The Orange Plaza was usually a destination for my family every couple of weekends. I grew up about 20 minutes away in Washingtonville and the only thing to do on dreary weekends was go to the mall.
I have fond memories of the whole place, from Sears to JC Penny to Sullivans and Greens to Kastle Brothers. The place was dimly lit and originally was carpeted before tile was installed in the 1980's. There was a cool 70's mall fountain at it's center, where people often threw pennies and where numerous signings by pro athletes took place. I met Mookie Wilson, George Foster, and Joel Youngblood from the NY Mets there and John Tonelli from the Islanders. This was about 1982 when I was 8, so it is a bit fuzzy. I am not sure how long they continued to hold those meet and greets, but they were always packed. My favorite store ever was Helen Gallagher Gifts, which was the place that sold rock t-shirts, KISS masks, posters, black lights, etc. It was an independent Hot Topic of the late 70's and early 80's.
In reference to a comment made by another commentator, the roof did indeed collapse during the late 70's, early 80's. During a torrential rainstorm there was a mishap with the sprinkler system, flooding the roof of a store called Howlands, which sold clothing. Eventually the roof collapsed, but it was afterhours. My dad brought me there two days later to look at the carnage - it was a pretty big store and a total mess. I still remember the picture on the front page of the Times Herald record with water rushing down the escalator.
Growing up in Rockland County NY, my dad was a fan of roadtrips on the weekends. These roadtrips *ALWAYS* led to random malls. Orange Plaza is a good hour from Rockland, but my dad loved long drives.
As stated in other reports, the anchors were Sears and Sullivans (I don't remember the JC Penney's). I remember a lot about about this mall, it was always cold and the floors were concrete. The mall was two stories, but I don't believe two stories but only one level was used as retail space.
Downstairs next to Sullivans was a strange staircase that lead down to a cafeteria of some sort and a Burger King. The Burger King was really strange, it had a ton of stained glass. The ladies in the cafeteria wore uniforms with "Orange Plaza" on them.
I remember a lot of the stores in the mall being food related. The ones that stand out in my mind were: Orange Julius, where my mom would always get one. Some sort of cookie/bake store front that had the wheel part of a windmill on top of the store, I don't know if it moved or not but it was rather large and I always looked for it when at the mall. Lastly, Fannie Farmer, the candy spot. This was more of a kiosk. I used to get a chocolate lollipop every time we were there, they were foil wrapped and had little characters on them. I always got the blond girl jumpping rope.
Sullivans was crazy. I once "ran away" from my parents in the store and ran through the China department breaking a glass, which prompted me to "hide" in the elevator. I pushed the emergency red button which caused the elevator to stop and lots of bells to go off. I landed safely on the bottom floor of Sullivans in the billing/service pickup department. Also on the bottom floor was the children's department. It had green carpet. LIME green carpet. LIME green SHAGGY carpet. It was bad.
I was sad to see OP go before I could go in as a semi-adult and see it for the last time.
I remember the Orange Plaza well, even though I was just a kid when it went under. It was indeed dimly lit, and I remember there being hardly anyone there. I guess that was close to the time it was closed. But there was a Friendly's, and that was the height of the trip out there. My brother would ALWAYS get grilled cheese, and I would ALWAYS get a hot dog. Any attempt by our mother to deviate us from those choices resulted in great cries of injustice. There was also a Woolworths, which by then was also close to folding.
When the Galleria came in, it was so much bigger, brighter, and better that the poor Plaza didn't stand a chance. I, too, in whatever capacities a 12-year-old has for boycotting something, boycotted the Galleria for a while, but there was just no getting around it.
The Orange Plaza was vacant for nearly a decade but did open again, recently, and my brother and I went last year to visit it. They would have done better, I think, in just tearing it down because of how badly it is set up now. There are two main buildings (Kohls, and another I can't remember) in the front and then a series of other stores in the back. It's all an outdoor mall now--that is, you can't go inside and walk around like a regular mall. There's a pathway the length of the back that takes you past all the stores. But this pathway is dark with a low ceiling and massive, squat columns that encourage one to think that all means of evil is hiding behind. And what stores do they have now? Two or three dollar stores, a couple plus-size stores, a Quiznos, and a handful of other unimpressive, irrelevant ones. I predict that this second round of the Orange Plaza will be more brief than the original.
Like Brian states in his commentary...Middletown is one of the perfect examples of how sprawl makes retail evolve. I never got to expierience this mall, but I have gone passed it many times. From my knowledge, there were three anchor stores in the mall. They were Sullivans...JCPenney...and Sears.
When the Galleria at Crystal Run opened in 1992 just down the road..the mall started to suffer. Stores quickly moved to the new Galleria..and both Sears and JCPenney moved out. Sullivans closed in 1994...and then finally the mall was closed.
In 2001..the mall was demolished and in it's place rose the new Shoppes at Orange Plaza with a new Walmart SuperCenter..Kohls..Bed Bath and Beyond..Rag Shop..Modells Sporting Goods and more. Still to come is Burlington Coat Factory..Krispy Kreme...and many others.
What I am going to talk about is this story I heard about the ceiling caving in, due to poor construction. Can anyone varify this? Other stories were that the mall was dingy, poorly lit, and smelled funny, even when it was opened to the public.
I think what got this mall in the end, really was the super-regional Galleria that was built on the other side of the highway. Any Middletown locals with info out there? E-mail me at horseboy@capital.net. The mall is gone, so I wouldn't bother visiting, but deadmalls.com has exclusive pre-demolition photos availible below.
This town still continues to fight sprawl. Most recently with the demolition of Orange Plaza, Walmart now plans to build a brand new supercenter in it's place. Walmart already has a store across the highway that went in not more than five years ago. Plans are to convert this to a Sam's Club. Also going into Orange Plaza is a Kohls, among others.
An excellent source of information about this mall and area can be found from the Times Herald Record news archive. I recommend checking it out and doing searches for "Orange Plaza", "Caldor", "Bradlees", "Galleria", "Kohl", and "Walmart".
"We think that we would not go to mom and pop stores any more, but to big malls. And what we thought we were doing was saving five cents on bread and 10 cents on milk, but what we were actually doing was changing the social construction of the society." These comments were made by my wonderful colleague Patricia Hunt Perry of Newburgh in a video that I am editing as part of a project I have been running to bring ecological literacy into the curriculum at Ramapo College of New Jersey. They readily apply to Orange County.
Indeed, there has been a social transformation of Orange County in the face of mall-development affecting the scale of relationships, the health of our communities, the viability of the local small business sector, and the quality of our environment.
Take Middletown. Beginning in the 1950s, Ed Lloyd pioneered the miracle mile along Route 211. Playtogs on Dolson Avenue. Both forged a shift of business from the center to the periphery in keeping with the popularity of the automobile in post-World War II America. While Lloyd and others were community-minded in shifting the balance to the fringe from the center, they helped to put Middletown into a spiral from which it may never recover, and in the end, to create their own commercial demise. The center decayed while the surroundings grew.
For Middletown, Orange Plaza dealt the coup de grace, the transition
from strip mall to mall, only to itself be taken out, in turn, by the
Galleria super-mall. In the transition, the diversity of local and small businesses has been crushed in the favor of standardized and
homogenized theme shopping. New wealth was created in this transformation, but it was wealth that was detached from the community, with increasing amounts going to far off investors trawling Orange County for profits.
The balance of power (and ratables) shifted to Wallkill, which virtually surrounds Middletown (a similar transformation happened between the City of Newburgh and Vails Gate and the Route 300 strip and has - or is being - repeated in our villages, as well). The sense of permanence and quality that came with investments in community was replaced with an architecture and a mode of doing business that is ever transient. Through new development on farmlands, redevelopment of obsolete commercial land uses, and corporate takeover, a frenzy of investments created an ever changing cacophony of unmusical chairs.
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It is not surprising that in Orange Environment's comments on the first Wallkill Galleria, we were concerned about adverse economic and social, as well as environmental impacts. Such issues were never really discussed in the environmental review process, despite our efforts. The Galleria was approved, and the new main street Orange County was created. As we predicted in our comments on the Galleria, Orange Plaza followed the fate of the businesses it had replaced. Galleria created a district of mega development, with such community killers as Wal-Mart and Home Depot soon in tow. Even within the Galleria, a progression was evident, whereby smaller and more local business people were supplanted by national chain stores. In the end, our Galleria could be located anywhere. It is placeless and deplacing. It is an anonymous experience in a synthetic world. |
I boycotted the Galleria for the first year, but as the parent of a teen-ager, I have gradually become enured to the place, particularly tolerating it when it is least crowded. But now even this tolerable experience of the Galleria is threatened by the proposed massive expansion toward the status of mega-mall. The expanded mall would reach out much further, threatening community integrity for a hundred square miles. Applauded as economic growth by this paper and others, the Town of Wallkill appears poised to rubber stamp the expansion with little consideration for the consequences. Just to force the issue, Galleria's owner, the Pyramid Corporation, apparently arrived in Wallkill with a draft impact statement already finished, not even bothering to wait for the legal steps by which a lead agency for the review is named and the need for an impact statement is determined. If that's true, this brash move will also preempt public and town involvement in determining the scope of the draft impact statement. This approach shows disdain for the law and for the people who will bear the brunt of the Galleria expansion. In today's Orange County, it is a strategy that may well succeed.
Meanwhile, similar threats confront the rest of our county. The small towns and villages of southeastern Orange County now live in the shadow of the ever-growing Woodbury Commons. A caller to the Orange Environment office recently summed up the social transformation that we are allowing. "It is as if this is no longer the Town of Woodbury, it is the Town of Woodbury Commons."
Michael R. Edelstein is president of Orange Environment, Inc.,
a non-profit environmental group, and professor of environmental
psychology at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
This article originally appeared in the Times Herald
Record news from
this article.
Some say the mall caused it's own demise... read about it here.
Click here for more books from Amazon about Retail and Malls! including.. "One Nation under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping" |
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