Westgate Mall (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)

The Westgate Mall in Bethlehem is a sleepy community mall from the 70's with a size of just 270,000 square feet of leasable space. As Bethlehem's only (surviving) mall, it was once a prominent shopping center but has since become a serial underperformer. As a result, the mall is probably doomed; the city knows they could be making more tax revenue off of that prime real estate if the mall gets torn down and redeveloped, and the mall owner seems more than happy to play ball. Admitting this brings me no joy, since this is my favorite mall, and I've been going here all my life. But for now, the Westgate Mall remains open for business, and I feel it is long overdue for me to do a writeup for this beautiful little place.

This Westgate Mall pylon advertises Hallmark and Payless - both of which left the mall in 2019.

Harold S. Campbell was a maverick developer in Bethlehem, who was known as a bull-headed but shrewd businessman. Born May 5th, 1913, Harold began his career as a milkman during World War 2. He began building houses after the war and would end up developing a great many of the houses and even entire neighborhoods in and around the city of Bethlehem. Campbell became infamous for his battles against city planners who he saw as standing in the way of his developments. In a cartoonish "rich business guy" style, he even had a pair of German Shepherds that he named Gold and Silver. Some of his other notable projects included founding the Westgate Water Company and supplying land for the development of the Lehigh Valley Hospital-Muhlenburg and Martin Tower. But his most prized development of all would come, at first, in the form of a modest strip mall in Bethlehem called the Westgate Shopping Center, so named due to its location on the western fringe of Bethlehem. The first store was supposedly 7-11, opening in 1964. The shopping center also housed tenants such as George's IGA Foodliner, Thrift Drug (which was at the time a subsidiary of JCPenney), and a local tavern called The Beef House.

Approximation of the Westgate Shopping Center after the 1967 opening of George's IGA food market at the center. The border around the image denotes the parcel of land that the whole mall would eventually occupy.

But the whole retail landscape changed when, in 1966, the Whitehall Mall opened its doors as the first enclosed shopping mall in the Lehigh Valley. At this point, few in the Lehigh Valley had even heard of a mall, making the Whitehall Mall an exciting new experience - and a smashing success story that would attract the attention of competitors. A number of developers started raving to get in on the action. These included Morris Kravitz of Kravco; Frank Pasquerilla of Crown American Corporation; and Phillip Berman of Hess's Department Stores. Harold Campbell was just as eager as any of them to build his own mall, so he resolved to expand his Westgate Shopping Center into a mall as well. He negotiated for Hess's Department Store of Allentown to open its first ever satellite location on his property to serve as the senior anchor tenant for the mall. This process was not without a hitch, though; both parties wanted to own the land that the department store would be built on. Hess's business strategy at the time involved the chain owning rather than leasing all of its department stores, while the famously stubborn Campbell was quite insistent upon keeping the mall all together on one property, under his ownership. As a compromise, the two sides agreed that Campbell would own the land from the start, but that at the conclusion of a 30 year lease, Hess's would have the option to buy the land for $500,000. This agreement, which did not account for inflation, would end up becoming awkward down the line - more on that later. Hess's Westgate, as the department store was called, opened at the site in 1971. Then, construction began on the mall itself, to be built spanning the gap between the original strip mall and the new Hess's store.

A recreation of what the Hess's Westgate signage would have looked like. This was the style of early Hess's stores which had names specific to each location, such as Hess's Westgate, Hess's North, Hess's South, Hess's Palmer Park, etc. The "Westgate" part of the store name was still mounted on the building until 2021.

The mall originally used this Germanic script for its signage. Today, this solitary enter/exit sign is the last remnant of that era. It is right next to a newer enter/exit sign, but for some reason nobody has ever taken this old one down.

Grand opening of the mall, with guest appearance from Democratic US Representative Fred Rooney, who represented the local congressional district from 1963 to 1979. Note Bill Hawk's Music Center on the right; this store remained in that same spot until 2015 when it moved to the opposite end of the mall, where it continued to do business until being evicted in 2023.

Celebrating its grand opening October 4th, 1973, the shopping center now dubbed the Westgate Mall attracted crowds of shoppers. Some of the earliest tenants in the mall, in addition to those which already occupied the original strip mall, included Westgate Optical, Hourglass Hallmark, Bill Hawk Music Center, Westgate Beverage, Westgate Jewelers, McCrory's, Westgate Pizza, Hickory Farms, Eugene Jacobs menswear shop, Kay Jewelers, RadioShack, Bookarama, Ladybug, Family Pet Shop, and a trio of related stores called Fashion Colony, Junior Colony, and Colony III. The mall had just two outparcels: a freestanding Hess's Auto Center and a Dempsey's American Kitchen restaurant. Hess's itself measured nearly 109,000 square feet, and the mall reportedly had about 50 stores upon completion.

George's IGA Foodliner at Westgate Mall. (Morning Call file photo)

Nice car. Morning Call file photo shows the Westgate Mall in its heyday. Note that tenants on the parking lot-facing side of the mall had exterior entrances as well as interior ones. Next to the main entrance is Hickory Farms, followed by Fashion Colony, Junior Colony, and Colony III. I can't make out the names of the tenants further down the line.

Lanta Bus once ran a promotion where shoppers could ride free of charge to and from the mall provided they made a certain minimum purchase at participating stores. Note McCrory's on the left hand side of the main entrance.

Approximate floor plan of the original mall, with anchors and known junior anchors labeled. Inline units are estimated. The existing strip mall had an enclosed walkway added along the front of the stores, which then wrapped around the McCrory's store to become a more traditional enclosed mall with stores on both sides of the hallway as it led down to Hess's. The mall had two different 2nd-story sections - I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was always just offices up there.

The Westgate Mall's tenant mix casted a wide net, in typical fashion for malls of its age, by featuring a beloved local department store, supermarket, drug store, and dime store. It was atypical only in that it featured just one department store. Most developers would have tried to land a major, national department store like Sears, JCPenney, or Montgomery Ward to add onto the mall's offerings. But the confines of the parcel of land the mall sat on likely prevented any thought of devoting another hundred thousand square feet to another anchor. Although small, the Westgate Mall found success as a shopping mall offering a little bit of everything that Bethlehem could call its own. However, within its first five years, the mall would face tragedy. On the morning of February 12th, 1977, patrolmen John Haslego and Richard Heffernan responded to a robbery that tripped the burglar alarms at Kay Jewelers in the mall at 1:07 AM. As they arrived, they saw a fire raging through the roof of the mall. All of Bethlehem's 7 fire engine companies, 50 firefighters, and 3 aircraft responded to the blaze. A fire wall saved Hess's from the worst of the damage, but the flames overran two fire walls in the opposite direction as they spread southbound through the mall itself. The inferno raged through most of the night, injuring six firefighters and destroying 18 shops. All told, it was estimated to cause a $16 million loss and went down in history as the second worst fire to strike Bethlehem. The fire was ruled an arson.

Morning Call file photo shows the devastation brought on by the 1977 Westgate Mall fire.

The stores that were destroyed in the fire were Ladybug, Cargo West, Endicott Johnson Shoes, Pick-A-Dilly Restaurant, Pick-A-Dilly Snack Bar, Eugene Jacobs, Richmond & Reed Shoes, Alice Kay, Clymer's Carousel, Colony III, RadioShack, Holiday Hair, Family Pet Shop, Kinaman's House of Music, Kay Jewelers, Variety Photo, Bookarama, and Record City. Even more stores suffered smoke and water damage, including Hess's, McCrory's, Feel-Fine Shops, Bill Hawk Music Center, Junior Colony, and Hickory Farms. But though the mall was largely destroyed, it was not destined to die young. The mall and its tenants rebuilt once more and prospered. With pride on the line, Harold S. Campbell had the mall rebuilt double-time for a grand-reopening in August of the same year, just six months after the incident. Stores, many of which had reopened even sooner, reported good business and a return of old customers in no time. 

The incredible vintage all-wooden storefront for what was originally Eugene Jacobs men's store. After the fire, Eugene Jacobs rebuilt their expanded store in this spot. Due to mergers, Eugene Jacobs later became The Hub and finally Jack Lang, all menswear stores. The most recent long-term tenant here was the Art & Drafting Connection, which did business for almost 20 years here after Jack Lang closed.

Once the 90's came around, change was in the air. Some of those stalwart tenants that made the Westgate Mall their home for decades were impacted by the economic recession, and not all of them made it. The Jack Lang men's store advertised that it was going out of business in local newspapers in March of 1991. Junior Colony, which was based locally in Allentown and had 114 stores under several different brand names at the beginning of 1991, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September that same year. They emerged from bankruptcy the following year, before ultimately closing down in 1994. Fashion Colony - Junior Colony's plus-size division - may have survived a bit longer, however, as that brand was sold off to separate ownership in 1993. The anchor tenants shuffled around a bit as well - George's IGA was bought out and became part of the King's IGA family of stores in 1992. King's, in turn, was bought by Weis Markets two years later. Hess's had been struggling due to overexpansion, and in 1994 most of its remaining stores were sold to The Bon-Ton. Thrift Drug, a subsidiary of JCPenney, became Eckerd drugs in 1997 after JCPenney bought that brand as well and consolidated the two chains. At some point along the line, McCrory's rebranded their store at the Westgate Mall under the J.J. Newberry five-and-dime brand name. 

The Bon-Ton bought all of the Lehigh Valley area locations of Hess's department store in 1994. Hess's parent company, Crown American Corporation, had been selling the chain off to various rival department store chains in the 90's due to Hess's poor sales and a high debt load. Bon-Ton didn't do much to change the exterior facades of the former Hess's stores they bought. In fact, this location was virtually untouched until late 2017 when Bon-Ton renovated the entranceway and updated their signage - apparently not anticipating going bankrupt just a few months later. 

Early Hess's locations often featured standalone auto centers, but these were discontinued after Hess's was bought by Crown American Corporation. New Hess's stores built after that point did not include auto centers. At some point Jack Williams cut a deal to sublease these old auto centers from Hess's/Bon-Ton. You might notice that the Jack Williams has cobblestone panels above its windows that match the exterior facade of the old Hess's department store.

George's IGA borrowed some exterior design elements from A&P. George's moved into the shopping center in 1967 and expanded in 1971 as the mall was being built. Interestingly, the store was observed to have differing ceiling heights due to the gradual expansion of the store over time into neighboring vacant spaces in the mall.

The changes in retail brought on by the 90s had longstanding impacts on the mall scene of the Lehigh Valley. The Whitehall Mall, whose success inspired the construction of the Westgate Mall in the first place, was mostly demolished in 1998. It was, perhaps, an ominous sign of what would come for Westgate, too, some day. Although the mall managed to snag the coveted "westgatemall.com" web address (there's so many Westgate Malls out there that this is genuinely impressive) which proudly displayed the slogan "It's Going On... At Westgate Mall!", vacancies began to become a consistent problem. The first big casualty was the J.J. Newberry. As a division of McCrory Stores, Newberry's outlived other big dime store chains like Woolworth. But towards the end of its lifespan, McCrory Stores accepted the reality that the five-and-dime concept was on the way out, and it began thinking of ways to alter its business model. McCrory experimented with a dollar store concept called Dollar Zone, selling cheaper products. The J.J. Newberry at Westgate Mall was transformed into a Dollar Zone in the year 2000, but it was a botched transition. The Newberry sign still hung above the storefront while paper Dollar Zone signs were printed and hung up around the inside of the store. The old-school lunch counter remained in operation in the store - a remnant of the past that seemed so out of place in the new business strategy that McCrory Stores was pursuing. Shoppers rebelled at the Dollar Zone concept, balking at the cheap imported products it peddled. The frankenstore shut down at the bitter end in 2001, when McCrory Stores liquidated all of their remaining stores - most of which, by that point, had been converted to Dollar Zone in the unsuccessful attempt to save the company. The Newberry's junior anchor spot would later be occupied by an off-brand dollar store or two, but mostly stayed vacant.

In October 1999, the Crown American Realty Trust announced their intention to purchase the parcel of land that housed The Bon-Ton department store. As per the agreement made between Hess's and mall owner Harold Campbell in 1970, Hess's had the option to purchase the land for $500,000 at the conclusion of a 30 year lease. The lease fell into Crown American's hands due to Crown having purchased the Hess's department store chain in 1979. By this point, the land value had increased dramatically. Crown American disclosed in its 1996 annual report that it received a revenue of $369,000 from subleasing the anchor pad to Bon-Ton in that year alone. Suffice it to say, purchasing the land outright for just $500,000 would have been a steal - roughly 10% of the actual value of the property. The mall's ownership litigated the issue in court, arguing that the purchase option was only available to Hess's - an entity which no longer existed. The legal battle would last for years.

Meanwhile, Campbell himself was in advanced age and declining health. He and his family ended up in a separate legal battle for control of the mall itself in 2002. Campbell had given power of attorney to his mall managers, Mylee Snyder and Helen Cline, in 1997. Snyder and Cline had worked for Campbell at the mall since the 80's, and used their power-of-attorney to assume mall operations starting that year. Campbell then instead granted power-of-attorney to his children, Dr. Harold S. Campbell Jr. and Joanne Burke in 2002. The pair of Campbell's kids appeared at the mall office on Tuesday, June 4th, 2002, armed with the new power-of-attorney and "claiming the right to exercise immediate control of the Westgate Mall and all of Mr. Harold S. Campbell Sr.'s personal and business affairs." Campbell Jr. & Burke converged on the management office with their own attorney and armed security and attempted what the local news described as a "coup" against Snyder & Cline that ultimately turned physical. In the wake of the incident, the management office at Westgate Mall was said to be locked & guarded. The issue was brought into court, where Campbell himself appeared at age 89 behind a walker. The still-imposing and fiery 6'1 Campbell immediately attempted to dismiss attorney Charles Bruno, who was hired by Cline & Snyder in 1997 to represent Campbell's estate. Reportedly, Bruno whispered to Campbell, "May I have a private word with you, Mr. Campbell? I represent you," to which Campbell retorted, "No you don't, and you never did. You ought to know that by now." Both sides accused the other of trying to take advantage of a wealthy old man, with Campbell's children further accusing Cline & Snyder of selling off nearly $1.3 million of Campbell's real estate properties & $100,000 in securities without consulting him. Ultimately, a judge ruled in 2003 that Campbell was no longer competent to fire the attorney that supposedly represented him or to strip Cline & Snyder of their power-of-attorney.

Morning Call file photo captures the Westgate Mall in 2002 - past its prime but still looking good. On the left side of the hallway is The Toy Tunnel, and just next door with the comically large gumball machine is the Candy Karousel. On the right side of the hall is a store called Real Style.

On January 23rd, 2004, Harold S. Campbell Sr. died at the age of 90 while in the midst of these legal battles. It was unclear, according to local news, how his death would affect the ongoing fight for control of his assets. Presumably though, Campbell's estate was left to his kids in his will, allowing them make whatever decisions they wanted in terms of managing the mall. When the dust settled, the mall ended up in the control of the Harold S. Campbell Foundation, a charitable group founded by the late developer's family. But they had little time to celebrate before a judge rejected their final appeal in 2005 to prevent the sale of the anchor pad housing The Bon-Ton department store for just $500,000 to the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (a.k.a. PREIT, who bought Crown American out in 2003). With this outcome, the mall would no longer collect hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in rent from its largest tenant. Fortunes continued to decline as a new shopping complex, Airport Center, opened just a 7 minute drive away from the Westgate Mall in 2010. Featuring big name stores like Target, Sam's Club, Ross, A.C. Moore, Five Below, Old Navy, DSW, and Ulta Beauty, Airport Center had a clear competitive advantage over the collection of local shops that were camped up in the Westgate Mall. Within a few years, even the old Kay Jewelers, which had stuck around all those years even after being robbed & burned back in '77, left the mall to join Airport Center. By 2013 the Harold S. Campbell Foundation sold the mall to local developer Mark Pepitone for the scant price of just $2.3 million. After the sale, the Campbell Foundation ceased to exist, and family control of the 40 year old enclosed mall finally ended. Pepitone separately purchased the anchor pad housing Bon-Ton from PREIT for $3.85 million, reuniting the mall once again. He began a renovation with a $5 million budget aimed at revitalizing the mall.

George W. uploaded this image to FourSquare in 2013. It stands in a rather stark contrast to the previous picture, taken at a similar angle about a decade prior. The store way on the left was Westgate Optical, which moved out of the mall but seems to still do business today. The now-closed Toy Tunnel, Candy Karousel, and Real Style storefronts are also plainly visible. Mall plants previously seen in the hall have disappeared. The Bon-Ton is brightly illuminated at the far end of the otherwise empty hallway.

Map showing the occupancy of the Westgate Mall around the time that Mark Pepitone bought it in 2013. Red spaces are vacant. At this point the upstairs section above the old McCrory's was totally closed.

The abandoned Dempsey's American Kitchen outparcel at Westgate Mall. Opened with the mall & closed in 2005. Dempsey's was at one point a local chain of over a dozen restaurants based out of Reading, PA that I think I'll write a separate blog post for some day. This was the 2nd-to-last location left in the chain when it closed. The last one closed in '08 I think. People have commented that this looks like a Howard Johnson with the red roof and cupola. It's possible that Dempsey's took some inspiration from HoJo's when building this restaurant. Dempsey's was finally demolished in the fall of 2023.

The wooden Dempsey's sign, still plainly readable.

A peek in the front door of Dempsey's.

A peek in the back door of Dempsey's.

Me eating Subway inside the mall in the summer of 2019. The restaurants inside the mall all seem to do pretty well. Westgate Jewelers, a very early tenant, is seen open across the hall.

Pepitone's renovation began in 2015. The centerpiece of this project was adding a SkyZone trampoline park to the center of the mall. SkyZone filled a lot of space, including the old McCrory's, Westgate Optical, Toy Tunnel, and Candy Karousel, and even extended out into what had been the mall's main entrance corridor. As a result, the corridor had to be re-routed around the new anchor tenant. This much was accomplished & was a huge success that gave the mall a new lease on life. The exterior of the mall, in some places, was updated with a new facade to make it look newer and more appealing from the street. The plan also involved converting the part of the mall between Rite Aid and Weis back into a strip mall, as it originally had been, by removing the enclosed hallway from the front of the building. Work began on this venture, and the hallway was indeed ripped out from in front of Rite Aid and a handful of other tenants, but stalled out before it was completed. Other goals that Pepitone had included redeveloping the old Dempsey's Diner, but this too did not occur. Eventually 2018 came around, and The Bon-Ton Stores, Inc. had filed for bankruptcy protection. In April that same year, it became clear that Bon-Ton would face total liquidation. Mark Pepitone was now in possession of two local malls (the other being Easton's Palmer Park Mall) that were set to lose an anchor tenant. He chose to hang onto Palmer Park Mall, the property which objectively had the better future prospects, while opting to sell Westgate Mall at a profit to Onyx Equities, a Woodbridge, NJ firm for a cool $30 million - almost 5x what Pepitone had paid for it 5 years prior.

One of the mall entrances. This is the exterior refresh that Mark Pepitone's renovation brought in. It's less crusty looking than the old brick facade from the 70's that came before it, but on the other hand it's kind of a generic modern commercial design that doesn't even have the name of the mall on it.

In front of the Rite Aid where it got de-malled. This sidewalk tells quite a story: you can see the lines on it from when the enclosed mall hallway was built directly on top of it in the 70's. Now that this part of the mall has been removed, the old sidewalk from the 60's has been revealed again.

A closed Bon-Ton at the far end of Westgate Mall. Bon-Ton occupied over 100,000 square feet and even expanded into 2 inline spaces of the mall to house their furniture & bedding galleries (seen on the right). The vacant tenant on the left used to be the Westgate Family Fun Center, which was a cheesy arcade.

Occupancy of the Westgate Mall towards the end of 2018 after Onyx took over. Note the mall no longer connects all the way over to Rite Aid, and the addition of SkyZone.

After the sale, Onyx remained very private about their plans for the mall. The first big news came in November 2019, when it was revealed that Weis would move out of its old central location in the mall and instead take up residence in about 2/3rds of the former Bon-Ton. The new Weis would be a much larger, state-of-the-art supermarket complete with liquor sales and a new gas station in the parking lot. This plan was, of course, delayed by the outbreak of a global pandemic about 4 months after the announcement. Though, interestingly, not a single tenant inside the mall closed permanently during the pandemic to date. Rite Aid ended up closing in 2021, but that's all. Weis proceeded with the plans after a modest delay, opening the new supermarket in 2021 instead of 2020. Progress on leasing was made elsewhere too, with a bank signing a lease to redevelop the former Dempsey's Diner; Harbor Freight signing on to open in a portion of the old Weis supermarket; Lehigh Valley Health Network signing a lease for 27,000 square feet in the rear of the former Bon-Ton as a medical equipment processing facility; a proposal to add a McDonald's to an undeveloped part of the mall parking lot; and negotiations underway with an unnamed "general medical facility" to camp up in the now-closed Rite Aid spot. It was good news all-around that is currently serving to fill up the mall's most glaring vacancies. Unfortunately, unlike predecessor Mark Pepitone, Onyx isn't in the business of bringing the Westgate Mall back to life; Onyx Equities is in the business of destroying the mall. As Matt Flath of Onyx explained, "You have the old interior mall that is between where the new Weis is and where the old Weis used to be, and we have a few different ideas as to how we're going to redevelop that part of the center, which we'll be announcing over the next probably six months. So, we definitely realize that model for that old, small interior mall layout is dated and doesn't work."

This is the current redevelopment proposal posted in Metro Commercial's digital pamphlet for the mall. It's got everything that the world doesn't need more of: a bank, a McDonald's, and a former mall turned into a completely unremarkable strip of box stores

The new Weis under construction. The Bon-Ton sign lives on at the former furniture gallery.

It was an ominous sign when Weis finished construction, and still the old Bon-Ton mall entrance remained sealed. I had really hoped that Weis & Onyx would take inspiration from a new trend of grocery stores opening up as mall anchors by keeping an entrance for Weis inside the actual mall. This practice was common in the 70's but fell out of favor since then - only recently making a comeback. Locally, the Stroud Mall in Stroudsburg successfully redeveloped a former Bon-Ton to accommodate a new Shop Rite, which opens up straight into the mall.

 As of 2022, the mall is still open and probably will be for a little while. There's a lot of logistics & red tape to cut through when dealing with the remaining tenants that are only accessible from inside the mall (which notably includes SkyZone) but Onyx has a stated goal of moving as many tenants as possible to exterior-facing units by 2023. That being said, if you want to see this mall I'd recommend doing it soon. A portion of the mall in front of the old Weis is now closed off as of December 9th 2021 for construction related to Harbor Freight moving in, and it may not ever reopen.

Current map (early 2022). Note the stretch of mall that's now closed to the public. The state liquor store is the only tenant keeping that one part of the mall on the left side of the map open.

The Westgate Mall sign being torn down, August 2021

I was surprised to see this when I turned the corner

The old Weis behind construction fences. "Welcome"

This part of the mall only serviced the liquor store when this photo was taken. The liquor store has since moved to temporary digs elsewhere on the property to facilitate the de-malling of this section.

Looking down the hallway. The liquor store is on the right close to the far end. The empty unit farthest from me at the end of the hall was Hourglass Hallmark. The two tenants on the left side were ABE vacuum & sewing machine repairs and Country Rose Florist. The unit with address 2293 on the right was a Curves gym and later The Spa at Westgate. The unit on the right just next to it was Westgate Daycare.

Former Westgate Daycare, which extended up onto the 2nd floor level as well. This part of the mall has kind of an old-timey main street sort of theme with those old decorative lanterns and faux roofs over many of the storefronts.

This section of the mall has had leaking roof problems

The closed doors up ahead are locked, sectioning off the stretch of hallway that dead-ends on the other side of that plywood barrier I showed you before. On the left was Curves gym / the Spa at Westgate. Right in front of me was a store called The Camera Shop, which at some point became part of Ritz Camera & Image. See again the faux streetscape theme with this storefront. On the right side was ABE sewing & vacuum.

Looking down the closed off hallway. That case built into the wall on the left says Westgate Mall at the top and holds trinkets from the different tenants inside, all likely destroyed now.

Back in the main stretch of the mall. I just think it's such a beautiful place. You have to think that they could improve the profitability of the mall while still keeping a piece of the interior preserved, but I guess that would require Onyx to have an original thought, or to do something that requires a little bit of effort. Too much to ask.

That's about all I can say about the Westgate Mall for now. Highly recommended additional reading on this mall can be found at this blog post which includes 2012 & 2014 pictures that show The Bon-Ton when it was open & prior to its exterior getting renovated, when it still looked exactly as it did in 1971. The pictures also show the mall before the layout was altered to accommodate SkyZone and before Mark Pepitone's exterior renovation of the mall. Also check out this blog post about the Westgate Family Fun Center, with plenty of pictures. I clearly remember the weird "A Prize Every Time" game with the chicken in it. Although I caution readers that there are a few pictures there purportedly from the Westgate Mall which are in fact rather from the Whitehall Mall.

UPDATE: 4/7/23

As I write this, the day is April 4th, 2023, and it is the last day of operation for Subway at the mall. It is one of a number of tenants being evicted to clear the way for demolition of a section of the mall. The other affected tenants, Hawk Music (since 1973), Holiday Hair (since the 70s), Westgate Jewelers (since the 70s), Amateur Athlete Skateshop (Since the 80s), More, and Fashion Nails have all already closed or found a new home at some other shopping center whose owners have an ounce of respect for their tenants. What else is there to say?