The Wheeling Renaissance, Part 2

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The Fort Henry Mall: “Bold and Exciting” or “Reckless Schemes”

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After the heroic efforts required to fund the Center Wheeling urban renewal project, local leaders struggled to actually find industrial tenants after the area was demolished in the early 1960s. The Urban Renewal Authority (URA) eventually settled for a new post office and a trucking company – not exactly the catalyst for economic growth proponents had envisioned.

Over the next few years, however, URA officials had more success with a project assisting the expansion of the nearby Ohio Valley Medical Center, which in subsequent decades would become a mainstay of the regional economy. At the same time, the city’s public-private partnership turned its attention to a more controversial subject: the construction of a proposed “Northern Gateway” and civic center in the central business district. The increasingly decrepit Market Auditorium had long been a target of the Wheeling Conference on Community Development, the group of local businessmen who looked to the Pittsburgh Renaissance for inspiration in remaking their own city. When the URA demolished the site in 1964 and secured federal funds for a new civic center, the next phase in the Wheeling Renaissance seemed set to begin.¹

However, as with the earlier Center Wheeling project, construction ground to a halt when voter referenda in 1966 and again in 1967 failed to reach the required 60 percent majority needed to issue bonds for the local share. When members of the city’s Municipal Auditorium Board, including developer Jack Waterhouse and retailer Robert Levenson, placed the civic center proposal before voters again in 1971, it had become “linked with a bold and exciting, but separate, revitalization program for downtown Wheeling.”

With the civic center as its western anchor and a new riverfront marina and amphitheater to the east, the heart of the proposal was a radical vision for an enclosed regional shopping center, dubbed the Fort Henry Mall. Proponents hoped the new facility would help to achieve Wheeling’s full potential as “a complete regional commercial center” as well as the focus for the area’s “cultural, civic and recreational activities.” Further, as the downtown area was transformed it would create new employment opportunities for “personnel with a variety of management, service, and administrative skills.”²

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a particularly tumultuous time in Wheeling politics, making the already delicate process of urban renewal even more difficult. Irritated with the unwillingness or incapacity of city council to undertake a variety of redevelopment projects, a group of civic leaders including newspaper publisher Ogden Nutting and Frank Haig, S.J., president of Wheeling College, backed a slate of candidates that defeated eight of the nine existing council members. After this coup, the new city council fired the city manager and then the URA’s entire board of directors resigned in protest at being shut out of decision-making. With council approval, Charles Steele, the new city manager, reconstituted the authority with a strong board led by William Doepken, president of Wheeling Corrugating Company, and Arch Riley, a politically savvy former county prosecuting attorney. “They were some of the strongest leaders in Wheeling and they absolutely had their heads on straight,” Steele later recalled. “They were committed to making sure Wheeling stayed as the [area’s] center city.”³

Following a publicity campaign by Wheeling City Council, the Municipal Auditorium Board and the URA, the required 63.5 percent of county voters finally authorized the city in November 1971 to issue $900,000 in general revenue bonds to cover the local share of the civic arena. With the keystone structure for its broader central business district plan approved, the authority turned to implementing the rest of its Fort Henry Mall proposal. Wheeling qualified for annual appropriations of federal urban renewal funds, which gave the URA resources that did not require local bond issues. Further, since it controlled the site of the demolished Market Auditorium, the authority already owned a significant part of the project location. By spring 1972, the mall design was in place, additional land acquisition was under way, and officials had begun a national search for “an experienced developer” to “share in the ownership and profit of the proposed mall.” Within a few months, Arlen Inner-Cities Industries agreed to oversee the project and quickly obtained commitments by retailers Sears, J.C. Penney, and Montgomery Ward to anchor the facility.⁴

As land purchases began, however, the project began to generate stiff resistance from some local merchants who believed that downtown Wheeling could retain its traditional role as the region’s marketplace without the loss of autonomy implicit in an enclosed shopping center. The Fort Henry Mall plan incorporated Stone & Thomas, Inc., the largest of the locally owned retailers, into its design, but developers planned to demolish and replace other structures with new buildings. As a result, owners of those buildings, many of whom were in the second or third generation, were upset at the loss of property made possible by the authority’s power of eminent domain. On the other hand, a number of major local retailers such as Boury Corporation and Reichart Furniture, of which former URA chairman Robert Levenson was president, were located outside the project area, requiring them to rent space from the mall’s developer if they wished to participate. Some store owners felt that this amounted to paying for entry to a retail market they currently controlled; for smaller retailers, renting space in the mall potentially involved a higher rental fee than they previously paid for downtown properties. Opponents also disliked the arrangement with mall developer Arlen Industries, which they believed would have an inherent bias toward national chains over local mom-and-pop establishments.⁵

In April 1971, a representative of the Downtown Wheeling Associates, the merchants group formed by Levenson a decade earlier, denounced the proposed mall at a public hearing as “entirely unfeasible, unrealistic, and financially unsound.” Mall opponents claimed that the commercial redevelopment plan was a “radical departure” from the authority’s mission of slum clearance for lower and middle-class housing and a “patent attempt” to use eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another, an argument that resonated with the national backlash against urban renewal. While it was essentially a power struggle over which faction would control the city’s urban renewal program, the fight over the Fort Henry Mall had all of the hallmarks of a classic neighborhood revolt, including the use of public hearings to express opposition, the filing of lawsuits to delay program implementation, and a publicity campaign complete with “Fort Henry Mall No No No” bumper stickers.⁶

Over the next two years, the DWA pursued a series of lawsuits and a publicity campaign attacking the Fort Henry Mall, the Wheeling Civic Center, and the URA. After the county circuit court dismissed their suit in April 1973, mall opponents, who had organized as the “Save Downtown Wheeling Committee,” launched a ballot initiative to force city council to either revoke the authority’s 1957 charter, which would disband it entirely, or call a public referendum on the issue. Appearing before city council, committee members Julia R. Boyd and Fred Friebertshauser, owner of a downtown beauty and barber supply business, declared that municipal officials are “obviously unwilling or unable to protect citizens from reckless Urban Renewal Authority schemes.” The group subsequently acquired the 3,000 signatures necessary to force a public referendum, and in August, residents voted by a two-to-one margin to scrap the proposed Fort Henry Mall as well as the URA itself. While the powers of the URA and the property it controlled technically remained with city council, Wheeling would no longer have a development agency capable of independent action.⁷

As the dust settled, mall opponents declared they would implement their own scaled-back version of downtown revitalization, but a “blue ribbon” advisory committee proved largely unable to enact meaningful change using purely voluntary means and local resources. The long-delayed civic center finally opened in 1977, but was moved from the site of the former Market Auditorium to a more isolated location several blocks away that did little to draw shoppers downtown. As early as August 1973, officials in Belmont County, Ohio, just across the river from Wheeling began seeking federal and state funds to prepare the site for a proposed regional shopping center seven miles to the west of Wheeling. With the failure of the Fort Henry proposal, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and J. C. Penney quickly signed agreements to anchor the new facility. The 1978 opening of the Ohio Valley Mall prompted a round of soul-searching among residents whose “hubris,” in the words of one commentator, had defeated the Fort Henry Mall proposal five years earlier. “I remember I said something to Bob Levenson once,” recalled John Hunter II, a local business owner, “and he shook his head. I just forget what he said, but it was a terrible thing to do. The city died from there on for many, many years.”⁸

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