History
The $2 million shopping center on 15 acres (61,000 m2) was developed by Berman Enterprises LP and opened on November 14, 1956, with 30 stores. The developers also developed the Ingleside Shopping Center near Baltimore, Maryland.
On April 24, 1964, the Hecht Company opened a 83,714-square-foot (7,777.3 m2) store, its sixth location in the Washington, D.C., area, at the center. A notable feature of the store at its opening was the French Provincial beauty salon and snack bar. The store closed and moved to adjacent Laurel Mall in 1981.
The shopping center's claim to fame came in 1972, when Alabama Governor George Wallace was wounded in an assassination attempt while campaigning for the presidency on May 15. Wallace survived the assassination attempt but was left paralyzed from the waist down. A bank branch remains near the location of the assassination attempt – Equitable Trust at the time and currently Bank of America.
A lesser known involvement in another significant part of American history came three days before the September 11 attacks. Hijacker Mohamed Atta sent $5000 to Mustafa Ahmad via a wire transfer he initiated at the Giant Food store located in the shopping center.
Read more about this topic: Laurel Shopping Center
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)