Editorial: Can courthouse be the anchor store for Downtown Greensburg?

In a mall, the little shops that dotted the wide corridors made the experience entertaining for many. The trip might not have seemed complete without a pretzel from a kiosk or browsing the cheap costume jewelry at a spot where you could also get your ears pierced.

But the big stores on the corner are what made malls work. They did exactly what their name suggested: They were anchors. These were the destination locations — the ones that brought people to the mall for school clothes or Christmas shopping — in a stream that could then trickle to the food court and specialty shops.

The problem is people’s habits changed. Department stores stopped being the draws they once were, closing down and stemming the flow of destination traffic. The smaller, dependent locations in between have starved as malls slowly have died.

Reversing this process has proved challenging for malls. Could it be easier for downtowns?

The Counselors of Real Estate is a professional organization of property business experts. It recently completed a report recommending ideas to Greensburg city council to rebrand and develop the area starting at its central hub and building outward.

That destination location isn’t a department store. It’s not a store at all. It is the Westmoreland County Courthouse — a building and courtyard just wrapping up its own revitalization project.

“Clustering development activity in a central location instead of spreading it out will create momentum,” said Tracy Miscik, a Greensburg resident and president of the Realtors Association of Westmoreland, Indiana and Mon Valley.

The report recommends concentration on four downtown properties — three bank buildings and a former department store. While some economic development projects survey the businesses people would like to see take root, this one appears to look at the issue of a stagnant downtown as less inventory to sell than a riddle to be solved.

The solution is not to populate downtown with individual shops people might enjoy but with the anchors that could bring large numbers first. The ideas are for apartment units and short-term rental units, an event venue and a co-working space.

It’s a smart recommendation. No one ever started building a mall around a pretzel stand.

The best aspect of these plans might be something malls don’t have with their anchors. The report’s recommendations are not just good ways to use big brick-and-mortar buildings. They also speak of flexibility, which is important in a post-pandemic world where office vacancies are a reality in many cities.