Call it a groundbreaking for the second act for North Platte’s 1972 mall.
The nearly 100 people at Tuesday morning’s formal shovel-turning could look anywhere and see plenty of ground already broken in the first three months of Rev Development LLC’s $75 million transformation project.
But the familiar scene of VIPs wearing hard hats and bearing shovels also served to unveil a page-turning new name — District 177 — for the shopping center known as simply The Mall for its first one-third of a century.
 
The name links the number of North Platte’s main Interstate 80 exit to the one-time regional hub’s new identity and purpose, speakers said on a stage just north of where the mall celebrated its grand opening on April 12, 1972.
Behind them, visitors could see the first poured footings for the four-story apartment-commercial building that will become the site’s new showcase as well as a new home for the remaining stores on the main mall’s north side.
 
“We wanted this destination to not just be for people in North Platte but to be for people that are passing through,” as in the mall’s first years, said Christine Weeks, CEO of Lincoln’s Eleanor Creative design firm.
“You have your Canteen District now” downtown, “and now we wanted another district — it’s a community within a community.”

Cassie Condon, a former Platte River Mall manager, beamed as she introduced the speakers. She served as master of ceremonies in her current role as vice president of economic development and marketing for the North Platte Area Chamber & Development Corp.
Chamber President and CEO Gary Person thanked chamber members, supportive city leaders and the nearly 100 people who publicly backed city aid to the mall project at City Council meetings this spring.
 
“This is rural America, where — supposedly — recruiting brand-name retail stores is a thing of the past and where once flourishing malls entered the ice age, becoming extinct dinosaurs,” he said.
But Rev co-owners Mike Works and Justin Hernandez, North Platte-based NebraskaLand Bank and a 4-3 City Council majority made “the impossible and (the) financing become possible,” Person told the crowd. Continue reading here > https://nptelegraph.com/news/local/malls-new-name-district-177-evokes-north-plattes-status-as-regional-hub/article_e86fd7b4-157c-11ec-a32b-ef4a3c310093.html