1970's Vintage HUD and the City of Middletown

  

Construction pics of City Centre Mart/Mall, Middletown, Oh circa 1970s

In browsing through the Middletown Public Library's online historical collection, I came across several construction pictures from the early 1970s of Middletown's City Centre Mart (renamed Mall at some point).  I thought I would share them here.  Most are in Black and White.

Plans to make downtown Middletown more suburban actually began in the late 1950s with an experiment that shut off Central Ave to vehicle traffic and created the pedestrian Central Plaza.  I'm not quite sure how long this lasted, but at some point in the 1960s, a local artist was asked to create some renderings of new storefronts for buildings along Central Ave.  One of those renderings appears below:



By the late 1960s, a new direction was taken (probably because the Middletown received several millions in federal dollars) to enclosed the intersection of Central and Broad Streets and extend that enclosure 500 feet in each direction to created an indoor, climate controlled mall.  The old intersection would serve as the focal point with a large fountain.   Next is a rendering of the mall's inside that must have been developed during the planning stages:



The remaining pictures are mostly of the canopy's construction.  Part of the project involved removing old, deteriotated buildings.  You get a chance to see how the area looked before the mall and before some of the buildings were torn down.

























Both the Filson's and Weber's buildings were casualties of the mall's construction:


And finally, a completed entrance.   This was known as the West Entrance at Main Street and what was Central.  Each entrance had some sort of public artwork or fountain.


The mall's removal began in the early 2000s and the project was completed in Winter 2003.  I have posted some pics in the forum on how the area looks today.  I have some pics of the mall prior and during its removing, but they aren't electronic.