While this mall is understandably no longer open to the public, it is still worth taking the time to highlight it and show some pictures from when it was open. This mall, opening in 1976 as Gennesee Country Mall, WAS very similar to Meadville's Downtown Mall in the sense that it was a small downtown mall in a relatively rural area. The biggest difference between the two is that this mall only had a one anchor in JCPenney. The JCPenney is still open to this day even though the mall is not. The mall had room for 37 stores with an interesting diagonal layout. (See the future plans document page 37 for the layout listed at the end of this post.)
I visited the site back in 2015 when it was still open to the public. It was obvious even way back then that it wasn't doing well. I saw evidence of roof issues as very few open stores. Perhaps one of the odder things about this mall was that it was connected to Batavia's City Hall, which I suppose kind of acted as an anchor.
Long term plans (see pages 37-39) call for the mall to be re-developed into a more attractive downtown setting. At least JCPenney should stick around, at least for now....
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