File photo.
Rest in peace, Towamencin Village Shopping Center. Welcome to the beginning of The Shops at Town Square – with Planet Fitness being the first new tenant at the old Sears Hardware location.
The 24-hour facility is poised to open in second quarter 2021.
On Wednesday night, Towamencin Township Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a conditional use request from property owner Philadelphia Suburban Development Corporation (PSDC) to allow a health club use in the entertainment lifestyle overlay district, which blankets the 98,000-square-foot shopping center.
The Board also unanimously approved PSDC’s request to waive the land development process on the shopping center at Allentown and Forty Foot roads. A conditional use hearing was previously held at the Dec. 9 meeting.
Supervisor Dan Littley was absent from Wednesday’s meeting, which was broadcast via Zoom to the public.
“The primary focus of the plans at the hearing involved the renovation of the strip center, specifically the buildings in the rear of the shopping center, along with the old SEARS Hardware building, which is proposed as a Planet Fitness,” said engineer John Anderson, of Cornerstone Consulting, who has represented PSDC at the meetings. “Improvements are underway as you may be very familiar with, passing by the shopping center.”
Anderson presented supervisors Wednesday with a modified land development plan, specifically as it related to landscaping on the site. Anderson said Forty Foot and Allentown roads will be infilled with street trees and lower-growth shrubs and ornamental bushes.
“Forty Foot Road has a narrow landscaping area, and we will infill that the best that we can. We are also selecting street trees along Forty Foot of a species that can do well under utility lines and will not conflict with overhead power lines,” Anderson said.
Interior islands in the main parking lot will have low shrub plantings and perennial flowering vegetation. Foundation plantings, he said, will be added along the front of the Planet Fitness building.
“In addition to landscaping, we are adding stamped asphalt to promote and identify crosswalks with sidewalk crossings,” he said.
There will also be aesthetic improvements to the trash enclosure fencing behind the Verizon store, he said, which includes planting evergreen trees.
Façade updates can now move forward at the shopping center, as the land development waiver had to be approved first before a building permit for façade improvements was issued, according to Anderson. Improvements include brick columns, gabled roofs, and colored awnings, per The Reporter.
The pad sites containing Wells Fargo Bank, Wendy’s, Verizon, and the former Boston Market would not be part of the shopping center upgrades.
Last July, it was reported a fitness center was eyeing the former Genuardi’s Market location and PJ Whelihan’s was in talks to occupy the Sears Hardware site.
The Store Outfitters, now owned by PSDC, remains the sole operating business in the shopping center, which has basically become a ghost town and a far cry from its once bustling commerce days in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Aside from SEARS Hardware, Genuardi’s Market was the main anchor store at the shopping center. As years came and went, so did many businesses – Little Professor Books, Comics A to Z, Eckerd Drug, Headquarters for Hairstyling and Via Marconi Pizza Pub.
The shopping center’s inception dates to 1952, when Irv Lopoten opened The Store, aka The Old Mill, in an old general store next to the Tennis-Lukens Cemetery. Lopoten sold off the land, relocated to the shopping center, and the rest is local history.
Now, PSDC looks to reanimate the center and bring a pulse back to a former shopping mecca in Towamencin Township. An age-restricted housing development is coming soon between SKF and shopping center. Once the shopping center updates are complete, there will be a phased-in discount on taxes for the property.
"Basically, it's a beautification of the existing shopping center, and as you well know that shopping center is in significant demise over the years,” Anderson is quoted in The Reporter article. “PSDC is now in the process of trying to renovate that."
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