Chester, Plymouth Meeting, and a Dead Village Center
Hello everybody! Sorry for the posting schedule being off a bit, midterm season is in full swing here and as much as I'd rather be writing this, I gotta keep my priorities straight. Today, we'll mainly be looking at a set of photos I got the day I interviewed for an internship in Chester (which I did get, by the way), then subsequently made a wrong turn on the turnpike and wound up in Plymouth Meeting. Also featured in this post is the Village at Eland, a mostly-dead shopping center in Kimberton.
This store was built as a Sears Hardware in the early 90's, and closed around the time of the Kmart merger. Dollar Tree picked up most of the space, and opened it as part of their short-lived Deal$ chain. That didn't last long; it was rebranded to Dollar Tree a couple years later, making it their second store in town. I want to say the tan part of the façade was added on when Deal$ opened, but I forget what it looked like before.
I always enjoyed driving past this little barn-shaped pizza place. They were sadly booted out in early 2017 so a Wawa could be built on the site. This, along with the car wash next door and a few trailers behind it, were razed summer 2017.
It was a pleasant surprise they decided to save this decrepit old gas station, though seeing what they did to it was a little less pleasant. This is by far the least visually appealing phone store I've seen.
According to their website, Triple R moved here in 1981. This building definitely predates that, meaning they were not the original tenant. I really loved the awning over the entrance here.
This store was built in 2002 on a large portion of the former Baldwin Locomotive plant (2 of Baldwin's buildings survive- we'll talk more about that in a couple weeks). It was one of the later holdouts with the old logo, still sporting it until around 2014. It hasn't gotten Walmart's new color scheme yet, probably as a result.
This McDonald's also opened in 2002. It survived without any sort of remodeling until earlier this year, when it was boxed.
This opened with the center in 2002, and was remodeled alongside Walmart around 2014. The place I was interning at that summer was located behind this shopping center, so I wound up getting lunch here a few times a week.
This place has a simple enough design that it really could have started out as anything, but the slightly angled-out walls and slanted roof remind me of a 50's Dairy Queen. Rita's is a perfect use for the place now.
Chester is home to a ton of fireworks stores, mainly due to the fact that it sits right where PA, NJ, and DE come together and that Pennsylvania has for less stringent regulations on them than our neighboring states. This store didn't make it, and shuttered around 2010. It sat empty for several years before being torn down to make way for a massive new storage locker facility.
I am fairly certain this was built as a Denny's. There's a few other restaurants in the region operating under different names that have the same design as this, so I can't really be certain. If any restaurant gurus could help me out in the comment section, I'd appreciate it!
This store opened in the late 70's or early 80's. It's in a 2-store strip mall with offices above the other store; I'm assuming Wawa didn't own the center at first, since it was given a modified roof design. The rest of the center is vacant, making me think Wawa is planning a tear-down rebuild here instead of a remodel and they could use the extra real estate to add gas pumps. There's also a 60's Wawa that was given a bare-bones remodel a stone's throw away which I could see being merged into this store if they rebuild.
This looks like an 80's-era Mobil, but given its location practically on the Mall's driveway, I'm thinking this may have been a rebuilt 60's location.
A few months after I covered this store's closing, I came back to see if anything was going on. It was, as you'd expect, totally closed up with the windows painted over. Fortunately, it didn't stay that way for too long- the space was split between Dick's and Burlington (among a few smaller tenants), who opened within the past couple weeks.
This site was previously home to IKEA's first US store, which opened in the mid-80's and relocated to Conshohocken in 2003. Since that would have been a rather difficult space to fill, PREIT demolished the store and replaced it with a strip center that attaches to the mall anchored by Whole Foods, which opened in 2008.
Down the hill from the Whole Foods is this sad little run-down office building. I never would have guessed it, but this was actually IKEA's first headquarters for their North American stores. They're still nearby- in 2006 they moved to a much larger building adjacent to their Conshohocken store. Plans have been going around for years to build a 260-unit apartment complex on the site, but so far nothing has happened. I'm not sure what they're waiting for, but this building certainly isn't looking any better as time goes on.
When the mall first opened, this space was a movie theater. They moved to a freestanding building in the parking lot in the 90's, and the mall's food court was relocated here. In 2017, Legoland took over the space. The mall is basically without a food court now, but given the number of restaurants it has there really isn't a need for one.
Lit's was one of the mall's original anchors, who went out of business in the late 70's. Hess's filled the space in 1979, but closed shortly before Bon-Ton bought them out. Finally, in the 90's, Boscov's opened here. At this point, they're the longest-lived tenant this space has had.
This bank was one of First Union's later banks, which through a series of mergers is now Wells Fargo. One thing of note here is that this is one of the few former FU's that still has its original roadside sign. On most of the locations they took over, Wells Fargo replaced the pylon entirely.
Generally I'm annoyed by the number of storage places being built, but I really like this conversion. They took an old bottling plant and repurposed it, rather than building an entirely new facility. CubeSmart's headquarters are in Malvern, so a lot of their locations in the area here seem to get special attention.
Inching along slowly but surely, the old pumps have been ripped out and it looks like they're getting ready to put in new ones.
This building was home to Norristown's main newspaper, the Times Herald, for many years. The paper is still in print, but these offices have been closed for a while, likely as a result of downsizing.
Bassett's new furniture store is huge! I'm surprised they managed to fit all this and a parking lot on the site of a McDonald's.
The houses on this block were bought out by a developer shortly after the paper mill behind them burned down in the mid-2000's. Some of them were rented out afterwards, but I'm guessing something was wrong with this one; it was just boarded up. In late 2017, the developer's plans were finally approved, and these houses (along with what remained of the paper mill), were razed. This site will be mainly high-density residential, although some commercial space is planned. Most notably, Downingtown Station will be moving to this site. The existing station, which is sorta on the outskirts of town, will be replaced with senior housing.
This center was built in the early 90's, across the street from the Eland Downe apartment complex which was owned by the same people. It's been slowly dying for several years, but things have really gotten bad recently. There were only a handful of tenants left when I visited in 2017, but since then half of those have gone as well. Currently, there's a dentist, seafood restaurant, realtor, and the leasing office for Eland Downe. Cooking Spotlight closed a couple months after my visit.
In keeping with Spooky Season, I'm gonna leave you today with some CCR. Expect a Halloween post (or maybe 2 depending on how motivated I feel) to drop tomorrow!
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