Philadelphia Retail with PlazaACME

It's been a rough week and y'all probably need a distraction, so let's see some retail! Most of this post is from North Coventry, which gets lumped in with Pottstown a lot of the time. We don't actually go to Pottstown in the post, but I wanted to make the title a pun. Aéropostale, Exton Square Mall, Exton, PA Aero pulled the plug on this store back in 2014, in the good old days when the mall was still over 90% occupancy. It's lain vacant ever since, but briefly saw the light of day for the 2017 Christmas season when Go! Calendars & Games opened up. Gymboree, Exton Square Mall, Exton, PA The mall had both a Gymboree and a Crazy 8 in it before they went bankrupt. The Gymboree was hit with the first round of closings, but Crazy 8 managed to hold on a few more months until the entire company liquidated. The 2-story H&M next door closed down the following year, so this mall is looking kinda dismal these days. Even if PREIT survives bankruptcy, I don't imagin...

 The story of how I wound up here goes all the way back to the beginning of Quarantine. Like the very beginning, where we literally weren't allowed to to be out in public on nonessential business. I, like most people, was stuck at home and bored out of my mind. To pass the time, I would find urbex sites (most of which are very stubborn about not giving out locations) and track down the buildings they featured. It was a fun challenge, almost like detective work. One site, Abandoned NJ , had a neat page on an unnamed Agricultural Research Facility. I became instantly obsessed- it was so modern but so decayed at the same time. It also had practically no clues on how to find it. It took me a few days, but ultimately I was able to track it down using a product name that appeared in one of the photos, finding the company that made that, then ultimately discovering that they still had a helipad registered at this address. After a few months when things had settled down virus-wise, I calle...