Rising from the Ridge: Viewmont Mall Begins
On the ridge stretching from Scranton to Wilkes-Barre, where Route 6 folds into the great northeastern Pennsylvania shopping corridor, the Viewmont Mall has been staring down the valley since 1968.
It is a place that arrived in the age of station wagons and green vinyl benches, when the idea of an indoor shopping palace still felt futuristic.
At 100 Viewmont Mall in Dickson City, though Scrantonians usually claim it as their own, the complex sits with the quiet authority of a landmark that knows it has outlived competitors and trends.
When it opened, Crown Construction of Johnstown, which built malls for Crown American, took a ten-million-dollar chance.
The plan was simple: three big stores, twenty-one smaller shops, a shiny walkway, and the promise of a comfortable, air-conditioned place to shop.
Today, it covers about 768,000 square feet, is owned by PREIT, and has JCPenney, Macy's, Dick's House of Sport, and HomeGoods as its main stores.
But the real story is what has happened inside those walls.
Viewmont Mall has made it through the ups and downs of big store chains, changes in ownership, changing styles, Sears at its busiest and Sears when it was almost empty, grand openings, slow closings, growing and shrinking, tearing down and rebuilding, emergency evacuations, busy holiday crowds, and community fairs.
In the way that only a stubbornly alive American mall can, it has become both a commercial vessel and a civic living room. But first it had to become itself.
Sears Leads the Parade
January 1968: The Times-Tribune reported that Sears would throw open its doors on February 13, becoming the first tenant to operate at the still-forming Viewmont Mall.
It occupied a formidable 115,800 square feet, backed by an auto center and a reputation for selling nearly everything except maybe modesty.
Alongside the anchor, Crown Construction announced twenty-one initial tenants, including Thrift Drug, Northeastern National Bank, Spencer Gifts, Kinney Shoes, and a Carousel Snack Bar, ready to feed the early crowds.
By October of that year, JCPenney opened its bright new store, making the mall a place with two main stores. A third big store, W.T. Grant, opened sometime in 1968.
Viewmont Mall was the future. People came in large numbers. Parking lots filled up. The hallway became a busy shopping place.
Grant's was the first main store to fail. The chain closed in 1976, leaving an empty space that could have hurt a weaker mall.
Instead, Hess's moved in that same year, starting a pattern where the big stores would keep changing but never go away.
That constant change would shape the mall for the next fifty years.
The Hess's Years, the Kaufmann's Era, the Macy's Reign
Hess's, known for its trendy style and local pride, became a regular part of the mall. By 1987, the company felt sure enough to grow.
The Scranton-area store started building a bigger space, making the store larger as the mall moved from its early years into a new phase.
But the 1990s were tough for department stores. In late summer 1994, Hess's closed and held going-out-of-business sales in many places.
By fall 1995, the space reopened as Kaufmann's, bringing a new but familiar big store to the mall.
Kaufmann's did not last forever either. When Federated bought May Company, Kaufmann's changed its name to Macy's in September 2006, and that name is still there today.
PREIT now says it is the only Macy's within fifty miles, which makes it stand out in the area.
Through all this turnover, JCPenney never budged. The original anchors may have been a trio, but only one has remained in permanent residency. In the Viewmont story, that kind of consistency is almost eccentric.
Sears Dominates, Expands, and Crashes Out
As the years went by, Sears stayed the mall's biggest and most important store. It was the first store to open and, for a long time, the main attraction.
In 1993, the company almost doubled the store's size. This was Sears at its best: selling tools, tires, refrigerators, Toughskins, and the quiet belief that it was needed by everyone.
But Sears' decline came late and then all at once. By April 2016, it was reported that the Viewmont Sears would close.
The store shuttered by midyear and was demolished soon after. For a place built as the mall's first beating heart, its death felt abrupt and strangely surgical.
One day it was a department store, the next a construction site.
What happened next was one of the biggest changes the mall had ever tried. PREIT said that Dick's Sporting Goods and Field & Stream would move into the space.
In September 2017, the combined store opened, with HomeGoods opening the month before.
The area that once sold tools and winter coats now sold kayaks and home decorations.
It was a clear change: Sears had stood for products that lasted a long time; the new stores focused on new experiences and items that looked good in photos.
Renovations, Repositionings, and the PREIT Turn
In 2003, Crown American sold Viewmont Mall and its sister mall, Wyoming Valley Mall, to PREIT. The new owner made it clear that they saw the mall as an important part of the area.
PREIT's information shows the mall's wide reach: about 566,000 people live in the area, the average household income is about 92,000 dollars, and about 76,000 vehicles pass by each day.
A big renovation happened around 2007. The inside was updated, and the mix of stores was changed.
In 2014, Viewmont Mall was described as full of changes, while the downtown Steamtown Mall was having a hard time. That same year, the food court was changed, and Buffalo Wild Wings opened.
Spaces outside the main building slowly filled with places like Applebee's and La Tonalteca, bringing people together over food and bright restaurant lights.
Meanwhile, national chain stores came and went: Old Navy, Ulta, Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, American Eagle, Kay, Pandora, and others.
Viewmont Mall was never the fanciest mall, but it knew its purpose. It needed to be a dependable, middle-priced place where families bought school clothes and where crowds came during the holidays.
Emergencies, Fairs, Cruises, and 5Ks
On March 21, 2024, the mall was evacuated after a possible gas smell spread through the building, sending everyone outside while UGI crews checked the food court.
Shoppers soon came back in, mostly unbothered, as daily life continued.
By September 2024, the concourse had changed from an evacuation site to a place for events, starting a new chapter as the third annual Local History Fair brought in more than thirty groups offering family history resources, old records, and local stories.
The first fair was in 2022. While the 2025 fair was already being advertised by the Black Scranton Project, the Lackawanna Historical Society kept using the mall as a dependable place for its activities.
Soon after, the mall hosted a steady stream of events: car cruise nights in 2025 raised money for Johnson College scholarships, senior expos took place in shared spaces, Santa visited for the holidays, pets waited for photos, and a 5K run connected to Dick's House of Sport started at the mall.
This mix of events kept the mall lively in ways that went beyond just shopping.
Not everything was cheerful. In December 2024, Scranton police asked the public to help identify two people connected to a theft at Dick's House of Sport.
The request came during a month when holiday crowds were already filling Center Court for Santa visits, last-minute shoppers crowded the aisles on Christmas Eve, and reporters watched the usual busy parking lots and disappearing sale items.
The 2023-2025 Retail Shuffle
Even in its sixth decade, Viewmont Mall keeps rearranging itself. Rally House opened in April 2024, its first Scranton location.
Carter's and The Children's Place signed on in 2025, adding more than 7,700 square feet of kids' apparel before the back-to-school rush.
PREIT framed these additions as filling a long-standing gap in the market.
The biggest news came on October 6, 2025: Boot Barn would open a 13,000-square-foot store in spring 2026. The news spread across local media.
Boot Barn, known for western and work clothes, joining the mall was a fun mix for Pennsylvania, combining practical work boots with country style.
But the biggest change inside the mall came in 2023, when the Dick's and Field & Stream store closed for a while to become a Dick's House of Sport.
It reopened in August 2023 with climbing walls, special events, and a lively atmosphere that was very different from the quieter Sears that used to be there.
Where the Story Goes Now
Today, Viewmont Mall is one of the last enclosed malls standing tall in northeastern Pennsylvania. PREIT even calls it the last remaining enclosed shopping mall in the region.
Its occupancy rate hovered near 98 percent as of late 2022, a figure that would make other malls jealous.
The future of such a place is hard to predict. Malls have shrunk, died, reinvented themselves, been reborn as mixed-use villages, or been abandoned to the weeds.
Viewmont Mall, however, has proven clingy in the best sense. It keeps adapting. It attracts new tenants. It remains a gathering place.
If the past is any clue, Viewmont will keep changing in surprising ways. The main stores will change again. Kids who take pictures with Santa now may one day bring their own children to a new version of the same place.
As long as it keeps welcoming fairs, races, western clothes, tacos, jewelry, yoga pants, and the unique traditions of American shopping, it will stay what it has always been: a reflection of the area that built it, full of change, stubbornness, and the daily life of people coming and going.
