Harbor Square

Harbor Square

The front of Harbor Square
Location	Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, United States
Opening date	1968
Owner	Aetna Realty
No. of stores and services	50+ at peak
No. of anchor tenants	2 (Formerly 3, Former Steinbach/Value City store now demolished)
Total retail floor area	337,423 ft²
No. of floors	1 (2 in Boscov's, Was 2 in Former Value City which has been demolished)
Public transit access	NJ Transit bus: 502

Harbor Square, formerly Shore Mall, is a shopping plaza (formerly a shopping mall) in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey on U.S. Route 40/U.S. Route 322 originally known as "Searstown". The plaza is accessible from Exit 36 off the Garden State Parkway. The plaza is owned by Aetna Realty. The plaza has a gross leasable area of 337,423 ft², formerly 620,000 ft² when it was a mall, located on 73 acres (300,000 m²) of land. The plaza's anchor stores include Boscov's and Burlington Coat Factory.

Shore Mall originally opened in 1968 as an open-air mall called Searstown. Original anchor stores included Sears, Grant City and a Pantry Pride supermarket. Between 1971 and 1974, the mall was enclosed and expanded, with regional up-market department store Steinbach being added as a fourth anchor store. A time capsule was buried next to the Steinbach store to be opened 100 years later on March 20, 2074. Grant City was shuttered in 1976 when the chain declared bankruptcy; by the end of the year, JCPenney opened in the former Grant City space. Pantry Pride was subsequently replaced with Foodtown, and the mall was renamed Shore Mall.

In 1987, Developer Kravco Company (Kravco Company LLC) and JCP Realty, the development arm of JCPenney, opened the new Hamilton Mall about 5 miles west on the Black Horse Pike (U.S. Route 40 and U.S. Route 322). This caused problems with the Shore Mall, because the Sears and JCPenney anchors moved to the Hamilton Mall. With the two anchors gone, Shore Mall underwent a fair sized renovation enclosing the still open-air portion between the two anchors (pictured to the right in December 2012) as well as re-tiling the mall to its current blue and white color scheme.