*** Welcome to piglix ***

Cascade Center


The Cascade Center at the Riverplex is an indoor and outdoor shopping, dining, and entertainment complex located in downtown New Castle, Pennsylvania. It opened in 2006. Much of the complex sits on the former site of the Cascade, the first movie theater of the Warner Bros., hence the name. The complex is at the corner of East Washington Street and Mill Street. As of 2013, the complex is owned by Riverplex Partners, Inc. The top three stories are rented by Refresh Dental Management as their corporate headquarters.

The Warners, residents of nearby Youngstown, Ohio, were sons of Polish Jews wanting to break into the then-fledgling film business. The brothers, after successfully showing a used copy of The Great Train Robbery at Idora Park in Youngstown, traveled to New Castle to screen the movie in a vacant store on the site of what would become the Cascade Center. This makeshift theatre, called the Bijou, was furnished with chairs borrowed from a local undertaker. In 1906, the brothers purchased a small theater in New Castle near the Bijou, which they called the Cascade Movie Palace, taking its name from nearby Cascade Park. They maintained the theater until moving into film distribution in 1907.

Gradually over time, the building that housed the Bijou would host other business while the Cascade itself would eventually be demolished to make way for a parking lot. The buildings themselves would become abandoned by the 1980s when New Castle, like most other Rust Belt cities, saw the collapse of the steel industry having a ripple effect in the region with the population dropping as well as the general suburbanization effect that had been happening throughout the United States since the 1950s.

By the mid-1990s, only two businesses were open on the site that would become the Cascade Center. One of them, Main Street Clothiers & Custom Tailors, is a men's suit shop that was housed in the building that also housed the Bijou. The other would be the B&O Railroad Federal Credit Union, a credit union that was in a separate purpose-built building on the site bordering Mill Street and the Neshannock Creek and had actually been built on the site of the Cascade after the site was used as a parking lot.


...
Wikipedia

...