When Malls Still Mattered
There was a time when ShoppingTown Mall was where you bought shoes, caught a movie, picked up cough drops, and bumped into someone from high school, all before dinner.
Built in DeWitt, an eastern suburb of Syracuse, NY, it opened in March 1954 as an open-air retail strip and quickly became a reliable fixture in the regional economy.
People came for JCPenney, Addis, Woolworth, Walgreens, and even Acme Markets. They stayed because it kept changing just enough to stay useful. ShoppingTown Mall wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be. It was a mall that worked…