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YMCA Opens Fitness Center In Springfield's Tower Square

WAMC
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Once a bustling shopping mall in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, Tower Square is welcoming new types of tenants. 

The YMCA of Greater Springfield has moved its fitness center, childcare programs, and administrative offices to Tower Square.

With brick and mortar retailers dwindling and malls struggling, Tower Square General Manager Fred Christensen said the focus is on attracting tenants that can offer services to the people who work in the 28-story office tower and elsewhere downtown.

"And a business that brings people in like the Y is the perfect homerun for us," said Christensen.

Next year, a brewery and tap room will open in what was once shopping space in Tower Square.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.