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128-year-old department store will be no more
Macy’s announced Monday that it has sold its downtown Pittsburgh location, which has been a department store since 1887, to a developer that plans to turn it into apartments and a hotel.
Cincinnati--Macy’s Inc. announced Monday that it has sold its downtown Pittsburgh location to developer Core Realty, which plans to turn it into apartments, a hotel and parking.
The building, located at 500 Fifth Ave. in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh, has been a department store of one name or another since 1887. It originally opened as Kaufmann’s and expanded several times until 1913, and then again in the 1950s.
The May Department Stores Company bought the store from the Kaufmann family in 1946. May’s was acquired by Macy’s parent company in 2005. Once the flagship of the Kaufmann’s chain, the store officially became a Macy’s in September 2006.
Cincinnati-based Macy’s said a final clearance sale is set to begin July 20 and will continue until early September.
Chief Stores Officer Jeff Kantor said the retailer has been investigating its options for this store, which includes about 1.2 million square feet of space on 13 floors but only about 475,000 square feet of actual selling space, for the past four years.
Macy’s eventually determined that selling the entire building was the best option, despite the fact that it had plans at one time to keep the department store open on floors 1 through 4, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
The retailer said it has no plans to open another store in downtown Pittsburgh. Macy’s has 13 other stores in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The downtown Pittsburgh store workforce numbers 170, and there are another 30 Macy’s employees who work in district offices downtown. Macy’s said employees will either be offered jobs at nearby stores or given severance.
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