Economy
Downtown New Castle is currently undergoing a redevelopment centered around the Cascade Center. (see below) The downtown streets and sidewalks were completely rebuilt in the early 21st century to resemble the style at the start of the 19th century, and local businesses are beginning to move into the downtown area. The revitalization of downtown also saw two major routes into the city, Pennsylvania Route 65 and U.S. Route 224, which have both had their terminus extended into downtown since the start of 2007.
InfoCision, a telemarketing services company, restored the old New Castle Dry Goods Co. building, where it moved its offices into from the Cascade Galleria. The building had been vacant since the late 1980s when the Troutman's department store closed and became registered on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is now known as the Pier I Complex Building.
The downtown area has also become the home of several bank offices, hosting the regional headquarters of Huntington, FirstMerit, and First Commonwealth (all descended from banks formerly based in the city but later acquired) as well as branches for PNC Bank and First National Bank. Mellon Bank also had offices across the street from the current Zambelli Plaza before selling off its New Castle-area branches to First National Bank, which closed the office building since it already had the aforementioned branch in downtown. Mellon's former parking lot was restored and is now the parking lot for the Cascade Center and other downtown businesses. Although the downtown has grown, many buildings and houses within the city limits are still abandoned.
The revitalization of downtown has improved economic activity. While most shopping malls have actually seen an increase in tenants in the past couple of years, many of them had seen several empty storefronts from the late 1990s until very recently. For instance, Lawrence Village Plaza, a 300,000 sq ft (28,000 m2) shopping center in Shenango Township, struggled to place a supermarket in after Sparkle closed in the late 1990s, though it still is home to a Kmart that is not officially part of the plaza. Dunham's Sports, Aaron's, and a Do It Best hardware store currently serve the plaza as anchor stores.
The Cascade Galleria, a more conventional mall located within the city near downtown, once home to Sears and G. C. Murphy, faced market competition in the mid-1990s when Wal-Mart opened its first supercenter in Pennsylvania in 1995 in Union Township west of the city. (Previously, Wal-Mart only operated standard discount stores in Pennsylvania.) Shortly after Wal-Mart opened, Sears moved across U.S. Route 224 from Wal-Mart while Lowe's, Hills, and Peebles all opened up locations in the area. Meanwhile McCrory Stores (owner of the G. C. Murphy brand) closed all of the company's stores by 2001, though the New Castle G. C. Murphy closed shortly after Wal-Mart opened.
AT&T has offices in the former G. C. Murphy side of the mall, while the former Sears portion has been subdivided into several other service-related businesses as well as a Family Dollar location and a Revol Wireless store. The United States Postal Service, in fact, currently uses the former Sears Auto Center building as a service garage for its mail trucks, while the Post Office itself has a branch inside the main portion of the mall, which it moved into after the loss of its two anchors. Hills later became Ames, which also closed its doors, and the building remains vacant. Peebles closed and is now Tractor Supply Company. Around the same time Tractor Supply Company opened, though, Peebles later reopened in another location in Neshannock Township in parts of the former Kmart section of the Field Club Commons plaza after Kmart reduced itself to one location in the New Castle area after it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002, with Tuesday Morning taking up the other half.
Read more about this topic: New Castle, Pennsylvania
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)