Miracle Mile Shopping Center (Monroeville, PA)
Monroeville, Pennsylvania - circa 1950s
Vintage postcard view of the bustling Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Monroeville, PA, which opened in November of 1954, and was originally officially named Pittsburgh Miracle Mile Town & Country Shopping Center Inc.--thank the Shopping Gods it got shortened! Cool shot here of the mall's S. S. Kresge and Sun Drugs stores
Mall history: 1954 - present
Current website: here
Current aerial view
Previous entries: 1
Labels: '50s, 1950s, Kresge, Miracle Mile, Monroeville, Pennsylvania
posted by Keith @ 7/07/2007
9 Comments:
Just a thought: I Wonder if any zombies from DAWN OF THE DEAD ever wandered over to Miracle Mile from nearby Monroeville Mall back in the late '70s when the whole "dead rising" thing was going on?
LOL!!! Gotta see the original DotD film. I only saw the reamke a few years ago and didn't think it was all that. Was miracle Mile still around by the late 70s?
I like this postcard but I can't help but think this looks familiar. So I clicked on the other entry you have and saw a more distant shot of this place. Aha!
"Was miracle Mile still around by the late 70s?"
Scratch that question. Miracle Mile sounds like that was a discount department store back in the 60s and 70s. I got confused here.
Strip malls like this remind me of the days my mother used to stop at the Kresge store at this large strip mall called Fox Point Shopping Center (The pylon read Fox Point Mall) in Neenah WI. That place, considering how young I was at the time (4-6 yr old) was big and long...it was an 'L-shaped' strip. I still recall many of its tenants as well..nearly 25-30 total, Kresge, JCPenney and Pick n' Save Warehouse Foods among them being the anchors.
By the late 1970s, SS Kresge Co stores that still existed just became "KRESGE" during its final years in business (probably '77, when Kresge Co. rebranded to K-mart Corp., to '87), so read out the large all-caps triple-stroked neon sign above the only Kresge I ever went to.....in that very same mall.
Keith I noticed in some of your strip mall features, Kresge / Woolworth, Kresge / WT Grant, or Woolworth / WT Grant, existed in the SAME mall. Talk about competition even back then, not just today with Wal*Mart vs Target!
I'm sure though, the stores all differentiated enough from each other, despite overlap in some in-store departments, where they were all serviceable in some way.
Nice to read (in the article you also linked to in a previous post) that this strip mall has weathered the changes and is still thriving today. That is rare among huge strip malls like this.
I remember going to this shopping mall when I was six years old to pick up my mother from the grocery store about 1962. Used to live in Monroeville. Interesting
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Miracle Mile in Monroeville is/was very similar to Great Southern in Bridgeville. Both built within a year of each other & both boasting some of the same stores, I can see why photos of the two are often mixed up & misindentified online. As a matter of fact, at first glance I almost thought this was Great Southern, but for the fact that at GSSC, The Sun Drug was further down to the left of Kresge along the main strip....
It looks just like the Lake Success shopping center on Long Island, but different store names. I bet they all had the same architect.
Like Anonymous above, I was a kid (7) when we moved to Murrysville in 1962. We would shop at Miracle Mile until we moved back to Long Island in 1966. I remember the Kresge's, as well as Kaufman, Woolworth's and the two grocery stores at either end (Kroger and, I believe, Thoroughfare). Of course, there was a barber shop and other smaller outlets. We as kids loved our time in the Pittsburgh area, and I often think back to those days with great fondness.
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