Century III Mall is an ailing enclosed shopping mall located in the southern Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. It is the fourth largest shopping mall in the Greater Pittsburgh area. Opened in 1979, and remodeled in 1997, the three-level mall contains 1290000sqft of retail space and approximately 25 stores. Anchor retailers at Century III Mall include Dick's Sporting Goods and J. C. Penney. From 1996-2011, it was owned and operated by Simon Property Group, and prior to Simon, the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation, who built the mall. It is currently owned and operated by Las Vegas-based Moonbeam Capital Investments LLC.HistoryThe development of the Century III Mall began as a collaboration between the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation of Youngstown, Ohio and the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel Corporation in the early 1970s. The name Century III was conceived at the time of the nation's Bicentennial, making light of the time at hand - the advent of America's third century. When the mall opened in 1979, it was the third largest enclosed shopping center in the world. The site is a recycled former U.S. Steel industrial area, a huge slag pile once known as Brown's Dump. Slag, a waste product of steel making, had for years been transported by rail cars from the mills of Pittsburgh to this once remote valley. The pile grew until it became an artificial mountain, as hard as concrete and large enough to contain a mall (as well as many satellite stores). Because of abandoned coal mines beneath the construction site, real concrete had to be pumped underground before construction could begin. More concrete was said to be used in the filling of the old mines than was used in the mall itself.
