First serving as a middle/high school for the city of Ithaca, this historical building built in 1914 served its intended purpose up until some point in the 1970s. William Downing purchased the building and repurposed it to serve as a mixed use center. Our brief tour of the building is of a look at the ground floor commercial area. Since this is a hallway with shops and/or restaurants, this qualifies as a mall.
NOTE: This post comes from outside the blog's coverage area.
Crossing over into Connecticut, we now take an abbreviated tour of the Cromwell location. I was sort of confronted by an employee here- which prevented me from documenting some of the clothing departments. At least I wasn't kicked out though. Anyhow, this was an early Kmart store that at one time would of had a Kmart Foods store next door. During my visit in 2016, this was an Xpect Discounts store, but the space is now part of Shop Rite.
There were no specialty departments in operation at the time of my visit- though this location did once have a Kcafe as as well as an auto center. The auto center had been repurposed to serve as the garden shop.
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| An honorary Ohio county that is unofficially a part of the Twin Tiers coverage area. |
Opening in 1992, the Ashtabula Mall (as it was called then) opened with a whopping six anchor lineup consisting of Dillard's, JCPenney, Sears, Carlisle's, and prototype Phar-Mor and Kmart locations. The Kmart would later be expanded to become a Super Kmart. Upon Carlisle's closure in 1994, Dillard's would open a home store in the space. Phar-Mor would close and be replaced by Steve & Barry's in 2005. In that same year, Dillard's would close the home store and leave the mall entirely in 2007. Around this time, original developers Cafaro would sell the property and the mall would change to its current name and begin its decline. The only remaining anchor is a hospital system operating out of the former Sears. The former Kmart auto center space (itself a former relocated Sears Auto Center) appears to be leased and used for storage.
