As this is written and chances are when you’re reading this, it is a rainy Sunday as a nor’easter pours down over the area. So just imagine a movie theater being close by, popcorn, perhaps an adult beverage and some food, and the blockbuster of your choice..
Ever since the Schuylkill Mall’s demise almost a decade ago, the county has lacked a theater of note. But if we flash back 20 years to September of 2006, headlines prove that we almost had a very different future.
At that time the Coal Creek Commerce Center in St. Clair was bustling with possibility. Walmart was really the big thing there, Home Depot was on the way, and there was a lot of land for other businesses to come in. The future was bright.. and enter the possibility for a multi plex? Even Billy Joel would give that a pass in No Man’s Land.
It was in September of that year that it was reported far and wide that, pending approval, a 10-screen movie theater was going to be constructed at Coal Creek overlooking the Walmart Supercenter. This wasn’t just somebody throwing an idea against the wall to see if it would stick. The proposed theater would be operated by Cinema Center, a family-owned company based in Millersburg that, according to the newspaper at the time, owned 59 screens at six locations across Pennsylvania. Developer Brian Rich said the project would cost somewhere between $7 million and $8 million, and an exact location had apparently already been selected, although it was not publicly released.
If everything went according to plan and the necessary approvals were received, construction was expected to begin in the spring of 2007.
There was a process to get there. Preliminary plans would have to go before the St. Clair Planning Commission, changes could be made, final plans submitted, and eventually Borough Council would have its vote. No one quoted at the time seemed particularly pessimistic about the idea.
Quite the opposite.
St. Clair council President Michael McCord said officials were very happy about it and believed it would be good for the community. Rich said bringing additional businesses into the area was “part of the plan.” The Republican & Herald even got into the act with an editorial applauding the proposed theater.
The newspaper argued that Schuylkill County residents should not have to drive 40 miles to attend a state-of-the-art movie theater and pointed out that thousands of dollars were leaving the county whenever residents traveled elsewhere for movies, shopping, dining and entertainment. There was actually a concern at the time about whether the shiny new 10-screen theater might hurt the existing theater at the Schuylkill Mall.
You have to juxtapose all of this optimism with what was reality at the time. Back then, we still had two semi-bustling malls, with the Schuylkill Mall featuring a four-screen United Artists theater. The manager of that theater actually told the newspaper he wasn’t even aware of the plans for a new theater when contacted for comment.
The executive director of the Schuylkill County Visitors Bureau thought the proposed theater would be a positive addition, but said the one downside he could see was how it might impact business at the Schuylkill Mall.
We now have the luxury of 20/20 vision peering back at history.
The Coal Creek theater never got built.
A theater company, a developer, a $7 million to $8 million price tag, an exact location reportedly selected, local officials sounding enthusiastic and construction anticipated for the following spring, the newspaper trail becomes remarkably quiet after the initial excitement..
The movie theater simply disappeared from the conversation.
Other development at Coal Creek certainly didn’t disappear. Home Depot opened, Tractor Supply eventually arrived and development continued, but the movie theater did not.
The theater everyone was worried might lose business because of this new Coal Creek multiplex ended up closing anyway.
Regal Entertainment announced in 2010 that it was closing the four-screen theater at the Schuylkill Mall, ending a run that dated all the way back to the mall’s opening in 1980.
Of course, that wasn’t quite the end of movies at the Schuylkill Mall.
As a matter of fact, throughout the 2010s we actually got spoiled. The theater found new life as the Pearl Theatre, and eventually it became one of the finest moviegoing experiences you could find around here, with brand-new comfortable seating, a restaurant and bar that stayed open late and an atmosphere that made going to the movies feel like an actual night out.
But we know what eventually occurred there, too.
At the time there were a few rumors here and there that a theater could be constructed somewhere different, perhaps somewhere in Pottsville but it never happened.
Also since then, the Fairlane Village Mall has become empty. There is some construction happening in the former center court, but the stores that once filled the mall including even holdouts T-Mobile and the nail shop are long gone, with the exception, of course, of Boscov’s anchoring all of those vacancies.
Which brings us back to that newspaper editorial from 2006.
Twenty years ago, the newspaper was arguing that Schuylkill Countians shouldn’t have to drive 40 miles to see a movie in a state-of-the-art theater.
Twenty years later, read that sentence again. If only a time traveler could go back to September 2006, stand somewhere around Coal Creek and scream aloud:
BUILD THE MOVIE THEATER NOW! THE FUTURE HOLDS NO OTHER POSSIBILITY FOR THE AREA!
But there are no time travelers that we know of.. Marty McFly is too busy at Twin Pines..
We now know what happened over the previous 20 years, but we don’t know what will happen over the next 20.
The Coal Creek Commerce Center, along with many other places around the county? We don’t know what businesses or luxuries, or data centers, await. But there’s still that old crazy rumor people pass around like an urban legend gone bad, that Sylvia Browne supposedly told Montel Williams that the whole thing was eventually going to just cave in anyway.
So maybe it’s best not to have a theater there. You know.. for our safety.
Maybe it was a pipe dream. Or just dreams of pipes. Either way, there are apparently plenty of those underground around here.
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