Opening the Galleria at Crystal Run
In the early 1990s, when regional malls were still seen as important public spaces as well as shopping centers, a new one was built at the intersection of Interstate 84 and Route 17 in the Town of Wallkill.
The Galleria at Crystal Run opened on April 1, 1992, seventy-one miles north of New York City, at a spot that pleased both traffic planners and store owners.
The developer was the Pyramid Company of Syracuse, which was already building large malls across the Northeast, and the Galleria followed the same pattern as the Poughkeepsie Galleria and later Palisades Center.
It was a major property: about 1.1 million square feet on two floors, built for around $100 million, with six large department stores.
G. Fox, JCPenney, Nobody Beats the Wiz, Steinbach, HomeImage by Lechmere, and Sears were on the edges, while a 16-screen Loews movie theater brought in entertainment.
In between, two levels of walkways offered the usual mix of jewelry stands, clothing stores, and food-court favorites.
The mall's opening was a big event for the region: a modern, air-conditioned gathering place for Orange County, one of New York's fastest-growing counties.
From the start, Galleria at Crystal Run was more than just a local shopping spot. It showed that the Hudson Valley could support a large, easy-to-see shopping center of its own.
How the Galleria Gutted Orange Plaza
To grasp the force of the Galleria's arrival, you have to look across Route 17. There, Orange Plaza, an older enclosed mall, had been doing the work of regional shopping for years.
Within months of Galleria at Crystal Run's opening, two of Orange Plaza's key anchors, JCPenney and Sears, decamped for the new complex.
It was a familiar American story: a gleaming successor on one side of a highway, a suddenly outmoded predecessor on the other.
The tenant's bleed at Orange Plaza proved fatal. As shoppers and chains defected, its interior emptied out.
By 2001, the mall was closed and demolished, its carcass repurposed into the Shoppes at Orange Plaza, a power center of big-box tenants that played a different game: Walmart instead of window displays, Kohl's and Burlington Coat Factory in place of traditional department stores, Home Depot where promenades once stood.
Galleria at Crystal Run, meanwhile, discovered that victory in retail is rarely clean.
Within its first five years, it went through its own bout of anchor turbulence. G. Fox was folded into Filene's as its corporate owner streamlined brands.
Nobody Beats the Wiz shut down in 1997, and its multi-story electronics box was handed to FYE, a music and entertainment retailer.
Steinbach's name came down, and Dick's Sporting Goods took over.
HomeImage by Lechmere vanished when the Lechmere chain collapsed amid Montgomery Ward's bankruptcy that same year, leaving a conspicuous dead zone in a supposedly invincible new mall.
By 1998, developers were floating an expansion that would have doubled the Galleria's size northward through the JCPenney store.
Like many late-90s mall dreams, it never left the drawing board.
From Lechmere's ghost to H&M and Target
After Lechmere closed, its big home-goods store sat empty for about three years, showing that even new malls can start to feel outdated quickly.
Around 2000, H&M moved in, bringing trendy European clothes and a bit of city style to a spot that had just lost a housewares store.
In 2001, Target opened in the rest of the old Lechmere space. Suddenly, the mall had a new main store that felt more like a brand for everyday life than a traditional department store.
Best Buy and Linens and Things opened as separate locations, adding to the group of large stores around the mall. Inside, department stores kept changing.
In 2006, when Federated joined with May Department Stores, Filene's at Crystal Run became Macy's, giving the mall a well-known national store.
The mix of stores changed over time. Borders opened to sell books, but later, bookstores left the mall. Loews Theatres became AMC as movie chains merged and changed names.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, Galleria at Crystal Run had the same stores you'd find in most big American malls: clothing chains, shoe stores, and phone kiosks.
Some might call it bland, but there's something interesting about that kind of stability.
When the mall turned 25, stores like Sweet Feelings Jewelers, Cohen's Fashion Optical, Eye to Eye Vision, Hallmark, JCPenney, Pretzel Time, Things Remembered, Wendy's, Zales, C&C Unisex, Express, and Kay Jewelers had all been there since the beginning.
The building changed, but these stores stayed.
Renovations, new amusements, and the fall of Sears
By the mid-2010s, Galleria at Crystal Run had to face a reality that malls across the country were discovering: a new coat of paint can matter as much as new stores.
AMC's movie theater got a big update in the fall of 2015.
In October 2016, the mall finished a year-long project that updated the tiles, paint, seating, lighting, and entrances.
The changes made the mall look cleaner and brighter, the kind of updates regular visitors might not notice unless they saw before-and-after photos, but that quietly made the place feel new again.
The upgrades were not just about looks. Outside the theater, Peru Cuisine Bar & Grill brought Latin food, showing that the food choices were going beyond the usual mall options.
Even more, the mall started to focus on fun activities. Round1 Bowling and Amusement opened in the area where H&M used to be, adding bowling, arcade games, and karaoke.
Then one of the original main stores finally closed.
In January 2017, Sears said it would close its Galleria at Crystal Run store, joining other Sears stores in the region that would also close, leaving only the Newburgh Mall with the brand in the Hudson Valley.
A closing sale started on January 6, and by mid-April, the Sears sign was taken down. The large space did not stay empty for long.
Urban Air Adventure Park took over part of it, and Gold's Gym moved in too, becoming a major fitness spot by around 2019.
In just a few years, a well-known store had been replaced by places for jumping and working out.
Panic, resolve, and a twenty-fifth birthday
On Sunday, November 26, 2017, Galleria at Crystal Run's carefully planned normal day was suddenly broken.
Around 3:15 in the afternoon, on the second floor in front of American Eagle, a man no one recognized fired a gun into the floor.
The bullet bounced off and hit a 49-year-old woman from Goshen and her 12-year-old son in the legs.
Their injuries were called minor, but in a busy mall on a holiday weekend, the sound of a gunshot did what it always does: it turned a shopping trip into a rush to escape.
Shoppers ran away as police from the Town of Wallkill, New York State Police, and the FBI arrived.
Special police teams searched the hallways while families ran the other way, a scene that videos on social media showed very clearly.
The suspect, described at the time as tall, dark-haired, bearded, and wearing a dark hoodie with gray or khaki pants, disappeared in the chaos.
Two days later, a 27-year-old man from Forest City, Pennsylvania, turned himself in. He was charged with first-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of third-degree assault.
The irony did not escape anyone paying attention: earlier that month, he had posted a video titled "How To Stop a Mass Shooting" on his Facebook page.
Earlier that year, in April, the mall had celebrated its 25th anniversary with breakdancers from the Famous Breakdance B-Boy Show performing at Center Court, radio hosts from K104 playing music, desserts being passed around on trays, and a band called The Drizzle playing live.
It was the kind of fun community event malls were meant to have.
Apartments, anniversaries, and regional clout
In May 2022, Crystal Run became a place to try a bigger plan: adding real homes to the area.
The Galleria Residences, a 224-apartment complex on five acres right across from the mall, were announced as a $40-45 million project with a developer from Long Island.
The plan included four floors of apartments built over parking that is below ground, with a rooftop lounge, a dog park, and a one-acre area for fun that has a patio and pool.
A special walkway for people would connect the homes right to the mall.
Construction was supposed to start in September 2022 and finish by June 2024, though anyone who has seen a building site knows those dates often change.
The idea itself was not a guess. Pyramid had already built a 282-apartment project at Kingston Collection in Massachusetts.
As of the end of 2025, The Galleria Residences is still just an approved, repeatedly extended plan at 79 Smith Road, marketed on paper as "Residences at Crystal Run" but never actually built or implemented on the ground.
April 2022 also marked the Galleria's 30th anniversary, an opportunity to reframe an aging mall as "the Hudson Valley's premier shopping, dining, and entertainment center" and as a community resource drawing from the tri-state area.
The mall promised to give away thirty gift cards during the year, and on September 17, it held events that celebrated both its own 30th birthday and the Town of Wallkill's 250th.
Crystal Run was no longer just a shopping center; it was part of a bigger community story.
Galleria at Crystal Run in 2024–25: anchors, entertainment, and employment
By the mid-2020s, Galleria at Crystal Run looked less like a single-purpose mall and more like a crowded diagram of contemporary commercial survival.
On paper, it remained what it had been built to be: 1.2 million square feet, more than 120 tenants.
The anchor lineup had settled into Macy's, JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Target.
Entertainment was no longer a side attraction but a small cluster of anchors in its own right: AMC Theatres, Urban Air Adventure Park, Round1 Bowling & Amusement, Billy Beez, Space Adventure Mini Golf, and All In Adventures.
Dining had stretched beyond the food court.
Ten eateries, including 110 Grill, Fuji Japanese Steakhouse, Peru Cuisine, Charley's Philly Steaks, and others, turned evenings at the mall into something closer to a restaurant row.
Nearly 1,700 people worked for Pyramid or its tenants, and Orange County's status as one of New York's fastest-growing counties framed the mall as a regional employment hub, not just a place to buy sneakers.
In 2024, foot traffic was more than 6.9 million, and 2024 brought its own roster of new leases: FYE returned to form in a 4,000-square-foot store on the lower level near Champs, selling CDs, vinyl, and pop-culture merchandise.
Avis Budget Car Rental opened on the upper level near 110 Grill, signaling that, for some, the mall was both a destination and a waystation.
Loans, anchors, and the hard math of survival
Behind the scenes, the balance sheet was being reworked. In July 2025, an $81 million, four-year loan closed on the property, backed by a consortium of lenders.
The financing was expressly tied to reinvestment: a full remodel of Dick's Sporting Goods and a 28,200-square-foot expansion of Gold's Gym.
Gold's, already occupying a large piece of the former Sears, announced in June 2025 that it would become an 83,000-square-foot fitness campus.
Dick's, for its part, extended its lease through 2034 and went through a complete reimagining. A grand reopening weekend from November 7 through 9, 2025, featured a ribbon-cutting at 8:45 a.m.
on the first day, mystery gift cards for the first hundred adults in line each morning, and a meet-and-greet with former New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist on November 8.
On November 7, 2025, another fashion experiment arrived: Urban Planet by Charlotte Russe, a hybrid concept combining two brands under one roof, opened on the upper level near Hollister, promising apparel, footwear, and accessories for men and women, plus an in-store DJ, spin-the-wheel promotions, and goodie bags for early shoppers.
The Galleria at Crystal Run began life as a statement that the Hudson Valley could handle a serious mall. Three decades later, it has become a case study in what it takes to keep one alive.
