Sears at Westmoreland Mall set to close March 17

The Sears department store at Westmoreland Mall is set to close March 17, a mall spokeswoman said.

That date could change, according to Stacey Keating, a spokeswoman for CBL Properties of Chattanooga, Tenn., which owns the mall on Route 30 in Hempfield.

Neither a Sears store official nor a spokesman for Sears Holding in Hoffman Estates, Ill., could be reached for comment. The number of employees remaining at the local store was not available.

Sears filed for bankruptcy court protection from creditors in October and announced in late December the Westmoreland Mall site and 79 other Kmart and Sears stores would be shuttered in 2019. The Sears auto center at the mall already closed this year.

The Westmoreland Mall location was among 505 stores that Sears Holdings Corp. wanted to either sell or auction, according to a November bankruptcy filing. Sears owns the building at the mall but leases the ground on which it stands.

The Hempfield store closing will end almost 90 years of Sears operating in the Greensburg area. Sears opened a store at the corner of North Main and Otterman streets in downtown Greensburg in 1932, according to Robert Van Atta’s 1999 book, “A Bicentennial History of the City of Greensburg.”

In 1963, Sears moved to 770 E. Pittsburgh St., in a building now occupied in part by the SeaBase Family Fun Center and a PennDOT driver’s license center.

When the Westmoreland Mall opened in 1977, Sears occupied 200,000 square feet and was one of four anchor stores. It will be the second anchor store to close in the past two years. Bon-Ton closed its 100,000-square-foot store in August. That space will be taken by a mini casino to be operated by the Cordish Companies, a Baltimore-based development firm.