I-99: The road sign of the times

Highway changing landscape of local businesses

By Mike Joseph

If time is money, as it is in business matters, then it’s no wonder Interstate 99 road signs are painted green.

The new 30-mile highway through Centre County, now almost finished, has paved the way to new stores, movie theaters, restaurants and new homes, job sites and commuting patterns.

Commuters, Pleasant Gap residents and businesses along East College Avenue that deliver were stuck in traffic for decades. Now, since the new four-lane highway opened in late 2002, they breathe easier and enjoy extra elbow room.

“It’s made it easier to get around,” said Frank Harden, manager of Lezzer Lumber’s State College store on East College Avenue. “It made it easier to do business.”

But there’s a down side. The same new road that has slashed drive times in moving goods and commuters has sharply reduced the number of customers pulling in to Lezzer Lumber and other East College Avenue stores.

“Everybody used to come down the Benner Pike,” Harden said. “They’ve taken that traffic away. They don’t see the traffic. They don’t see the people coming to them. Bigger isn’t always better.”

Five years after I-99 opened east of Grays Woods — and less than a year before the state plans to open all of the western part — the interstate’s impact across Centre County has come into sharper focus. It’s a big picture of change, one that continues to unfold.

To a great extent, the road has become the common denominator in business decisions that are shifting the county’s economic center of gravity away from the pedestrian-oriented town-gown interface along College Avenue and toward the gasoline-oriented I-99 interchanges, which have become small but lucrative ports of commerce along the concrete river.

KFC left South Atherton Street, where there isn’t access to I-99, and reappeared in new digs on North Atherton Street, where there’s an I-99 interchange nearby.

That move eliminated a trailer park — 35 mobile homes that provided affordable housing — but S&A Homes was at the same time opening the first of two new sets of affordable housing at Fox Hill Senior Apartments just outside Bellefonte, with easy access to I-99 two miles away. Some folks from the trailer park moved to Fox Hill.

The second set of Fox Hill homes for seniors will open this year.

When Geisinger Health System, of Danville, decided to build a major regional medical clinic in the State College area, the for-profit health care provider wanted at least 20 acres, and it wanted quick access to I-99.

Geisinger chose an I-99 interchange in Patton Township, four miles west of State College, where it plans to open its clinic Aug. 4. The only other tract that Geisinger seriously considered is also four miles from the borough, but to the east, at the I-99 interchange at Shiloh Road in College Township.

I-99 “absolutely” mattered most in the decision-making process, Geisinger spokeswoman Kim Aboud said. “The fact that it was adjacent to I-99 certainly made it stand out among the other tracts that we were looking at.” “They wanted to be on an interchange,” said Doug Erickson, Patton Township manager.

While I-99 has changed the landscape lines in Centre County, it has also changed the bottom lines.

The road has led two battling retail giants — Lowe’s and The Home Depot — to plan stores next to each other at I-99’s Valley Vista Drive interchange in Patton Township. If you’re a look-alike retail competitor, the best place to locate is right next to your rival, to maximize your share as you divide the territory.

Mass marketing drives the profits of nationwide chains Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and The Home Depot: low-cost purchasing, competitive pricing, broad merchandise choices and advantages in purchasing, distribution and finance. Competitive pricing requires high sales volumes, which in turn require a lot of traffic.

Lowe’s and The Home Depot have I-99, and I-99 has the traffic.

I-99’s impact landed on O.W. Houts Inc. this year. Houts, a home-grown State College original, was the first-stop hardware store for decades for amateurs and professionals alike. But as big box stores moved in, Houts turned into a last stop.

Last month — at age 88, with The Home Depot in Patton Township due to open in early summer — Houts closed for good, erasing part of the town’s “before I-99” character.

Patrick Leary, Gregg Township supervisor and a self-employed tradesman, was a longtime first-stop Houts shopper. For one thing, Houts had economical five-gallon tubs of construction adhesive and no one else did. But then Houts stopped stocking the five-gallon tubs and cut back on other things. And Leary became another of the shoppers who made it a last stop.

“It was a sad thing,” Leary said. “It’s a real shame that they gave up.”

But in crisis there’s also opportunity.

Houts closed a friendly and helpful door to do-it-yourselfers, but that change opened more than four prime acres that could allow State College officials to widen the horizons of their West End redevelopment plans.

Premiere Theatres flanked the downtown to capture more of the moviegoer market. It put a multiplex cinema at each of two I-99 interchanges, Shiloh Road and Valley Vista Drive. That didn’t prevent the State Theatre from rising, phoenix-like, in the center of State College, or stop plans to give another old downtown moviehouse new life as a mix of shops.

In the I-99 interchange lottery, however, Patton Township hit the jackpot with three. At the Valley Vista Drive interchange are the building supply giants, a new Wolf Furniture store, a Sheetz and a new Premiere Theatre.

Just down the road in one direction is the Waddle Road interchange, which channels traffic to two shopping centers: the Colonnade, anchored by the high-end grocer Wegmans and Target, and the Wal-Mart shopping center, which was expanded as I-99 construction began.

Just up the road in the other direction is I-99’s Grays Woods interchange, where the new Geisinger clinic overlooks the highway from a ridgetop and where Grays Woods Boulevard takes off into a deep pocket of residential development between I-99 and state Route 550.

Developer Bob Poole’s Grays Woods Planned Community in 20 years or so could be part of a residential spread from the Lowe’s and Home Depot building supply corner to Sawmill Road in Halfmoon Township, owing to the principal transportation artery provided by I-99.

In January, the Patton Township Planning Commission began reviewing a revised master plan for roughly 600 acres into the frontier beyond areas already under construction. The master plan calls for more than 1,500 homes of varying shapes and size.

On the other side of I-99, at Toftrees, 1,250 acres is zoned to accommodate more than 4,500 housing units, but only 1,200 have been built in the past three decades. Plans for more, also to be developed by Poole, have been advanced and construction could begin next year, though a complete build-out on both sides of the highway would take decades.

Helping to fill these homes would be a growing county population, centered on State College and Penn State, though the county’s rate of population growth since the high tide of the 1960s continues to slow.

That 1960s growth of 26 percent fell to 14 percent in the 1970s, 10 percent in the 1980s, 8.8 percent in the 1990s and now, with the first decade of the 21st century coming to a close, projections are that the 2010 census will show that the county’s population rose only by a little more than 6 percent since 2000.

“It’s slower than we anticipated,” county planning director Bob Jacobs said. “You can almost see that continuing through the decade.”

Still, a 6 percent population increase over the decade would exceed the rate of most other counties in the state. Pennsylvania’s total population is expected to increase by only 1.4 percent, slower than all but four other states.

Centre County’s economy, driven by Penn State and thus insulated against the manufacturing sector’s decline, will continue to spawn population growth, though much of it is likely to spill over into adjacent counties, a trend also fed by I-99.

Lezzer Lumber’s Harden sees the old manufacturing cities Altoona and Lock Haven recovering from economic hard times in part because I-99 makes it easier for people to live there while commuting to the State College area.

“You’ll see those towns get bigger — those areas are going to be a lot more appealing to the workers,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of changes over the years.”

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.