall Mall was on 27 September with Woolworth's and a myriad of smaller stores, offering a wide variety of products. The Mall also offered a free 4,000 car parking lot and about 10,000 people were in attendance during the first official shopping day.

During it's first decade of operation, the merchants at Whitehall Mall thrived and by the late 1970s, several "satellite stores" were developed along Grape Street separate from the Mall. MacArthur Road was widened in the early 1970s into a multi-lane highway with its now-familiar traffic left turn "handles" for left turns from the old two-lane road into the modern highway due to the large amount of traffic generated by all of the retail development along it. Two Guys eventually closed it's doors around 1980 largely due to the construction of Whitehall Mall and Lehigh Valley Mall, as well as the myriad of strip shopping centers, car dealers and apartments along MacArthur road.

Whitehall Mall changed also during the 1970s and 1980s with Zollingers going bankrupt in 1978, it's Whitehall store being taken over by the H. Leh & Company. An extension of the Mall was built in 1982 with Clovers, a division of Strawbridge and Clothier becoming a fourth anchor store in the northwest part of the mall. In addition, the Plaza Theater was expanded into a twin theater.

By the mid-1990s, Whitehall Mall began to look dated and was losing its profitability after 30 years. It was also losing business to the much larger Lehigh Valley Mall and the other strip shopping centers along MacArthur Road. The cages of exotic birds and the water fountains inside the mall were removed, and the effect of the Lehigh Valley Mall reduced the amount of shoppers steadily. Leh's closed in June 1996 with Gallery Furniture taking over its former space in 1997. Clover closed in 1996, with its replacement Kohl's opening in April 1997. The mall itself became more of a place for older shoppers, who appreciated smaller crowds and a slower pace. More shoppers were going to the Lehigh Valley Mall which offered a much wider variety and number of stores, as well as a faster-pace for younger shoppers.

In January 1998, it was decided to renovate the mall and convert it from an indoor mall into a large strip shopping center. The redesign caused the tearing-down of the Weiss Market supermarket, part of the former Leh's department store, and the east-west promenade stores of the mall interior. These parts of the mall were replaced by a group of large retail store buildings, as the owners of the mall wanted to lease these to large, big-box stores. The Old Country Buffet, Sears and Kohls stores would remain intact.

The Plaza Theater was closed as part of the redesign in June 1999 due to having only two screens and being considered.obsolete. When it closed, the theater was incorporated into part of the space of the former Leh's store and in 2000 it was reopened as a Gold's Gym. What was once the mall is now a short indoor walkway from where Weiss Markets once was back to the Kohls indoor entrance. Some small mall stores remain in the walkway area by Kohls inside entrance.

In 2020, both Sears and the Gold's Gym closed, The last retail store of appreciable size remaining from its mall days is Kohls,