South Hills Village in Bethel Park, PA: The mall that made Route 19 what it is

South Hills Village is a two-level enclosed mall on the line between Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair, 7.5 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. Most people just call it the mall, or the place at the end of the T.

It opened on July 28, 1965 with Gimbels, Joseph Horne Co., and Sears, more than 80 shops, and a Woolworth with a cafeteria and luncheonette attached.

Gimbels closed in 1986 and became Kaufmann's. Horne's became Lazarus, then Macy's. Sears held on until 2018, leaving that end of the mall without an anchor for six years.

Almost every opening-day store name is gone. Most of the old structure is still standing.

Target took the lower floor of the old Gimbels, Dick's Sporting Goods took the two above it, and a Von Maur from Iowa, with a grand piano on the sales floor, opened on the rebuilt Sears site in November 2024.

The mall is 61 years old, was 95.1 percent occupied at the end of 2025, and is still signing new tenants.

Here is how a 1965 shopping center kept refilling itself while others emptied out.

South Hills Village opens in 1965

The Sears lease was signed more than a year before there was anything to shop in.

Don-Mark Realty, a Pittsburgh company that had assembled 85 acres of hillside where Washington Road meets Fort Couch Road, got that signature on July 6, 1964.

South Hills Village opened on a Wednesday, July 28, 1965.

It's a two-level enclosed shopping mall at 301 South Hills Village, on the boundary between Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair, 7.5 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh.

It opened with three department stores, Gimbels, Joseph Horne Co., and Sears, and more than 80 shops between them, one million square feet in all.

The roof was the whole idea.

Most shopping centers around Pittsburgh still ran along open-air walkways, where a February afternoon did what February afternoons do.

Here you parked once and walked from Gimbels to Horne's without a coat.

Early tenants were names people already knew: Woolworth and its Harvest House restaurant, Sun Drug with the Patio Coffee Shop, Stouffer's, Isaly's, National Record Mart, and Waldenbooks.

Skylights over the courts, plants growing indoors, stairs and escalators where the two levels met.

The opening campaign called it the largest enclosed shopping community between New York and Chicago.

Then Oxford built something bigger

Don-Mark changed its name to Oxford Development Company in 1966.

South Hills Village was the firm's first large shopping center, and the experience paid for everything that followed.

It was the biggest mall in the Pittsburgh area for four years. Then Oxford opened Monroeville Mall in 1969, larger, with three department stores.

What the mall had already done to the region held anyway. Families who used to ride downtown for a department store drove south instead, from Mt.

Lebanon, from Peters Township, from the top of Washington County.

A big share of that spending left Pittsburgh's business districts for a field off Route 19.

Washington Road filled in around it.

Shopping plazas, restaurants, supermarkets, banks, car dealers, all of them wanting to sit near the traffic the mall generated.

Some of it eventually competed with the mall for the same shoppers.

By the mid-1980s the place had grown to 126 stores with parking for 5,000 cars.

The T arrives at the front door

Connecticut General Life Insurance Company bought the mall in January 1982. Oxford stayed on to run it, so nothing changed for shoppers.

That spring, members of a socialist campaign asked to collect nomination signatures inside and were told no.

The owner had a flat rule against political activity.

The argument went all the way up, and on October 6, 1986, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the owner.

A mall open to the public is still private property, and its corridors aren't sidewalks.

Then came something almost no other mall in the region had.

Light-rail cars started running between South Hills Village and Castle Shannon on April 15, 1984.

On July 7, 1985, the line ran through to the subway under downtown Pittsburgh, and the station beside the mall became the southern end of the line.

You could get there without a car, which is still unusual for a mall in the Pittsburgh suburbs.

A seven-story park-and-ride garage with 2,200 spaces opened next to the station in May 2005.

The garage started charging in June 2005. The last free surface lot closed in November 2007.

Two anchors, six signs

Gimbels lasted 21 years. The company shut down its Pittsburgh division in 1986, and the location here closed on August 23 of that year.

Crews spent the next year rebuilding it.

The building got a third level and grew to 254,000 square feet, and Kaufmann's opened inside it on August 13, 1987.

That end of the mall had a full department store again.

The other end went next. Federated Department Stores bought the Horne's chain, and the Joseph Horne name came off the store on August 29, 1994.

That building was pushed to three levels and 277,700 square feet and reopened as Lazarus on October 20, 1995.

Lazarus didn't stick either. The store became Lazarus-Macy's on August 1, 2003, then dropped everything but Macy's in 2005.

If you shopped there your whole life, you bought clothes in the same corner of the same building under four different signs.

Two of the three names from opening day were gone by 2005, and the floor plan they were built around was still there underneath.

A glass elevator and 14 food stalls

The interior people remember from the 1990s came out of a two-phase project costing $15 million.

Entrances were rebuilt, marble went down on the floors, and a glass elevator went into the middle of the mall with a new escalator beside it.

The first phase finished in July 1993.

The food court came next, opening in late 1994 near the upper-level main entrance: 14 bays, 21,600 square feet, all the quick food in one place instead of scattered through the corridors.

Simon Property Group bought the mall on September 29, 1997, as part of a $1.30 billion deal covering 12 regional malls and a community center.

Simon started its own overhaul in April 2014. Five of the six entrances got new fronts, lighting, and automatic doors.

Inside came new tile, glass and stainless-steel railings, and escalators where stairs had been near Macy's.

The food court was rebuilt around new seating, charging stations, and renovated restrooms.

Most of the work happened overnight so the stores could open in the morning.

Forever 21, Ulta, and Soma arrived during that first year. Kay Jewelers renovated, and Dairy Queen moved.

The store that lasted two years

In 2005, Federated bought May Department Stores and found itself owning two competing department stores in the same mall: Kaufmann's at one end, Macy's at the other.

One of them had to go.

Boscov's agreed in February 2006 to take the Kaufmann's buildings here and at Monroeville, and the store opened on August 26, 2006.

The arrangement was supposed to keep a department store in that building for at least seven years. It got two.

Boscov's filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2008 and picked 10 stores to close, including both of its new Pittsburgh-area locations.

The closing was announced on August 4, and the store was shut by October.

Three levels sat empty through 2009 and 2010.

The replacements surfaced on January 14, 2011: Target and Dick's Sporting Goods, splitting the old building between them.

The slope of the site made that possible: both floors touch the parking lots at different points.

Target took 145,000 square feet on the lower level, Dick's 85,000 upstairs. Dick's opened October 17, 2012, and Target followed on March 6, 2013.

A pool the zoning wouldn't allow

Sears announced on May 31, 2018 that its store here was closing.

The auto center went first in late June, the main store in September, after 53 years. During the bankruptcy that followed, Sears gave up the lease.

On August 16 a sprinkler pipe burst and brought down part of an interior ceiling.

Nobody was hurt, but 10 nearby stores, including Apple, had to close while crews cleaned up and made repairs.

All were back open by the end of the month.

The empty Sears and its auto center then drew the biggest redevelopment plan the mall had seen in decades.

On February 13, 2019, Bethel Park's planning commission voted unanimously to recommend a plan later priced at $50 million: shops facing outward where Sears had been, a 120,000-square-foot Life Time fitness club with indoor and outdoor pools and a deck approaching 40,000 square feet, plus a reworked food court with restaurants opening onto the parking lot.

Bethel Park's rules for that district required recreation to stay indoors.

Life Time wanted the outdoor pool and was willing to build somewhere else in the Pittsburgh area to get it. Nothing was ever built.

What South Hills Village is now

The replacement came from Iowa.

Von Maur announced on August 30, 2022 that it would put a 118,000-square-foot, two-level store in the old Sears position, its first anywhere in Pennsylvania.

Crews replaced the old Sears with a brick-fronted store, wide sales floors, original artwork, and a grand piano on the sales floor.

The work cost $30 million and brought more than 100 jobs.

It opened November 9, 2024, the chain's 38th store, six years after that end of the mall went dark.

The 1965 layout now holds Macy's where Horne's was, Von Maur where Sears was, and Target and Dick's inside the old Gimbels shell.

Around them sit Barnes & Noble, DSW, Ulta, Ashley HomeStore, Bonefish Grill, and AMC's 10 screens.

The mall had more than 130 stores in early 2024, and it finished 2025 at 1,126,700 square feet and 95.1 percent occupancy.

It turned 60 on July 28, 2025.

This year's work includes refinished terrazzo floors, new entrance signs and doors, soft seating, and a family restroom by the food court.

Come on a weekday and the T still empties out beside the mall, people walking from the platform into the corridors.

The food court is where it was put in 1994, the piano is playing in Von Maur, and Spencer's is listed as coming soon near Macy's.