In keeping with the theme of last week’s “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, take a look at this, in Pittston, Pennsylvania:

This is a hospital complex. But it doesn’t quite look like it, does it?

That, of course, is because it didn’t begin life as a hospital complex, but as this!

The property is so large, and the store is so set back from the road, that there’s no legible Google Maps imagery of the actual store as a Walmart.

It’s not that common for a newer, larger Walmart to close, but this one did, and for about a decade it was a large indoor flea market. That’s a typical reuse of big-box stores in relatively poor areas, which Pittston probably counts as. It’s lost thousands of people since the 1950s, and has a higher-than-average share of residents over the poverty line.

Sometimes, these big-box properties don’t even get an informal reuse. Jumping over to Virginia, to the distressed city of Emporia, look at this Lowe’s property. It’s been like this for years.

So it’s heartening to see a state-of-the-art, truly useful second life for that old Walmart. This is a real, serious healthcare facility:

“We have three X-ray rooms, three ultra-sound, two MRI scanners and one CT scanner,” Operations Manager Michael DiMare said as he offered a tour of the new Geisinger Healthplex CenterPoint just off State Route 315 on Oak Street. And that was just the radiology department.

The urology department has five procedure rooms and will offer same-day care for patients with emergent situations like kidney stones or an inability to urinate. It will include sophisticated equipment allowing analysis of bladder function.

The ambulatory surgery department has 31 bays for patients in either pre-op or post-op, and there are six operating rooms for same-day procedures. The Healthplex is adding three endoscopy rooms to Geisinger’s offerings in the area.

The opthamology department is set up to serve both adult and pediatric patients…

There’s a lot more!

There’s a reference in the news story that blockquote is from to the prime location. Of course it’s a great location—one of America’s biggest retailers chose it (even though the store closed). And both the structure and infrastructure are already there.

This is why I think a lot of vacated retail spaces could be great resources for…not “urbanizing” suburbs or semi-rural areas, but delivering necessary stuff cheaply. Big-box retail may present issues: about how much property tax these companies pay; whether localities are taking on long-term infrastructure liabilities to attract stores which may close in a matter of years; whether commerce at such a large and concentrated scale is good for local business, whether it reinforces the need to drive everywhere, etc.

But none of these classic problems necessarily apply specifically to a big, cheap, retrofit-able one-story building. (If the parking lot ends up too big, build an outparcel or return some to landscaping.)

Maybe it would have been better not to develop so much land in this pattern. But once it’s done, we can—and we increasingly will, and will have to—find much better uses for it.

Related Reading:

Midcentury Modern and Asphalt

The Office Space is All Tied Up

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #7

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