21-02-2025
From mills to malls: Rosenbergers to redevelop Washington County eyesore for new use
Tony Rosenberger can date both his first experience with the typical revulsion that reveals an easy-to-overlook opportunity and the start of what's become a standard redevelopment playbook to nearly 40 years ago in downtown Ambridge, Beaver County.
'39 years ago, we drove past the A.M Byers Company on Duss Avenue in Ambridge and everybody looked at it, including my father, and everybody said, no way anyone has need for a dead steel mill,' said Rosenberger.
Yet redeveloping the closed mill property would prove to be both an introduction to a career to come in redeveloping failed, aging industrial properties for Rosenberger as well as a childhood indoctrination into the world of real estate development for his son Ian, perhaps best known in Pittsburgh as the young entrepreneur behind the Homewood-based plastic recycling business Thread International and its companion company Day Owl.
'Ian had the opportunity to watch that from an early age as a little kid,' said Rosenberger.
Now, the father-and-son partners are joining to together to take on redeveloping Washington Mall, a long shuttered enclosed shopping center totaling in the range of 350,000 square feet on 36 acres in South Strabane, Township, Washington County. It's a mall that has always been owned by a collection of local families that opened it in 1968 with anchors that included JCPenney and Woolworth's but was long ago out positioned by a changing industry of big box stores and e-commerce.
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