Whitehall Mall (Whitehall, PA)

This one is a downright tragedy. The Whitehall Mall is a primarily outdoor shopping center located on the bustling retail corridor of MacArthur Road in Whitehall Township (just outside of Allentown). Buried in the Whitehall Mall is a single, small interior corridor with but a few low-end local shops camped inside. It is a tremendous fall from grace for what was, at one time, the beating heart of commerce in the Lehigh Valley. Read on for the story of the rise and fall of the Whitehall Mall.

Whitehall Mall pylon sign in 2019.

Philadelphia-based real estate developer Donnelly & Suess, Incorporated was responsible for the construction of the Whitehall Mall. Founded in 1897, Donnelly & Suess had done some noteworthy work in the Philadelphia area and other parts of eastern Pennsylvania, including housing projects on East Mt. Airy Avenue in Philadelphia in the early 1900's. The mall, however, would be the company's largest and most ambitious project.

The former offices of Donnelly & Suess, Inc. still stands. Above the door at the right-hand side of this building, the address "931" is carved. 931 Lehigh Avenue in Philly was the Donnelly & Suess HQ as early as 1915. Image from Google Street View.

In January of 1963, Donnelly & Suess announced their intention to build a mall in rural Whitehall Township along a sleepy stretch of road through the farmlands. At that time, few people in the Lehigh Valley had ever heard of a mall before. It would be the first enclosed shopping mall built in eastern PA, outside of the immediate Philadelphia area. It was a radical idea that sought to bring everything you could ever need under one roof - shops, offices, department stores, a food market and even a cinema. By 1965, the red tape was cut through and ground was broken for the first time on the project. For the symbolic ground-breaking photo-op, a unique five-handled shovel was used. Holding the shovel were Leonard Mercer, the vice president of Donnelly & Suess; Donald Vollmer, president of the Zollinger-Harned department store company; Charles A. Raab, general manager of Sears, Roebuck, & Company in the Lehigh Valley; Whitehall Township commissioners President Arthur Wieand; and Allentown Mayor F. Willard Harper. From a plot of farmland that had been bought for a mere $125,000, a titan of commerce was about to rise.

Ground is broken at the Whitehall Mall. To the far right is Harry Greenberg, a representative of the mall developer, Donnelly & Seuss, Inc. Donnelly & Suess would later become Greenberg Realty Associates, and Harry Greenberg would go on to develop a number of clubs and discotheques in Allentown and Philadelphia, while also continuing to own and manage the Whitehall Mall.

This file photo from The Morning Call shows downtown Allentown's Sears store. The Whitehall Mall lured Sears to close this store and open a newer, larger store at the mall. The hulking Sears store would be the main anchor of the Whitehall Mall.

Ad for the new Sears department store opening at the Whitehall Mall

Comparison photo of the Sears in 2019. Notice the brick is off-color where they bricked over the old display windows.

Whitehall Mall under construction. Photo credit: macarthurroad75.com

Zollinger-Harned, a local Allentown-based department store, was the first to open its doors at the mall on August 15th, 1966. The event drew some 25,000 shoppers and caused traffic jams at various times of the day. The rest of the mall opened on September 26th, 1966. Ownership was split 50/50 between Donnelly & Seuss (the developer) and Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT). This was just the first of several malls PREIT would become an early partner in. Reporters raved about the mall amenities, including cascading fountains and lush plant life in planters whose design was inspired by the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, Belgium. Aside from Zollinger and Sears, the mall was originally anchored by an especially large (~44,000 square feet) Woolworth five and dime store and a Weis Food Market. Other noteworthy tenants included the Plaza cinema and Percy Brown's Cafeteria. All told, the mall included 52 shops under its roof. The mall was primarily single-story, though there was (and still is) a small second-floor section that housed some office tenants including the mall management office, as well as a community room.

Fountains spray in the Zollinger-Harned court of the Whitehall Mall around Christmastime. Photo from macarthurroad75.com

Shoppers observe a cage of exotic birds in the Whitehall Mall. Image from macarthurroad75.com

Aerial view of the Whitehall Mall in its original form, with Sears in the foreground.

Postcard from Percy Brown's Cafeteria. The back of the postcard reads "Percy Brown's Nationally Famous Cafeteria/Restaurant. Whitehall Mall 1/4 mile north of Rt. 22 Allentown Exit 145, MacArthur Road, Whitehall, Pa. 18052. Exceptional quality at reasonable prices." Percy Brown's was a Wilkes-Barre, PA eatery, and the Whitehall Mall location was the only additional location that Percy Brown's ever opened. Old Country Buffet most recently occupied the space that Percy Brown's originally did.

The Morning Call file photo shows Sears department store upon opening

PLAZA single-screen cinema at Whitehall Mall. Eventually it would get upgraded to a twin-screen. The PLAZA actually opened in July 1966, several months before the rest of the mall. Plastic coverings prevented movie-goers from entering construction zones as the rest of the mall was completed.

Approximate floor plan of the Whitehall Mall in 1966.

Speaking to The Morning Call, mall developer Leonard Mercer said "You know, I treat this thing as a Broadway production. It's something you've got to constantly promote and give tenants action at all times. We're going to run it as a gala. The mall will be open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, except for an hour or so now and then while changes are being made. But it's big enough so that people can be in one end while they are cleaning up or making changes at the other."

The Whitehall Mall took the Lehigh Valley by storm. Just as advertised, the mall operated like a Broadway production. In 1968, it was home to the world's highest slide at more than 4 stories tall and 193 feet long. Later, in 1974, it was home to a Circus Vargas show that attracted 4,000 to the mall parking lot. However, its success invited intense competition. In an ominous sign of what was to come, just one month after Whitehall Mall opened, plans were set in motion to build a new mall directly adjacent to it. Six tracts of land owned by Allentown department store magnate Max Hess, Jr. were purchased by developer John A. Robbins of Jarpenn Co. Inc. of Philadelphia. Robbins announced plans at the time to build the largest mall in the state of Pennsylvania. Robbins, it turns out, would never be able to see his plan to completion, partially due to legal battles against the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation concerning the expected traffic burdens. But eventually, a more powerful mall developer would follow through.

The 70's ushered in an explosion of mall development in the Lehigh Valley; every developer wanted a piece of the action. Everyone from controversial Bethlehem developer Harold S. Campbell to the expanding Hess's Department Store chain to the Crown American Corporation of Johnstown rushed into the Lehigh Valley to build their very own malls. The climax of this mall boom came in 1975, when a judge's approval finally cleared the way for a major mall developer, Kravco, to build a massive, new, two-story mall directly across the street from the Whitehall Mall. Some criticism emerged regarding the preferential treatment Kravco was being given by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for their mall project; namely, PennDOT agreed to create a median break on MacArthur Road to let cross-street traffic enter the new mall - an option that was not offered to other developers, such as those of the Whitehall Mall. PennDOT also relied on Kravco's own traffic study rather than conducting their own. Regardless, the project pushed on. In the final months of Kravco's project, a most ominous turn of events occurred; Harry Greenberg, founder & president of Greenberg Realty which owned & managed Whitehall Mall, suddenly collpased at the mall on February 24th, 1976. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, just 57 years old. 

Just days after the Whitehall Mall's tenth anniversary, the Lehigh Valley Mall opened with some 130 shops and about a million square feet of retail space. The Whitehall Mall may have been born a Broadway production, but after ten years, the show was over.

File photo from The Morning Call. The Lehigh Valley Mall opened on October 6th, 1976. It was nearly double the size of the Whitehall Mall and offered more than twice as many shops under its roof. Its anchors were John Wanamaker, Bamberger's, and JCPenney.

The Whitehall Mall project was clearly the zenith of Donnelly & Suess / Greenberg Realty's legacy, and by this point had been the product of 13+ years of planning, promoting, and operating. Yet, in March of 1977, a mere 5 months after the opening of the Lehigh Valley Mall across the street, Joan Greenberg (Harry's daughter) sold the Greenberg estate's ownership of the Whitehall Mall to Kravco. Greenberg Realty would slip quietly into history, hardly to be remembered.

The first major casualty at the Whitehall Mall was the Zollinger-Harned department store. A classic old-school department store in its own right, it was complete with an in-house restaurant on the second floor. But it may have seriously erred by keeping its downtown Allentown department store open even after opening a branch location at the Whitehall Mall. Downtown department stores increasingly fared poorly during this era, and the Zollinger store was unlikely to be an exception. As late as 1975, Zollinger was still profitable as a whole, but in 1976 the company suffered dramatically, perhaps in part because of new competition from the Lehigh Valley Mall. All told, the chain, which included four department stores total (the other two being in downtown York, PA and at the Wyoming Valley Mall near Wilkes-Barre, PA) lost $1.2 million in 1976. In February 1977, Donald Vollmer, who 12 years prior had held the five-handled shovel at the Whitehall Mall's groundbreaking, sold his entire Zollinger-Harned company for $1, plus the assumption of debts. A month later, the chain filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection. The York store soon liquidated. The owners of the Wyoming Valley Mall, Crown American Corporation, pressured Zollinger into closing their store at that mall as well so that Crown American subsidiary Hess's Department Stores could open at the mall in Zollinger's place. The two hometown locations remained open through one final Christmas season before shutting their doors in 1978 after failing to return to profitability. The space that Zollinger occupied in the Whitehall Mall was soon replaced by a hometown rival: H. Leh & Co., or Leh's, as it was commonly known.

The main entrance of the Whitehall Mall had a big "Leh's" sign on it. to the right of the main entrance you can see part of the Weis Markets sign. (Photo credit Michael Lisicky)

The Leh's court at the Whitehall Mall had big, beautiful planters and fountains. In the background you can see the PLAZA cinema. (Photo credit Michael Lisicky)

A look inside the Leh's department store. (Photo credit Michael Lisicky)

Kravco, to their credit, invested substantially in the Whitehall Mall. In 1982, the mall was greatly expanded to include a new 82,000 square foot Clover discount department store, as well as a new stretch of mall corridor to connect it which added a handful of new inline tenants as well. One of the tenants added in this expansion was a Space Port arcade, which today is occupied by a comic book shop. This expansion brought the mall up to its maximum extent. GLA (gross leasable area) estimates from this time period tend to be all over the place, but the figures I've seen place the mall at anywhere from 601,000 square feet to 666,000 square feet of leasable retail space, making it easily the second-largest mall ever to be built in the Lehigh Valley. If only the largest one wasn't directly across the street.

Aerial view of the two malls - Whitehall on top, Lehigh Valley on the bottom. (Google Earth)

Approximate floor plan of the Whitehall Mall following the 1982 expansion which added Clover and some small shops.

In spite of this new expansion, the Whitehall Mall continued to limp as the 80's dragged on. Outdoor shopping centers were beginning to return to popularity, and the critical young demographic had long-since left the Whitehall Mall behind in favor of the more modern shopping experience at the Lehigh Valley Mall. The Whitehall Mall increasingly became the mall where older shoppers went for a more relaxed, slow-paced shopping setting. Kravco began a series of distasteful renovations that removed the mall's more extravagant features to put a lid on upkeep. In the article "Remembering When Whitehall Mall was Cool", Morning Call writer Frank Whelan wrote this assessment of the Whitehall Mall as it was in the 80's: "It's cages of exotic birds and the fountains were gone. And so were the crowds that used to flock there."

Whitehall Mall always here for you. (Morning Call file photo)

The backslide into irrelevance continued. MacArthur Road blossomed into the great golden strip of commerce in the Lehigh Valley, all of it due to the pioneering Whitehall Mall that brought life and excitement to what had been a sleepy stretch of country road. But the mall that started it all was being left behind. The mall continued to turn a profit, but its performance was sub-par at best for its prime location. into the mid-nineties, Kravco started contemplating more renovations to refresh public interest in the mall. But trouble was brewing for the Whitehall Mall's major tenants; as downtown Allentown declined, it dragged Leh's down with it, forcing the closure of the flagship Leh's department store downtown in 1994, though they kept the Whitehall Mall location running. In the fall of 1995, Strawbridge & Clothier, the parent company of Clover stores, put itself up for sale. They found a buyer in 1996, though it came at the cost of the Clover division, which was slated to close entirely. Also in 1996, after a few more years of struggles, Leh's department store closed their remaining locations for good. Luckily, Kohl's department stores was looking to expand to the east coast at the time, taking the opportunity to take over many of the former Clover locations, including the one at the Whitehall Mall. Despite this bright spot, Kravco found itself unable to find a suitable long-term replacement for Leh's. The Woolworth company had also been circling the drain for years, with the Whitehall Mall location being the last surviving store in the chain in the whole Lehigh Valley by early 1997. Faced with these issues, Kravco adopted a different vision for the future of the property.

Woolworth lasted until the bitter end at the Whitehall Mall, but in July 1997, all remaining Woolworth stores were announced to close. A "WOOLWORTH'S" labelscar is still clearly visible along the side of the structure it once occupied. Today, the building houses Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

Consultants hired by Kravco were unconvinced of plans to preserve the enclosed mall with a new renovation. Though Kravco had drawn up plans for such a renovation that would have included some new amenities such as a parking deck, the consultants insisted that with Leh's gone and no prospective high-quality tenants lining up to replace it, there would be a poor return on investment for such a scheme. Instead, they pushed Kravco towards total redevelopment that would virtually eliminate the enclosed mall to replace it with a shopping center concept known as a power center - a cluster of big box stores and category killers. Towards the end of 1997, Kravco publicly announced that the Whitehall Mall as it had been known since 1966 would cease to exist after a date with the wrecking ball scheduled for mid-1998.

Walking beneath a canopy of trees and skylights, two elderly shoppers reminisce about the Whitehall Mall in January 1998. The two had been coming to the mall since 1966 and were saddened by the impending demolition. This rare photo from within the now-demolished main stretch of the mall shows several empty storefronts. in the far background you can just about make out the blue glow of the Sears sign at the end of the hallway. (Morning Call file photo)

Work is done for the de-malling of the Whitehall Mall on April 14th, 1998. The main mall entrance is in the background, next to the Weis Markets sign. (Morning Call file photo)

A worker cuts through steel beams of the Whitehall Mall structure on Thursday, June 11th, 1998. (Morning Call file photo)

Workers deconstruct the former main entrance to the Whitehall Mall on October 20th, 1998. (Morning Call file photo)

Thus, the new Whitehall Mall was born. A sad fate for what was an objectively a historically significant mall. So far removed were the days when the Whitehall Mall was a 24-hour attraction akin to a never-ending Broadway production. So distant were the times when tens of thousands piled into the brand new Zollinger-Harned department store. So foggy were the memories of exotic birds, the world's tallest slide, and floral-shaped ceiling lights that once inspired awe in the community.

Approximate floor plan of the Whitehall Mall post-demolition. The main mall corridor between Sears and Zollinger-Harned/Leh's was torn out, leaving a strip of stores on one side. New structures were built as well, adding space for Michael's craft store and Borders bookstore, among others. The former Leh's building was split up, with a furniture store taking over part of it while the Weis supermarket expanded into the rest.

Despite the changes, some of the Whitehall Mall lived on. The original Sears building, sporting the same beautiful architecture it had since 1966, remained. It was described at the time as one of the best performing stores in the whole Sears chain (which, at the time, was still an impressive fleet of stores). Additionally, a small section of the mall interior was preserved. This corridor mostly serves as a passageway to let shoppers easily reach Kohl's from the front parking area of the mall, and it had inline spaces to accommodate 9 small inline tenants. For a short time, this tiny interior space also continued to host the PLAZA movie theater, which had been the first business to open to the public on the mall property. Sadly, however, the PLAZA, which had been a third-run cinema ever since AMC sold it to Roxy Theaters in 1996, closed for good in 1999. The former theater and the part of the Leh's that was briefly occupied by Gallery Furniture would be repurposed for the largest Gold's Gym on the east coast, which opened in 2005. Luckily, the PLAZA theater facade on the inside of the mall has been preserved for all of these years.

Sears' hulking 213,000 square foot, two-story department store at the Whitehall Mall in 2019.

I've always found the architecture of this Sears to be pretty pleasing

The PLAZA theater still lives on in some small way, as the facade has been preserved. 

What you see here is basically the sum total of the Whitehall Mall - what little remains of it. One final, largely neglected corridor full of vintage charm and just a handful of shops. 

The original Whitehall Mall lacked real skylights, instead opting for artificial ones shaped like flowers. One of the later renovations added these real skylights, complete with retro light bulb borders that are still occasionally turned on.

Strange panels on the walls unconvincingly assert that the Whitehall Mall is "where to meet for every occasion, where to shop for every occasion". Perhaps it once was, but not anymore.

A planter in front of Kohl's that probably used to be way more impressive.

It's easy to see why, in the modern age, most people would happily bypass the tiny, outdated remains of the Whitehall Mall. Indeed, the vast majority of shoppers who come to the mall probably never venture into the enclosed section. The first time I was at this mall I was very young (and had no particular interest in retail or the history thereof), and it was a truly confusing experience. The mall is actually a bit intimidating when you walk in through the main entrance; as this was the former Zollinger/Leh's court, it is a wide hallway with a two-story high ceiling. The grandeur was once justified by large fountains, planters, and seating areas that simply no longer exist, leaving a rather cavernous entryway that just doesn't seem to make sense. Venture further into the mall and you'll find how small and empty it is. The mall doesn't even play music anymore on some days. At the time, I could never have imagined what this mall once was. Now that I know the history and significance of the Whitehall Mall, I have a greater appreciation for what's left. But it's still very sad to be there and think about what once was, and will never be again.

Get a load of that storefront for SMP. Apparently it's some sort of wholesaler. There's no way that this storefront has been changed since this wing was constructed in 1982.

The rest is, for the most part, history. Eventually the Weis supermarket closed down; Weis had opened a newer supermarket just up the road a few years prior and operated both supermarkets simultaneously until they decided to consolidate and thereby close the old Whitehall Mall location. This left Sears, the mighty and indispensable 213,000 square foot anchor store, as the final living remnant of the Whitehall Mall as it was. But those who know Sears' struggles of the past few years will not be surprised to hear that the Sears, too, would not last forever. Though it had survived Sears' bankruptcy filing of 2018 and several rounds of store closures thereafter, the store which had once been described as among the best performers in the entire Sears fleet closed its doors for good as one of the *last* stores in the Sears fleet in 2020. What the future holds for the now-vacant anchor pad remains to be seen, though demolition seems likely as few retailers need a two-story building of that size today. Thank you for reading, see below for pictures of the Sears in liquidation.

The auto center was the first to close up shop when liquidation began. The moody clouds are appropriate.

Still a beautiful building, even in its last days of use

Store closing signs in the appliance & mattress showroom.

"Pride is not mass produced". Barren shelves in the tools department suggest these were hotter commodities than the seemingly endless racks of apparel that remained stocked.

They put up the newer Sears signs with the goofy new logo. I'm not a fan of it.

Where else?

This picture was taken of the second floor of the department store, which had not been used for several years prior to the store shutting down.

They pulled out a cart of old CCTV monitors in the later stages of liquidation. I picked one up for myself for $10 and got the necessary adaptors to play video games on its tiny, black & white screen.

Faded Sears cart

1966 called, and it's taking its store back.

Another angle of the auto center.