Walt Whitman Shops

Walt Whitman Shops

Location	Huntington Station, New York, USA
Opening date	1962
Owner	Simon Property Group
No. of stores and services	88
No. of anchor tenants	4
Parking	5043 spaces
No. of floors	1
Website	Simon Malls

Walt Whitman Shops is a shopping mall located in Huntington Station, New York on Walt Whitman Road (Route 110) and Jericho Turnpike (Route 25). It has many stores including main anchors Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor, Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue. The mall is owned and managed by Melvin Simon and Associates, one of the largest developers of shopping malls in the United States and owner of Long Island's largest mall, Roosevelt Field in Garden City. Suffolk County Transit, Nassau Inter-County Express and Huntington Area Rapid Transit all have bus routes that service the mall.

Walt Whitman Shops is the first enclosed mall located on Long Island.

The mall is named for the poet Walt Whitman due to the close proximity to his birthplace, a National Historic site located just down the road from the mall on Walt Whitman Road (Route 110). Quotations from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" are engraved in the exterior facade of the mall.

Anchors

• Bloomingdale's (233,000 sq ft., 2 Floors Above Ground, 1 Floor Below Ground) Opened 1962 as Macy*s, closed for renovation in 1998 and converted to Bloomingdale's. Macy*s had opened in the much larger vacant A&S building in 1995, resulting in two Macy*s in the same mall for over two years.
• Lord & Taylor (120,000 sq ft., 2 Floors Above Ground) Opened 1998 in Mall Expansion.
• Macy's (302,278 sq ft., 3 Floors Above Ground, 1 Floor Below Ground) Opened 1962 as Abraham & Straus, closed 1995, reopened as Macy*s.
• Saks Fifth Avenue (100,000 sq ft., 2 Floors Above Ground) Opened 1999 in Mall Expansion off former McCrory Store.

Previous anchors

• Abraham & Straus, A&S was located in the store which is currently occupied by Macy's.
• McCrory Stores (converted to Mall Space which connects Saks Fifth Avenue in 1999), It was here that a fire was started in May 1991 which burned through the middle section of the mall.

Food

Restaurants such as Legal Sea Foods, California Pizza Kitchen, Panera Bread, and The Cheesecake Factory can be found at Walt Whitman Shops. Although it does not have a food court, the mall does contain a McDonald's. A T.G.I. Friday's can also be found less than a block north of the mall, and an IHOP is situated across the street from the mall. There is also an Applebee's restaurant one block south of the mall at an adjacent shopping center.

Fires

• 1984: A fire destroyed seven stores and damaged 25 others in the 76-store mall.

• 1993: In 1993 a McCrory's worker plead guilty to tossing a lit cigarette into a display of silk flowers set on a block of Styrofoam, killing two of his coworkers aged 20 and 27.

External links

• Walt Whitman Shops
• Labelscar Retail History Blog