This is from Paul Schwedelson at the Philadelphia Business Journal:

Abrams Realty & Development’s overhaul of the Exton Square Mall is coming into focus with plans to demolish nearly the entire property and emphasize a mix of uses including more than 600 apartments and townhomes.

According to plans submitted to West Whiteland Township, Abrams plans to preserve the 178,000-square-foot Boscov’s department store while knocking down the rest of the mall to make way for apartments, townhomes, fitness and entertainment uses, office space, shops and restaurants.

The Business Journal reported in November that Elkins Park-based Abrams was under contract to purchase the 989,659-square-foot Exton Square Mall from PREIT. Abrams expects to close the sale before the end of March. The mall sits on 75 acres at the intersection of Route 100 and Route 30, about four miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

It’s funny that Boscov’s survives while everything else around it is kaput. Same thing at the Coventry Mall, sort of, where the big anchor stores are accessible from the outside but you can’t actually go into the mall itself. If humanity was annihilated and a nuclear winter covered the Earth, Boscov’s would still be standing, only with no patrons.

Full transparency, I had the idea of doing a “Crossing Broad Dead Mall Tour” this Spring and Summer. Not a unique idea, but we’d go mall-by-mall through the suburbs and rank each of them based on alive (King of Prussia) to dead (Montgomery) to deader than the 2024-2025 Philadelphia 76ers (Exton). We’d get with someone who grew up patronizing each of these malls and run a feature story with a lot of before-and-after photos for a combination nostalgia trip and feature story. It would have been pretty cool, and it would have done clicks, but it seems like there will be no malls left to tour soon.

Funny enough, my kids love the Montgomery Mall. We’ve been there twice in three weeks. There is a shitty old nautical-themed playground and some broken down rides that they climb on top of. You put a dollar in the Merry Go Round and it herks and jerks but they don’t seem to realize that it’s broken. Then we go to the arcade and play the crane games and shoot basketballs before heading over to Auntie Anne’s for more sugar that they don’t need. They have no idea what the place used to be and no idea that it’s on life support, but they enjoy it anyway, because they have no frame of reference:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Kevin Kinkead (@kevin_kinkead)

What’s particularly fascinating and jarring at the same time is that some stores in there are thriving. You can face one direction and see a Bath and Body Works that has a lot of people going in and out. Then you turn around and do a 180 and it’s four empty stores in a row, shuttered and gated. There’s some bored Indian kid sitting in a cell phone repair kiosk and a couple of places in the food court clinging to life. Then you walk down to Dick’s Sporting Goods at the other end and there are a hundred customers in there. It’s the most ridiculous combination of dead, dead, dead, then a store that’s crushing it. It’s morbidly curious from a retail and cultural perspective.


Putting the nostalgia trip aside, it seems like people are still willing to shop in person, just not at the classic malls we grew up with. KOP will always be an anchor for anything and everything, and then you have the outlets up in Sanatoga and some other reworked, mixed-use spots that are doing just fine, but add Exton to the cemetery with Granite Run and other mallrat destinations of yesteryear. One of these days I’ll sit my children down and tell them about the golden age of Sam Goody, The Wall, Orange Julius, and Waldenbooks. And Schuylkill Valley sports. And Electronics Boutique. And the list goes on.