The Uneasy Life and Long Afterlife of Parkway Center Mall
It was once advertised as the future in concrete and carpeting: a mid-size, freeway-visible mall with its very own exit ramp, a place where westbound drivers could peel off the Parkway West and be shopping within minutes.
Parkway Center Mall, perched above the asphalt near the Fort Pitt Tunnel, promised convenience, jobs, and the sort of indoor, climate-controlled community that defined American retail ambition in the early 1980s.
Forty-odd years later, the mall is gone, the lone surviving supermarket has gone dark, and the surrounding office buildings are drifting into foreclosure…