The shopping center was unveiled in a pivotal moment in 1960 central Pennsylvania.
. For a week in September, the city commemorated its past, reveled in its present and looked toward its future, burying aOne notable symbol of this suburban shift was the Colonial Park Plaza. The shopping center, which opened two months later on Jonestown Road in Lower Paxton Township, reflected customers’ increasing preference for living and shopping in the suburbs instead of Harrisburg’s downtown department stores.
The 350,000-square-foot mall featured about 40 stores, including Sears, which had relocated from Market Square in Harrisburg and was operated separately. “The development of shopping centers has gone through its birth pains and infancy,” Ralph Biernbaum, vice president and general manager of Food Fair Properties, said before the Colonial Park Plaza opened. “Today, it has reached maturity.”Less than three weeks after the Colonial Park Plaza’s unveiling, the U.S. Census Bureau released 1960 population numbers.
But as the 1960s raced into the 1970s, a “mall craze hit,” historian and longtime Patriot-News columnist Paul Beers wrote, and “it became a flurry.” In 1987, the Trans-Lux’s successor, the Eric Colonial Park, was moved to a different part of the mall, and its former building, along with the structure that once housed the bowling alley, were demolished to make way for Boscov’s and other stores. The“Towne Center” zoning district
“Lower Paxton Twp., just 10 years ago a place you thought about when you wanted to take a drive through the country,” the newspaper said, “may eventually have a population greater than the city’s.”
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