Harundale Plaza, at 7440 Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie, Maryland, is an open-air shopping center now. Harundale Mall opened on that site in 1958 as the first enclosed shopping center in the state.
The mall was a climate-controlled shopping street with a single department store, and Hochschild Kohn ran that store on two floors. No other major store in the mall had a full upper level.
Most of the enclosed mall was torn down from March 1998 into 1999, and the fountain court and the upstairs community room went with it. New stores went up in rows facing the parking.
No tenant at Harundale Plaza takes up more room today than Urban Air Adventure Park, and Lidl's grocery store comes next. Both sit inside the old Hochschild Kohn building, which went up with the mall.
A mall built around one two-story store
At 9 a.m. on Wednesday, October 1, 1958, Maryland's governor, the president of Hochschild Kohn, and James W. Rouse opened Harundale Mall at Ritchie Highway and Aquahart Road in Glen Burnie, Maryland.
Traffic backed up for about two miles on Route 2 as drivers tried to get onto the property.
Harundale was the first enclosed shopping center in Maryland, and its site is now Harundale Plaza, an open-air shopping center at 7440 Ritchie Highway.
Rouse wanted a suburban shopping place that could carry some of the civic and social functions of a downtown commercial street, and his company, Community Research and Development, developed Harundale as an enclosed, climate-controlled shopping street with one department store.
The mall's storefronts were more open to view than in later enclosed malls, with sliding glass fronts facing a common area of seating and planting, and those common areas were unusually large.
Hochschild Kohn, the Baltimore department store, had announced a Ritchie Highway branch by December 1954.
At Harundale it took about 100,000 square feet, and it was the only major store in the mall with a full second retail level.
From the fountain court, stairs rose to the mall offices, restrooms, community room, and the second floor of Hochschild Kohn.
The store's Severn Room terrace restaurant looked out over the court.
Before the mall opened, downtown Glen Burnie was still the town's everyday shopping center, especially around Crain Highway.
Harundale shifted much of that activity to Ritchie Highway, which had opened in 1939 and quickly become a major road for drivers between Baltimore and Annapolis.
By the 1950s, suburban homes and automobile-oriented businesses were spreading through the corridor, and Harundale followed the same pattern with a large parking field around the mall.
Fresh tile and a new name on the anchor
Harundale's 1980 renovation started on July 14.
Fresh paint and tile went in throughout the mall, and the common areas got larger planters, more seating, new kiosk designs, and a picnic area in the south court.
The job was budgeted at about $250,000 and left the fountain court and enclosed street in place.
Harundale's basic scale did not change: one department store on a site with little room to grow.
New regional malls were being built much larger and around several anchors.
Hutzler's acquired four Hochschild Kohn stores in 1984, Harundale's among them, and opened in the building that October.
It used Harundale to replace its own smaller store at the Southdale Shopping Center, so the building remained a department store under the new name.
Marley Station opens and Value City moves in
In 1987 Marley Station opened about a mile to the south.
It belonged to a later generation of regional malls, with two large department stores and far more retail space, while Harundale was competing from almost the same compact site it had occupied since the late 1950s.
Within a short time the older mall was losing shoppers and tenants to the new one.
In September 1988 Hutzler's put Harundale into its Value Way discount program. The experiment was short-lived, and the store was gone by early 1989.
That February, Value City was announced for the building. It opened in the former Hochschild Kohn and Hutzler's space.
On the building's upper floor, the old Severn Room had become a Horn & Horn Smorgasbord, which remained until 1989.
Boarded shops around an open Value City
Harundale was about 80 percent occupied when the Rouse Company put it up for sale in 1995.
Rouse's Community Research and Development had become the Rouse Company decades earlier, but the mall still carried its 1950s layout: broad courts, an upstairs community room, and limited retail space on a site away from a major crossroads.
Instead of another major investment in the enclosed center, Rouse chose to sell.
The enclosed portion of Harundale shut down in 1997. During the summer, boards and barriers cut off the former run of small shops inside.
Two tenants with exterior access kept operating, one of them Value City.
Demolition around a store that stayed open
By late November 1997, Manekin was preparing to buy Harundale from The Rouse Company, although the deal had not yet closed.
Its redevelopment concept called for roughly 10 to 20 stores on the site.
Demolition began in March 1998 and continued into 1999.
The enclosed street, its courts, the fountain area, many of the small-store bays, and most of the other 1958 construction came down.
The Value City building was the main piece of the old mall kept on purpose, and the store remained open while the new center went up around it.
Super Fresh, a supermarket, had signed for the redevelopment by August 1998, and by the end of 1999 it was open in Harundale Plaza beside Value City, banks, restaurants, and smaller shops.
AJWright had been announced in November as another major tenant.
The open-air center covered 217,600 square feet, with its buildings set in rows and on pads facing the parking and access roads.
Almost all of the walking between stores now happened outdoors, and the indoor seating and the upstairs community room were gone from the plan.
By 2005 the plaza had 17 tenants, with the supermarket and Value City as its anchors, and was 100 percent occupied.
The old mall had been about 80 percent occupied when it went up for sale.
From Burlington to Lidl and Urban Air
Value City closed in 2008, and Burlington Coat Factory took over its lease and used the old department-store block as a large-format apparel store.
By the mid-to-late 2010s the store was one of the plaza's key tenants. In September 2019 it left for the nearby Centre at Glen Burnie.
Lidl opened a grocery store in part of the former Burlington area on December 16, 2020, with 31,900 square feet.
Urban Air Adventure Park's 42,600-square-foot indoor park opened on July 13, 2024.
Urban Air and Lidl are now the two largest tenants at Harundale Plaza, and between them they occupy most of the former department-store block.
In 1998 that block went on trading while the enclosed mall around it was torn down.
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