Malls' best days may be long gone, but memories remain strong, particularly at Christmastime

There was a time when holiday gift buying involved — and in many cases required — a pilgrimage to the nearest mall.

Many malls are still there, but shoppers aren’t crowding into them like they once did. And while going to the mall isn’t the experience it once was, nostalgic memories of a not-so-distant past remain.

Malls used to represent something that went beyond commerce. For many rural communities, the mall was like Main Street or the town center.

Greengate Mall in Hempfield hosted Hempfield Area High School’s prom in 1967 and a Hands Across America event nearly two decades later. Century III Mall in West Mifflin was huge — more than 1 million square feet when it opened. It became such an important destination that 1980s TV fitness icon Richard Simmons, adorned in a hot pink tank top, once led curious onlookers in an impromptu exercise session during an appearance in October 1994.

Malls were places where people converged, socialized, got information, shared a meal and even learned to ice skate (hello, Monroeville Mall).

“The way I start thinking about the mall, the frame for me was aspirational living,” said Wilkinsburg native Matthew Newton, author of the book “Shopping Mall.”

Newton describes the book as part memoir, part case study, largely inspired by his adolescent experiences at Monroeville Mall, which he said was among the state’s first enclosed malls when it opened in 1969.

“It was the idea that you could go to the mall and see how you might want to live, almost envision what your life could be like,” Newton said. “When I was a teenager, the internet wasn’t around. To me, the mall was essentially the internet before the internet existed. It was like an analog version of the internet.”

In many ways, malls had about everything a person could want under one roof — a climate-controlled, manufactured Shangri-La.

Newton recalled Monroeville Mall’s imposing illuminated clock tower, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center’s, fish ponds and waterfalls. The stimulating atmosphere was particularly important to Newton, who, after moving from Wilkinsburg to Plum with his family, said he felt disconnected.

“In Wilkinsburg, I had a neighborhood where my parents were comfortable with me walking around. At the mall, that freedom was almost fabricated again,” Newton said. “That was the first place my parents would just drop us off, and you’d be there for a few hours, and they would come back and pick you up.

“That was a very small taste of independence. I felt a little less disconnected from everything because we’d run into friends we knew from before I moved out to the suburbs.”

‘The social thing to do’

Rowshan Lang, 49, of Pleasant Hills works for the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion at Carnegie Mellon University. Lang remembers Century III Mall from the time it opened in 1979.

“That was the place that we went in high school (Thomas Jefferson) because there weren’t a lot of gathering spaces,” Lang said. “So someone’s parents would drop you off, and you’d wander the mall like all of the other teenagers to see and be seen. That was the social thing to do.”

Lang said sometimes she would go to the movies at Century III, but she wanted to be in places where other teenagers were congregating, such as the arcade.

“You would probably do some shopping, but mostly it was hanging out at the food court and watching for other people. It was masses of people moving through the mall everywhere. Then somebody’s parents would pick you up, and you’d meet them at the turtles (the turtle statues were a landmark at the main entrance to Century III Mall). Everybody knew where the turtles were. Kids would play on them, and there were benches there.”

Lang describes shopping at “fun stores” such as Spencer Gifts and the novelty shop Heaven and browsing the latest album releases at National Record Mart. She remembers buying 45 rpm records such as “Flashdance … What a Feeling” and “Eye of the Tiger,” the theme song from the movie “Rocky III.”

“You had to know when the new album was coming out and buy it and take it home and play it on a record player,” she said. “That was before social media, and you had to just physically be present in spaces.”

Radio talk show host (93.7 The Fan) Paul Alexander remembers being excited about skating at Monroeville Mall, which had its own youth hockey team, the Monroeville Mallers. Alexander was a defenseman on the team of 12- to 15-year-olds during the early to mid-1970s.

“You would look out and see there would be two tiers, an upper and lower level, and it would just be completely filled with people watching us play,” Alexander said. “It was so fun and so cool.”

Alexander remembers a day when Penguins goalie Jim Rutherford showed up to practice.

“I remember we got to warm up and shoot on him and then we scrimmaged, and he could not have been a nicer guy,” Alexander said.

Christmastime was a special time

Malls have always been showcases for Christmas — whether it’s the decorations, the choirs or Santa Claus listening to what children want for Christmas. When the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills opened in 2005 in Frazer, it was no exception.

“At least the first 10 years, it was a very busy time. The atmosphere was exciting,” Frazer Supervisor Lori Ziencik recalls. Her office is located in the mall. “There was a lot of hustle and bustle, a lot of seasonal workers. A lot of families would come out together and shop. A lot of local high school choruses would be in the food court. The parking lot was completely full at Christmastime.

“They always had Santa Claus. Our firemen would always come down with Santa on the firetruck. There were snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, the lighting. Macy’s always had their big tree up outside their store with the train.”

Lee Vercoe, 77, of Cabot worked at Greengate Mall’s RadioShack store and said he especially enjoyed being there in the days leading to Christmas.

“The decorations there were always first rate at the mall,” Vercoe said. “That’s what most people remember. They always had a large tree, and they had ornaments on there that were probably the size of a basketball and bigger. I remember there was the train for the kids to ride. The way Greengate was built, you could stand at one end and look all the way down the open area at the Christmas decorations.”

Nick Kratsas, 43, who grew up in Bethel Park and now lives in McMurray, said Century III Mall was his family’s go-to place for visits to Santa Claus.

“Several times I remember going to see Santa there, and we still have some of those photos,” Kratsas said. “I remember the Christmas trees there and people everywhere and running through the crowds and stuff. Especially as a kid, I just remember Century III Mall being this big place — big concrete, big ramps, big stores — it made you feel like you were doing something special when you went there.”

There also was what Newton calls the “cross-pollination of people” happening at malls.

“I didn’t technically meet my wife there, but we went to high school together and then she was off to college. I was at the mall and I saw Michelle, who is now my wife,” Newton said. “She was home from college for spring break and looking for a part-time summer job. We ate in the food court and I tagged along with her to a party at CMU, and we pretty much started seeing each other.

“If you weren’t going to a school dance, that’s probably where you were going to meet somebody. You talk to girls and that sort of thing, and a couple of my friends met girls who turned out to be long-term girlfriends.”

Gary Nelson, 36, a Jeannette native, remembers dance parties for young people in the middle of Greengate Mall in the late ’80s to the late ’90s.

“They called them ‘Dance Bashes.’ They would just turn the whole center court into a big dance floor and play popular music and they would have several hundred people in there,” he said.

It wasn’t just young people who met and became romantically involved at Greengate Mall. Vercoe began dating his wife, Linda, when both worked at the mall’s RadioShack.

“We were both in our 40s at the time,” he said. “Many times she would have to stay after (the store closed) and finish up the books, and I would stay there with her to walk her to her car. One time, I went out and got a pizza for us because she had a lot of work to do. We were always hanging around together.”

Newton said part of the attraction of the mall was seeking out new experiences.

“I don’t think anybody realized it at the time, but this was your very cursory introduction to different types of food or culture, in a way, that’s completely sanitized and homogenized to the Americanized version of it all,” he said. “You could go to the food court and get pizza and Chinese food.

“To me, bookstores were always like this portal that you go through. There are magazines; there are comic books. That was how I learned about what bands I wanted to check out,” Newton said. “That’s how your idea of style and fashion and clothing and music, that’s your window into it. It was spectacle, but discovery was a big part of it.”

Changing landscape

Things have changed dramatically in the past 20 years.

Century III is defunct and sits abandoned. Monroeville Mall is littered with empty storefronts.

“It’s a terrible thing to watch something like that die,” Vercoe said.

All that remains are the memories shared on a website Nelson created in 2004 called greengatemallrevisited.com.

Century III is defunct and sits abandoned.

“It reminds you of your age. If somebody had told you when the mall opened that in 2020 no one is going to be at (Century III) mall, you would never have believed them, just because it was such a central point of life,” Lang said.

Lang lives near Century III and said it makes her sad.

“It’s a nostalgic sadness,” she said. “The world of the mall has not died. There are other malls I can go to. But there’s a sadness of realizing you’ve now grown up when you drive by this place that’s dark at night and nobody’s there. It’s a piece of your childhood that is gone.”

Kratsas still found himself going to Century III Mall as an adult when he was courting his eventual wife, Heather. “It was always there and then as an adult you’d see all the stores closing up and it was sadder and sadder, and it got to the point where we just stopped going there,” he said.

Much of the demise of malls can be attributed to online shopping. But even for the malls that still exist, Kratsas said, it’s not the same experience. If he goes to the mall, he said, it’s because he needs something he couldn’t find online.

“It’s not an adventure anymore,” he said. “It was such a part of my life growing up. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, I need a shirt. I’m going to the mall.’ When you went to Century III Mall, it had the biggest food court ever — or at least, as a kid, that’s what it felt like. I remember my aunt would take us to Century III Mall just to walk around. I don’t remember going there because I needed something.

“It’s just so funny now looking at it and seeing how it ended up, how sad it is to see this place that had so much life and so much interest for people in the area, and now it’s just this husk — this big blank space in the middle of West Mifflin.”

Pittsburgh Mills and Monroeville malls are still hanging on.

But the Mills resembles a ghost town, with little to no activity in the corridors and many darkened, closed storefronts.

“We have practically an empty mall right now,” Ziencik said in her office at the Mills, part of the space Frazer has maintained there since it opened. “So we just don’t have that same feeling.”

Just three weeks before Christmas, there was a sparse crowd at Monroeville Mall. It also has its share of empty storefronts, though some recently have become occupied by pop-up, seasonal stores. Newton earlier had noticed smaller “mom and pop” stores taking up spaces where chain stores once stood.

Monroeville Mall’s skating rink, once a centerpiece, is long gone. Alexander said he was devastated when the rink was shut down.

“Something that was such a huge part of your childhood was just gone, and it didn’t make any sense to me,” Alexander said. “The Monroeville Mall was like the first huge mall in Pittsburgh, and that was one of the coolest aspects of it.”

Newton said he still found the mall to be a soothing place, even as an adult. But, he adds, he wouldn’t be surprised if Monroeville Mall was gone in 10 years.

“Everybody just buys things online if they need them, and the social aspect, I don’t think is appealing to a teenager because the entire world is available to them through their phone,” Newton said. “I would be the same way if I had that entire connection to the whole world.”