Downtown State College has changed dramatically. Has it grown for better or worse?
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Business Matters: Reshaping communities
How is Centre County growing, and how does the approach to growth affect families, businesses and visitors? The answer is different depending on where you look — from downtown State College’s ever-evolving landscape to Bellefonte’s small business boom and Snow Shoe’s struggles after business loss. The Centre Daily Times’ annual Business Matters section explores growth and development throughout the county.
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As Penn State has grown into one of the largest universities in the country, downtown State College businesses have increasingly changed who they’ve catered to over the past decades, a trend that professionals in the industry don’t see slowing anytime soon.
Five-and-dime stores that sold a wide variety of inexpensive merchandise and mom and pop shops once dotted the downtown landscape. Now the borough has more high-rises than ever before, leaving some to wonder whether the small-town feel is fading.
Fred Hurvitz, a former downtown State College business owner turned business instructor at Penn State, is among the chorus of people that miss the “old days.” But, he acknowledged, there’s no shortage of others who like the direction downtown has been heading.
“I don’t see downtown State College ever coming back to what it was,” Hurvitz said. “It can remake itself into something still pretty good, but it’s going to be almost all student oriented.”
Focusing on the college students
Art Fine isn’t optimistic about the future of downtown State College, especially when it comes to brick-and-mortar retail.
Few would know better than the 72-year-old businessman who’s made his money in that industry over the course of nearly five decades.
“I would not recommend a young person to go into bricks-and-mortar retail at this point or at any time in the future. ... It’s too hard. It’s too hard and the odds are stacked against you before you even get started,” Fine said. “Even if you’re a cockeyed optimist and you really think, ‘You know what, most people probably couldn’t do it, but I can because I know how to build a better mousetrap.’ I think that, in reality, that’s not going to happen.”
Fine graduated from Penn State in 1971 and opened his first downtown State College business four years later. He still operates Barefoot Shoes and women’s clothing store Metro at 130 E. College Ave. in the shadow of Old Main.
Downtown State College was “the envy of everybody” when Fine opened up shop, he said. The Nittany Mall was less than 10 years old, Walmart had yet to gain its footing as a top retailer and the internet was years away from becoming mainstream.
But things changed as University Park went from a campus of about 32,000 students to one of about 47,000 students.
More and more businesses began catering toward students, rather than people who called Happy Valley home for more than four years. Downtown State College, Fine said, “is not going to be able to support the fringes.”
“In downtown State College, my philosophy always was if you don’t appeal to the college student, then you’re not going to survive. And in order to appeal to the college student and to be focused, you can’t be all over the place. You can’t say, ‘Well, I want that 40- to 50-year-old local resident and her husband and their kids, as well as the college student.’ You’re not focused,” Fine said. “And when you’re not focused, you don’t mean anything to anybody. I always believed that you have to focus on that college student because they’re the ones that live closest to campus and walk the streets every day.”
What does the future hold?
Not everyone is bearish on the downtown State College market. That includes Brad Groznik and Spud Marshall, two men who have put forward some of the most creative ideas for how to shape the future of State College.
Groznik was part of the team behind Summers on Allen and outdoor flea market Pop Up Ave, while Marshall was behind projects like 3 Dots, Innovation Trailhead, the Co.Space and New Leaf.
“It’s critical that we prioritize ways for the public to be active participants in shaping the changing landscape,” Marshall wrote in an email. “Businesses will change. Skylines will change. It’s not that we should avoid change, but rather ensure our community is actively involved in animating the downtown in ways that would most benefit them.”
Downtown State College was once home to a bowling alley, arcades, movie theaters, health clubs and car dealerships. There were “so many fun things to offer us townies,” longtime State College resident and HFL Corp. President Fred Sahakian wrote.
Sahakian, a Penn State alum, started his first business downtown and now leads the real estate development company that’s been influential in the borough’s development over the past six decades.
Commercial storefronts began to change dramatically in the 1990s, Sahakian said, especially after Walmart opened along North Atherton Street.
“Downtown State College is a very densely populated area, but we seem to have had a really, really good balance all these years,” Sahakian said of the mix of businesses downtown. “And the people that are complaining constantly about State College losing its charm with the high-rises and this and that, I think that once they see the quality of some of the tenants that are going to be coming to the commercial spaces and all the different options that they’re going to have in the next few years, I think people are going to be very, very happy with the downtown.”
The future of downtown State College is bright, Sahakian said, but will “have a lot to do with the growth of Penn State.” He theorized more restaurants, coffee shops and bars will look to open downtown.
Hurvitz, a lifelong State College resident who said he watched the borough evolve from “small town USA to something much larger,” said he doesn’t see general merchandise retailers ever returning.
On-street parking became more difficult to find, buildings became more expensive to rent and businesses increasingly focused on selling to students.
The only certainty, Hurvitz said, is downtown will continue to evolve like it has for more than a century.
“As the downtown started to slip and became much more oriented to students, it presented a lot less of a shopping experience for customers. In the old days, if somebody was looking for a gift ... they’d go downtown and have several different places to shop,” Hurvitz said. “As we started to lose them, we lost the shopping experience. ... It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 to 15 years in downtown State College.”
