Every Christmas, Kaufmann’s Department store in Century III Mall tasked Paula Biggs with leading the store’s decorating. She particularly enjoyed creating little villages, which required using risers to display layers of the town. Cotton served as snow, wires lit the houses and miniature people and cars populated the display.

“The whole shop looked like a fantasy land when it was done,” she says.

Biggs recalls bringing in her own Christmas CDs and playing Christmas music from September until January.

“It was just happy. People would come in, they’d be grumpy, they’d come into that department, and … it would make them happy, you know? They’d leave happy.”

Even off the clock, Biggs, who worked in several Kaufmann’s departments while living in West Mifflin, loved spending time at the mall, shopping for “everything” — clothes, toys, shoes, houseware items, holiday cards and more. “The mall itself was just such a nice mall,” she says. “There was so much there to do, so many restaurants and things to do, with all the mall walkers. You could spend a day there and do everything you needed to do.”

She stopped working at the mall in 2006 and has since moved to Duquesne, but she’s followed the mall’s steady and steep decline as it has become a site of disrepair, vandalism and devastating injuries. Much of the trouble has been tracked through news reports and a popular, community-run Facebook page dedicated to the mall.

“It’s sad that they let it get to that point,” she says. “I know malls are kinda going out in places, but there’s still some that are thriving.”

Residents and West Mifflin borough officials now generally view the long-closed mall as a public nuisance that should be demolished. But there’s a longing and a nostalgic fondness for what the three-story behemoth once provided to the Pittsburgh area.

WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC CORPORATION PHOTOGRAPHS, MSP #424, DETRE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES, SENATOR JOHN HEINZ HISTORY CENTER

Center of Everything

The first enclosed shopping malls emerged in the U.S. in the mid-1950s. When Century III Mall opened in 1979, it was the third-largest mall in America, spanning 63 acres; its name comes from being created near the start of the country’s third century. Built on a portion of an unsightly slag heap used by U.S. Steel Corp., the new mall was an attempt to repurpose local land for a postindustrial future.

At its height, Century III had more than 200 stores, anchored by Kaufmann’s, Montgomery Ward, Gimbels, Sears and JCPenney. Sears, once the world’s largest retailer, has just a few locations left; JCPenney is trying for a revival. The other department store chains are long gone.

Century III’s decline follows national trends for malls, spurred by the rise of online shopping. Terms such as “dead malls” and “zombie malls” have become commonplace as many malls have become abandoned. In Frazer Township, a scheduled sheriff’s sale of the Galleria of Pittsburgh Mills was halted at the 11th hour in late September when its owner, Namdar Realty Group, paid all of the delinquent taxes on the 1.1 million-square-foot shopping center. Many of the mall’s storefronts remain empty, although it has become the seasonal home of ScareHouse.

In other parts of the region, South Hills Village, Monroeville Mall and Ross Park Mall are still doing well, despite having less prominence than in years past, when malls had a commanding grip on American commerce and pop culture. They were popular settings for such films as 1995’s “Mallrats” and 2009’s “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.”

Today, television series and movies such as Netflix’s “Stranger Things” sometimes use scenes shot in reproduced, bustling malls to tug at viewers’ heartstrings. HBO’s 2023 series “The Last of Us” shot scenes in 2022 in the closed Northland Village Mall in Calgary, Alberta, which is being turned into an open-air shopping area.

Hope For Revitalization

Moonbeam Capital Investments, a management and leasing company based in Las Vegas, bought Century III in 2013, pledging to revitalize the site. But it’s been heavily criticized by the borough and local residents for what has happened to the shopping center.

In 2018, images of a person dressed-up as the Easter Bunny sitting on a throne, waiting for children amid closed stores at Century III Mall, went viral under the title: “Lonely Easter Bunny in a Dead Mall.”

The mall closed for good in 2019.

Negative news about the mall hit a climax this past spring and summer. In April, a fire raged through the former food court. In June, a teenager sustained critical injuries after falling through the mall’s roof. That same month, West Mifflin Council hosted a condemnation hearing for the mall that drew a standing-room crowd of 100 people.

The borough presented evidence of the mall’s sad state: water damage, graffiti, mold, vandalism and more. During its slideshow, some attendees gasped at the mall images. Police and fire department officials detailed frequent 911 calls about people breaking into the mall and expressed concern about sending officers inside the mall with potentially hazardous air.

Then a Moonbeam representative defended the mall at the meeting, the audience loudly groaned and heckled. A month later, council voted unanimously to condemn the mall, but at press time an appeal by Moonbeam and its failure to pay code enforcement fines had set up what could be a long court battle on the path to demolition.

At the condemnation hearing, Moonbeam President and Chief Operating Officer Shawl Pryor said that Moonbeam still believes the mall can be salvaged and the company intended to sell.

“Currently, we are working with a potential buyer for the property, and they have to make a determination if they are going to utilize that existing structure for their facility in use, or if they are going to look at some type of partial demolition of the property, so that will determine whether or not we go in and do the cosmetic damage and address the cosmetic issues,” Pryor said.

The Nostalgia Factor

For thousands of Pittsburghers, the mall still evokes warm memories. About a decade ago, a man now living in North Huntingdon began co-running the “Century III Mall Memories” Facebook page. There, he frequently posts old photographs, news stories and other information about the mall for its 24,000 followers. A regular administrator of the page, which often publishes negative documentation and opinions about Moonbeam, he asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

The individual, who worked in sales and marketing for the mall about 10 years ago, says the popularity of the page doesn’t surprise him. He looks back on the mall’s heydays as positively as many others.

“Nostalgia is a weird thing,” he says. “Everyone has their own recollections of things they remember, things they experienced. It’s not just malls. For me, that’s what I remember from growing up. Other people might remember the old Civic Arena or Three Rivers Stadium. I think everyone connects to places in their own way. To me, it’s human nature.”

He recalls getting his childhood dog at a pet store in the mall and a time he lost his keys and never found them. Maybe they’re still there.

Walter Samosky, 52, who lives in Beaver County, uses the Facebook page to follow the mall from afar. He says he started going to the mall soon after it opened, before he moved out of the area. His parents took him to nearby Sears and JCPenney stores for clothes shopping, but when the family noticed the mall being constructed, his mother explained that they wouldn’t need to go to those stores anymore, as there would be something called a “mall” that had everything.

When he was little, Samosky loved the toy stores. As a teenager, he got into playing arcade games and would go out with a girlfriend who liked shopping at jewelry stores and Victoria’s Secret.

“I cannot remember a week, once I was driving myself, that I wasn’t at the mall at least once a week, just either to kill some time in the arcade or to actually go and get something, buy something,” Samosky says. “Most of my Christmas shopping over the years, once I had money, would be done at the mall.”

Another of the page’s most active members, Sue La Barbera, 79, of South Park, spent a lot of time shopping at the mall with friends and family. She and other parents would drop off their teenage children to hang out at the mall, frequenting shops such as the mainstay novelty store Spencer Gifts. For her own part, she spent a lot of time at Kaufmann’s, Sears and JCPenney. Once, when picking up her daughter and a friend, she learned that they had purposely turned back the time on their watches to spend more time at the mall and insisted her watch must have the wrong time.

In the mall’s latter years, she and her husband would walk it for fun.

“We just really, really liked it. I was just so sad when it started to deteriorate,” she says. “And when [my husband] and I were walking, we could see, in some of the stores that were empty, the ceilings had fallen down from water damage. And at that point, you could even smell the mustiness.”

Even when talking to people who passionately love the mall for what it used to be, it’s difficult to find anyone saying it shouldn’t be demolished. The Facebook page administrator says he believes the mall needs to be demolished, despite all of his own nostalgia and that of the page’s followers.

Demolition of the mall wouldn’t make him or anyone else lose their precious memories of the mall, even though demolition might mean those old keys of his would be lost for good.

Matt Petras is a freelance reporter and professor based in the Pittsburgh area.