When Sharon flattened its flats: How well-intentioned urban renewal failed a half-century ago
SHARON – As businesses and residents across America fled to the suburbs in increasing numbers in the 1960s and ’70s, Sharon turned to urban renewal to revitalize its center city.
It didn’t quite work as planned.
The west bank of the Shenango River, known as the South Ward or South Flats, was a mix of businesses and houses.
There were blocks of late-19th-century brick storefronts and a hodge-podge of businesses, fraternal and social clubs, bars and restaurants, automotive dealerships, and blocks of modest wood-frame houses.
Much of the housing had seen better days. The whole area was prone to being inundated by a couple feet of flood water every few years before the Shenango Dam finally tamed the angry Shenango River in the mid-1960s.
Sharon was like many cities nationwide, where residential and commercial growth started to migrate from the tight, century-or-more-old center cities where it all began, choosing instead the spacious suburbs, where cows often still outnumbered people.
Sharon’s golden age starts to lose its glitter
Bob Price – once known as Sharon’s Mayor Price for 24 years after a few additional years as a city councilman – remembers the city’s glory days from his high school years in the 1950s.
A teen neighbor who lived near the Price family home on Alderman Avenue had a car.
“Monday and Thursday nights, stores were open in downtown Sharon. There was no mall. Then it was like cruising in California. You’d see in a movie, and he had a car, and that was great,” Price reminisced during a Sharon Historical Society program on Sharon urban renewal in 2019.
“We’d come downtown and cruise back. We didn’t really do anything. We just rode back and forth. But it was hard to find a place to walk in those days, because so many people came downtown to shop.”
Then it all changed.
The Hickory Plaza – now still thriving as the Hermitage Towne Plaza – opened in the mid-1950s in Hermitage, which was then known as Hickory Township. The plaza lured several businesses from Sharon. That was followed by the Shenango Valley Mall in 1968, which eventually stole even more stores – and shoppers – from Sharon and Farrell, formerly the leading commercial centers of the Shenango Valley.
City leaders begin to recognize a growing problem, seek solutions
Herald files show Sharon city leaders were talking about revitalization as early as 1960, when planners envisioned a downtown with most of State Street turned into a pedestrian mall – an outdoor version of an enclosed shopping mall. Pedestrian malls were a popular concept nationally through the ’80s, although most cities, like Youngstown, eventually discovered they simply didn’t work and bulldozed the brick sidewalks and planters; people wanted to be able to drive up to and park in front of stores.
The 1960 Sharon plan would have created a pedestrian mall with a loop of roadways encircling the downtown. It never came to fruition.
You wouldn’t want Shelbyville to have a monorail first, would you?
By 1970, state and federal money was flowing freely for cities to buy, demolish and reuse “blighted” property in the name of urban renewal.
So it’s no surprise that the Sharon city fathers pinned their hopes on a grandiose proposal to level acres of the flats and replace it with – wait for it – a large, suburban-style shopping mall, in the middle of the downtown.
In hindsight, it bears some resemblance to that episode of “The Simpsons” where a Harold Hill-like wheeler-dealer pitches Springfield on spending a multimillion-dollar windfall on building the Springfield Monorail. Act now; you wouldn’t want Shelbyville to have a monorail first, would you?
In August 1970, a group of Sharon city leaders and businessmen announced that Youngstown developer William M. Cafaro and Associates wanted to build a massive, $20 million retail and office complex in the middle of the downtown: The Sharon Tower Plaza.
In its various incarnations, it had everything imaginable:
• 265,733 square feet of retail space – about the size of the Shenango Valley Mall – plus 89,250 square feet of office space.
• Two major department stores and about 80 shops (the Shenango Valley Mall only ever had about three dozen retailers).
• A major-chain hotel and banquet center.
• Parking for up to 1,600 cars.
• Two movie theaters.
• A skyway across West State Street that would connect the new mall to the existing Strouss’ department store (today it’s The Winner fashion store; Strouss’ later moved to the Shenango Valley Mall, where it became Kaufmann’s then Macy’s before closing for good in 2024).
It wasn’t just the scale of the project that was jaw-dropping, it was the design: There would be three stories of mall shops, topped by five more floors of offices. The office tower would be capped by a revolving restaurant overlooking the Shenango River.
Only you wouldn’t really see much of the river. The original plan called for two levels of parking the size of a football field over top of the river, covering most of the river between State Street and today’s Connelly Boulevard.
Oh, and two fountains in the river would flank the parking platform on the north and south, a reminder that it was a waterway.
The then-thriving local mills and industries were the target tenants for the office tower. At one point it was suggested the city, in need of a new city hall, should take the top two floors because city offices deserved to be in such a place of prestige.
No time to waste; city lets the demolition begin
The Cafaro company already had established its reputation after developing the Eastwood Mall in Niles, Ohio (which still thrives today) and the small Sharon Towne Plaza on South Sharpsville Avenue (home today of the Mercer County Food Bank). While the developer was tight-lipped as it worked to line up major retail tenants, city redevelopment agencies gathered $5 million through borrowing and state funds then started to raze, clear and prepare the site.
The redevelopment site stretched from West State Street south to Ohio Street and from the river west to the Erie Railroad tracks, 22.9 acres in all.
In 1972, it was determined that the project would displace 197 people who lived there and 51 businesses that employed 230 full-time and 66 part-time workers.
The developer stalls, then the whole project implodes
As the redevelopment authority proceeded to displace and level acres of homes and businesses, the developer stalled and hem-hawed on naming anchor tenants for the mall, and it proposed changes in the scale and timing of portions of the plan.
The whole thing unraveled in February 1977, when Cafaro abruptly pulled out of the project, blaming rising borrowing costs and claiming the city wasn’t cooperating fully, a charge the city forcefully denied.
Acres of groundhogs; the city comes up with a Plan B
In the aftermath, the land sat vacant for years.
“We owned the land, so we had to take care of the land. I think the only thing out there were groundhogs, basically,” Price said. “So that’s why we had to get something done with it.”
It was an admission that if a developer the likes of Cafaro couldn’t make it work, the project was flawed.
Price, who had joined city council in 1972, ran for mayor in 1977. His major campaign issue. The land had been vacant long enough, and the city needed to find something commercial that would realistically fit with the downtown.
After he was elected, Price helped find a developer who bought bought much of the acreage, and in 1980 the strip plaza Sharon City Centre opened west of South Water Avenue. It was originally anchored by a Heck’s discount department store and a Giant Eagle grocery. In 1986, Reyers Shoe Store moved from a smaller storefront a few blocks away and occupied the 36,000-square-foot grocery space. After Reyers left for the Eastwood Mall in 2021, a pair of dollar stores moved in. The plaza’s 10 other storefronts are filled today with stores that include a Save-a-Lot grocery.
Modest infill takes the place of a shopping mall
A small office and retail building went up at South Water Avenue and Connelly Boulevard. Land along South Water later was used to build single-story office buildings for lawyers, an insurance agency and a software company.
The first block of West State Street had been a two-story, 19th-century block with about 20 narrow storefronts – the kind of architecture that gives a downtown character and personality. Professional offices and apartment upstairs were upstairs. It became a McDonald’s restaurant and bank parking.
A new city hall and fire department, built with federal money, opened on the southwest edge of the flats in 1979.
The redevelopment displaced about 200 people; easily twice that many now live in new apartments built in the southern part of the urban renewal area.
The business population went in the other direction. After 51 or so businesses – virtually all locally owned – were forced out of the area, only about half that number of businesses of any kind are in the footprint of the urban renewal area today.
Sharon’s grandiose urban renewal plans failed spectacularly for myriad reasons – but they were made with the best of intentions.
A modern-day parallel up the road in Hermitage
Fast forward a half century. The adjacent, once-rural city of Hermitage is undergoing a parallel retail urban renewal today.
Like dozens of malls nationwide, the Shenango Valley Mall, with about 36 storefronts, lost its anchor department stores – Macy’s and Sears (2017) and finally JCPenney (2024) – then most of its remaining retailers left as foot traffic evaporated.
The mall, built on the former George McConnell farm, opened March 13, 1968. It closed May 31, 2024, then was demolished in early 2025, creating a blank canvas for development.
Butterfli Holdings LLC of Pepper Pike, Ohio, owns the property and has filed development plans for its reuse. The first phase will include a Target department store and Chili’s, LongHorn Steakhouse and Chick-fil-A restaurants. Pre-fabricated concrete walls for Target began to rise earlier this year, and a 2027 opening is expected. The restaurants are expected to be close behind Target, with announcements of additional retailers said to be on the near horizon.
A later phase will create a mixed-use development on the northern end of the property that will include a grid of tree-lined streets populated by business storefronts, apartments and green spaces.
Effectively, Hermitage is rebuilding a 19th-century downtown Sharon – because, as urban planners often point out – that kind of a city plan worked.
History repeats itself.
JOHN ZAVINSKI is the assistant editor of The Herald and a founding board member of the Sharon Historical Society. This story was adapted from his research for a September 2025 WaterFire Sharon downtown Sharon history walk and from a 2019 historical society program on Sharon’s urban renewal that had guest commentary from former Sharon Mayor Robert T. Price.