Mountaineer Mall - Raw & Real Retail

This is our walkthrough of the Mountaineer Mall in Morgantown, WV from August 2, 2019. This is a fly in amber sort of property in that it looks nearly identical today as it did over 20 years ago. There is very little actual retail besides a thrift shop and a restaurant and most of the building has been repurposed for use as a business park. The design screams vintage 1970s and has never seen a remodel. The place is kept immaculately clean and reeks of cleaning product throughout. It felt pretty great walking around this mall.
Songs used in this video (in order):
Steve Gray - Early Riser
Alan Hawkshaw - Sundown
Steve Gray - Wonder Groove
Steve Gray - Reach Out
Here is a portion of a great writeup by the labelscar blog:
www.labelscar.c...
Mountaineer Mall originally opened in 1975 on a bluff, high above the Monongahela River, on the south side of Morgantown. It had a goal of capturing local shoppers who were forced to drive either to Pittsburgh, where the closest major malls, South Hills Village and Century III Mall, were 60 miles away, or down to Fairmont, where the tiny Middletown Mall sat. Anchored by JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and Murphy’s Mart, Mountaineer Mall had a simple dumbbell shape when it opened. Murphy’s Mart was the western anchor closest to the river, JCPenney sat adjacent to center court, and Montgomery Ward flanked the eastern end of the mall.
Even though Mountaineer Mall was small, it became immensely popular and gained a loyal following in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Too soon, though, Mountaineer Mall’s owners realized the mall was too small to serve the area, and embarked on an expansion in 1987, adding a fourth anchor, Stone and Thomas, and an additional hallway connecting it to the mall. This gave the mall a T-shape once the renovation was complete. Meanwhile, an anchor change took place around 1985, when Murphy’s Mart became Ames.
The new addition, with its late-80s appearance, featured smart looking brass fixtures, fake skylights, and a brighter look than the rest of the 8-year-old mall. In addition, due to the natural topography of the site, the developer chose to build the addition on a slight incline, giving the mall corridor a handicapped-accessible carpeted ramp down the middle and stairs flanking either side. This is definitely, by the way, an amazingly unique design feature, which seemingly gives the mall not only an extra dimension of space but also a disjointed, frankenmall-like weird quality. The new addition also brought stores with only exterior entrances on one side.
Unfortunately, Mountaineer Mall’s time in the sun was short-lived. Three years after the addition, in September of 1990, Mountaineer Mall’s luck ran out when competition came calling from the brand-new, $70-million Morgantown Mall, which opened across the river, just two miles from Mountaineer Mall. The new 557,954 square-foot mall was anchored by Sears, JCPenney, Elder-Beerman, and K-mart. JCPenney chose to immediately bolt to the new mall when it opened in 1990, but Elder Beerman kept a location at both malls until 1998.
After the loss of JCPenney, Mountaineer Mall soldiered on, eventually replacing the space with U.S. Factory Outlets in 1993. In January 1994, Ames was replaced with a 126,000 square-foot Wal-Mart, the first in the area. The popularity of Wal-Mart routinely filled the parking lot to capacity, and the mall soldiered on against its newer cousin across the river. U.S. Factory Outlets eventually closed and was replaced by Gabriel Brothers, a regional off-price chain based in Morgantown. Then, in 1998, Stone and Thomas was forced to sell out to Elder Beerman. Elder Beerman chose to continue operating in Mountaineer Mall after the acquisition, despite already having a duplicate store two miles away at Morgantown Mall.
The first decade of the new millennium was extremely unkind to Mountaineer Mall, as the mall lost all four of its anchors, three of them in short spacing. In 2000, Montgomery Ward announced it was going out of business nationwide and closed the last remaining original anchor at Mountaineer Mall. The next anchor to depart was Wal-Mart, which abandoned the mall due to a non-compete agreement with grocery store Giant Eagle that barred it from opening a Supercenter with grocery on the site; it closed in October 2006, the same day two new Supercenters opened elsewhere in Morgantown.
About the same time anchor Gabriel Brothers opened a brand new store across town, and began to offer fewer items at their Mountaineer Mall location. After over a year of progressively emptier shelves, it became apparent that Gabriel Brothers was slowly abandoning the Mountaineer Mall store, and it finally closed in 2008. Elder Beerman also closed in 2008. In a span of less than two years, Mountaineer went from having three anchors to having zero anchors. At the same time, many in-line stores cleared out as well.