Seventy years ago, in time for late back-to-school shoppers and early holiday bargain hunters, the shopping venue billed as the largest on the East Coast opened in Dundalk.

The strategically placed Eastpoint Shopping Center, a portmanteau of the intersecting arteries that distinguish its location (pictured above) opened with more than 60 retail shops, including popular Baltimore chains like Read’s Drug Store, Arundel Ice Cream, and Stieff Silver. Hutzler’s and Hochschild Kohn’s, whose histories on Howard and Lexington streets dated to the 19th century, provided anchor outlets. Spread over 60 acres, the complex included parking spaces for 4,000 automobiles.

Gov. Theodore McKeldin presided over opening ceremonies while 101-year-old Max Hochschild cut the ribbon at Hochschild-Kohn and Max’s 5-year-old grandson, James Hutzler, snipped the ribbon at Hutzler’s (the legendary department store dynasties intermarried). The excitement was such that Baltimore County police were called in to direct traffic and manage the throng of shoppers and sightseers, some of whom came merely to gaze at the modern marketplace.

With the suburbs burgeoning and downtown congestion and parking issues apparently intractable, “new shopping habits” were forming, a representative of developers Joseph and Jack Meyerhoff told The Baltimore Sun. They described the massive complex as an “expression of the continuing revolution in the pattern of daily life.”

In 1972, a roof was placed atop the shopping center and HVAC units, dropped by helicopter, transformed the outdoor site into the climate-controlled and renamed Eastpoint Mall—one more permutation in the pattern of daily life.

This June, however, store owners and vendors at Eastpoint received notice from mall owners MCB Real Estate—the same firm planning to replace the twin Harborplace shopping pavilions with condominiums—that the whole enterprise would be closing August 31.

“I’m surprised it’s lasted this long, to be honest,” says Wayne Laufert, a reporter and then-editor at the The Dundalk Eagle from 1986-2010, who still lives less than two miles away. “But it’s sad at the same time.”

To Laufert’s point, Eastpoint was always more than a shopping destination. From the outset, it also served as both community hub and cultural institution (of sorts). There were car shows; visits from Miss America, Captain Chesapeake, teen TV dance host Buddy Deane, and practically every Oriole and Colt for autograph sessions; and of course the traditional mall drop-ins by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

More remarkably, and somewhat surreal in hindsight, Hochschild-Kohn, for years, featured a live penguin exhibit. Equally curious, Hess Shoes maintained a window display of monkeys. Once, actual reindeer were brought in for a holiday promotion. And, for a brief period, the mall’s indoor pond was stocked with trout for fishing. (Yes, there are photos of boys and dads proudly holding up their catch with the always-popular Great Cookie store in the background.)

By the 1980s, record stores like Sound Waves and fast-food additions like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A helped make Eastpoint the quintessential teenage hang of the era. On a recent podcast of Nestor Aparicio’s “Baltimore Positive,” former Child’s Play drummer John Allen—both are Dundalk natives—compared his teenage Eastpoint experience to the mall in the movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

“It was our social setting,” Aparicio added. “This was before [cell]phones. It was the only place you could find your friends.”

Laufert doesn’t recall the exhibit known as “Monkeytown” at Hess Shoes. He may have been too young. But he says, “I do remember the penguins at Hochschild’s.” As a teenager, he grew to appreciate the mall’s bookstores (he now sits on the Poe House board). Today, he mostly visits to get his steps in on rainy or hot summer days. Occasionally, he grabs a pretzel from Auntie Anne’s, which remain hard to resist.

In light of its closing, Laufert reflects on what Eastpoint became for him over the years—an adventure as a kid, later a chance to chat up the girl next door who worked at a jewelry counter. Then, a shopping errand with his wife—and now his alternative treadmill.

The inevitability of the last few years, watching stores close and get boarded up, witnessing the decline in foot traffic, never quite set in.

“It’s just something you don’t think about ever going away even as the reality of the last several years should’ve sunk in,” he says. “It’s 70 years old. The metaphor to the human lifespan is pretty direct. Birth, adolescence, middle age, old age, and now death, is it?”

In the halcyon 1950s, Hutzler’s department store employed 1,500 sales, office, and Colonial tea room dining staff. “Probably 2,000 during the holidays,” says Michael Lisicky, author of Hutzler’s: Where Baltimore Shops. “You went downtown to shop, lunch, see a show, go back, and shop again,” he says. “Lexington and Howard was the busiest intersection in the state.”

In a twist of fate hardly fathomable when the 140-year-old family business shuttered in 1989, that corner, specifically the former luncheonette basement of the old Hutzler Brothers Palace, is now home to one of the busiest “intersections” in the world. An estimated 25 percent of global internet traffic—including half of the emails, Amazon orders, Netflix streams, and iPhone downloads in the U.S.—pass through the stacks of underground AiNET servers there.

Many Baltimoreans know the backstory: In 1858, 23-year-old Abram Hutzler convinced his father, Moses, a German-Jewish peddler, to sign for credit so he could open a dry-goods store, which eventually set a record among American department stores for tenure at its original location.

Fewer know the current story: Deepak Jain, son of Indian immigrant parents, launched AiNET—originally a web-hosting company whose revenues now surpass $100 million—in his parents’ basement while attending Glenelg High School. (When he was a restless 6-year-old in a rural community without a lot of children nearby to play with, his parents had gotten him a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer to keep him occupied.) By 1994, while in theory a sophomore Johns Hopkins University pre-med student, Jain’s business was growing fast enough that he could pay his own tuition.

Since then, AiNET, which employs two dozen workers on site, has expanded into a data center, cloud storage, IT services, and cyber-security business. Clients include federal contractors Jain can’t mention, as well as tenants at his telecom hotel such as Comcast and Verizon. In 2014, Jain bought the five-story Hutzler Brothers Palace on Howard and the adjoining seven-story building on Lexington known as One Market Center—where the Hutzlers tried and failed to reinvent themselves in 1985.

One of Jain’s related missions is Future Cities, an effort to bridge Baltimore’s digital divide by building a free Wi-Fi network across the city. Meanwhile, change has been percolating on the outskirts of the long desolate block. The Everyman and Hippodrome theaters and Bromo Arts District have sparked activity. Historic Lexington Market is also due for a $30-million-plus redesign.

For his part, Lisicky would like to see more AiNET initiatives similar to its collaboration with The Contemporary art museum in 2017, which opened the Hutzler Brothers Palace’s renown Art Deco doorways to the public for the first time in nearly three decades. The irony that what was once such a social hub now channels our digital communication—even a local text or email sent via the internet inevitably bounces through AiNET servers—isn’t lost on Lisicky. “There’s still a heartbeat in that building. It’s just digital and buried.”

As far back as 1941, Albert Hutzler, then company president, saw the handwriting on the wall. Long before his beloved department store came to its end, he had alerted a city planning conference at Hopkins that urban blight, unchecked, would lead to falling downtown real-estate values and transform Baltimore into a “ring city” with a shrinking core surrounded by thriving suburbs.

He added that such flight is not so much a problem for a merchant. “They go to the outlying communities and go on to build there,” said Hutzler, who would build stores in Towson, Catonsville, Dundalk, Glen Burnie, Woodlawn, Bel Air, and White Marsh. “It is the city itself that goes to pieces.”