WEST MIFFLIN, Pa. — When Chris Kelly was a kid growing up in Homestead, like most kids from working-class families, he would pile in the family car and drive out to watch the glow of the slag heap in nearby West Mifflin.
“The hot molten slag was leftover waste from the steel-making process that would come by railroad from the mills in nearby Braddock, Duquesne, and my hometown of Homestead. When they poured it from these huge ladles, it looked like a volcano with lava streaming down the hill,” he explained.
“It was spectacular, it lit up the night sky like fireworks,” he said, chuckling at how ridiculous it might sound to someone who never saw the industrial phenomena that for him and any other kid who grew up in an industrial area was commonplace family entertainment.
Fifty years later, Kelly, 64, is in a vacant parking lot of the once grand Century III Mall that was built on top of the slag heap in the late ’70s. He’s waiting to see what is in store next for this spot that has brought so much joy, change, turbulence, innovation, and disappointment to the municipality he now serves as mayor.
“In the 1970s, West Mifflin started to change from an industrial hub to a commercial corridor and ultimately a destination spot when Youngstown developer DeBartolo Corporation decided to build Century III Mall, which was then the third-largest indoor mall in America,” he explained, pausing for emphasis: “On a slag heap.”
Everyone thought it was crazy.
Kelly, who had gone from a Homestead kid to a Homestead police officer, was in his early twenties at the time; the mall had an immediate and detrimental impact on his hometown. “It wasn’t just that the mills had closed, it was this mall that had just opened that took business away from all the mom and pop shops,” he explained.
In Homestead, as the furniture, clothing, and hardware stores that had served the town for generations started to board up, the tax base nearly collapsed. Then, windows started to get blown out, and crime grew.
A mere four-and-a-half miles away in West Mifflin, Century III Mall was booming.
“Century III became the mall for the working-class family, it was where people shopped, it was where they went on dates, it was where they socialized, it was very special for those reasons, but it also contributed to the collapse of Homestead,” he said of the 1.2 million square foot steel and glass structure that boasted over 200 stores, boutiques, and restaurants when it opened.
Forty years later, Kelly is in sitting in the same parking lot people marveled over (free parking!) and where today only seven stores still exist.
Earlier this week, the massive mall was declared unsafe and uninhabitable by the West Mifflin building inspector and temporarily closed.
In a twist of irony four-and-a-half miles down the road, back in Homestead, business is thriving again thanks to The Waterfront, a Main Street open-air shopping mall that sits on the exact same land once occupied by U.S. Steel’s Homestead Steel Works plant that used to dump the molten slag on the same site where the ghost town of Century III languishes.
Some serious weird karmic justice is going on here.
Century III started off as locally owned and operated. The owners, the Youngstown DeBartolos, were culturally connected to the region — they had owned the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, the USFL’s Pittsburgh Maulers football, and the Pittsburgh Spirit of the Major Indoor Soccer League.
Kelly has tried to work with the current owners, Moonbeam, to no avail. So, years ago, he wisely took the Century III tax revenue estimate out of West Mifflin’s budget because of the instability of the management.
He also tried to lure Amazon to use the space for its proposed headquarters last year, which ultimately went to the New York and Washington areas.
Kelly still remains optimistic for the future of the site. He thinks it has a third life waiting for it, as long as it’s in good hands.
“We saw how Homestead rebounded after years of economic and societal decay. We didn’t just lose the heart of the downtown, we lost the churches and the social organization, a lot of them made up of business owners,” he explained.
“A lot of that kind of society fabric is starting to rebound, but you have to realize that sometimes you’re chasing air. You can’t put a finger on it.”
The surrounding retail is still doing well, but Kelly is cautious. That same Amazon he tried to court to locate their headquarters in the spacious mall is cutting into every retailer’s bottom line.
That same free parking lot that years ago lured shoppers is now being replaced by a click on an app that replaces the shopper from ever leaving home.
“We can’t repeat chasing air here again.”
