Susan, I grew up in McKeesport, and remember Immel’s well. Nice 3-story department store. Clothing, shoes and cosmetics but no appliances, furniture or food, and carried the better clothing lines(McKeesport was prosperous in those days). They had the slowest elevator in the world, with an elevator operator! My first credit card was from Immel’s!
Susan D.
Rating des Ortes: 3 Pittsburgh, PA
My first day back at work in 2 ½ weeks and I had to head down to McKeesport to do a home visit. So I checked out the company car and headed down to the Tube City. Or shall I say the Former Tube City? McKeesport is a former manufacturing city, and since the decline of industry, it always seems like it’s trying to pull itself back up. It’s downtown is kind of a ghost town. And there are always a few things which catagorize cities like this. First of all, when all else fails, build parking decks and transit centers like McKeesport, Johnstown, and Atoona have. You look at these semi vacant facilities and you have to wonder whether or not they’re just space fillers on otherwise vacant land. The other thing you do of course is take wonderful old buildings and slap awful new facades on them in the name of mid 20th Century«modernization». Such is the case of Immel’s. I found it while looking for a place to eat. As for Immel’s, it looks like it was some sort of department store. Being someone who loves shopping, I wonder what their clientele was. Likely it was a mid-price department store ala Sears or JC Penney. It probably catered to the entire family. You could probably get anything the family needed here – clothes, TVs, furniture, etc, at lower prices than Kaufmann’s or Hornes. I’ll bet they even had a candy and popcorn counter here too! Maybe even a cafeteria or coffee shop. I’ve seen pictures of Downtown McKeesport in its heyday. It was a thriving place full of stores, offices, and restaurants. But the 1 – 2 punch of the fall of industry and the new regional malls like Monroeville and Century III sealed its fate. Even the nearby Eastland Mall fell to changing times.
