Macy's at Logan Valley Mall: the place you didn't question
For years, the Macy's at Logan Valley Mall was the kind of place you didn't need to think about. It was just there, doing the job anchors do: pulling people in, giving the mall weight, making the whole place feel like a real destination instead of a hallway with outlets.
Its address was 5580 Goods Lane, Suite 2178, Altoona, PA 16602.
The mall itself was large by any normal standard - roughly 783,000 square feet of indoor retail, the sort of space built for the assumption that a lot of people would keep showing up.
Logan Valley Mall wasn't born in one clean moment. It was built in stages, with parts dating back to the early 1960s, and it is often pegged as a 1965-era mall.
It was an old-school setup: big department stores at the ends, smaller shops in between, the steady rhythm of Sears and JCPenney.
There was also a Hess's store at the far west end, which at one point sat vacant, like a warning sign you could walk past without reading.
Fire, rebuilding, and the version that survived
In the early hours of December 16, 1994, fire broke out inside the G.C. Murphy store.
The flames spread quickly through older sections of the mall, which lacked a sprinkler system.
By the time it was over, fifteen stores and nine kiosks were destroyed, and dozens of others had heavy smoke and water damage.
The disaster cut through the original section of Logan Valley Mall, leaving long corridors closed and many tenants displaced.
Crown American immediately rolled out a three-phase recovery project. The first phase brought in a new Kaufmann's store to replace the shuttered Hess's space, along with renovations to undamaged areas.
A two-story replacement wing opened in May 1996, restoring some of the lost square footage.
Kaufmann's becomes Macy's, then Macy's bows out
The store that people later called Macy's didn't start as Macy's.
In the early 2000s, it showed up in the mall's major tenant lineup as Kaufmann's, a name that felt more regional and more old department-store formal.
By then, the mall had already lived through the fire and renovation and was in its post-rebuild phase, still presenting itself as stable.
That stability did not protect the signage. In the mid-2000s, Kaufmann's was folded into the national Macy's brand shift, with conversions rolling through in fall 2006.
Same building, same escalators, new name out front.
That was the era when a lot of local department-store identities were flattened into a single national one, which was convenient for corporate branding and less meaningful for anyone who remembered the old names.
In 2011, Macy's focused on storewide campaigns designed to make all their stores feel like one big team.
One example was a March of Dimes fundraising shopping day held at every Macy's, which turned a regular shopping day into a planned, nationwide event.
Around the same time, the company also ran large seasonal programs in stores, like the holiday "Believe" letterbox stations that connected customer visits to donations for Make-A-Wish, supported by in-store events and the usual signs, reminders, and staff encouragement.
On November 20, 2018, Logan Township police said two men went to the jewelry counter at the Macy's in Logan Valley Mall, asked to see diamond bracelets, then grabbed several bracelets and ran.
The report published the next day described an employee struggling as at least one bracelet was pulled from the employee's hand, and it noted that one bracelet was later found inside the store, while the missing jewelry was estimated at about $16,000.
Fast forward to the exit: on January 9, 2025, Macy's confirmed the Altoona store would be among 66 closings, expected in the first quarter.
The location was also included on the company's fiscal 2024 year-end closure list.
After that, it stopped showing up as an operating store in Macy's Pennsylvania listings, which is the corporate equivalent of turning off the lights and locking the door.
The present: a large, quiet box for rent
What the property is now can be described in one sentence, and it's not a poetic one. The former Macy's box is available - about 150,000 square feet across two levels.
That is enormous, and also weirdly generic. A department store is built for a specific kind of retail life: wide aisles, big floor plates, storage, loading access, the whole machine behind the scenes.
Once it's empty, it's hard not to see it as a shell built for a past version of shopping.
The mall has done reinvention before, whether it wanted to or not. It was built in stages. It was rebuilt after a major fire.
It kept the old anchor format going longer than many places managed. Even in 2024, the directory still treated Macy's as a given.
Now the map is wrong, the box is sitting there, and the future is basically a question of what anyone can do with a two-level space that large in a world that doesn't need department stores to make a mall feel alive.
someone needs to buy the logan valley mall and turn it back into a mall again
I get the impulse, but the hard part is that "a mall again" needs a reason to exist in 2025 that it did not need decades ago. When malls do recover, it is usually because they become a place you go for an experience, not just a transaction.