Hundreds of people showed up at Live! Casino Pittsburgh in Hempfield Township in April 2026 to watch a grand opening that skipped the ribbon entirely. Instead, staff and local officials cut a length of Italian pasta the size of a pool noodle to mark the debut of Mangia Featuring DeLallo, a fast-casual eatery and market tucked inside the casino floor at Westmoreland Mall. Sopranos actor Steve Schirripa was there for the occasion, and even he needed an introduction to the local brand behind the counter. "I had never heard of DeLallo," Schirripa said.
That is a strange scene to picture inside a mall that a lot of Westmoreland County residents have quietly written off as fading. It shouldn't be. The mall isn't dying. What's happening at Route 30 and the old Bon-Ton building is closer to a bet, and the county's own numbers say the bet is paying off in a specific, narrow way that has almost nothing to do with department stores.
The Casino Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
Live! Casino Pittsburgh occupies the space where a Bon-Ton once stood, and it has quietly become the best-performing example of its kind in the state. Live! Pittsburgh is one of four Category 4 satellite casinos in Pennsylvania, and it is the top revenue generator among them, having produced 2024 gross gaming revenue of more than $116.2 million, with $101.7 million coming from slots alone. That single building now outperforms every other piece of the property, including a mall that still carries JCPenney, Macy's, H&M and Old Navy as anchors and, according to CBL Properties, more than 170 specialty shops spread across a complex that other reporting puts at over 1.28 million square feet.
That gap matters because it explains the pattern of everything that has opened, closed, or been proposed at the mall over the past two years. CBL isn't backfilling empty anchor boxes with more clothing racks. Cordish Companies, which owns and runs the casino, isn't adding slot machines. Both are adding places to eat, play, and stay, because that's where the traffic and the revenue actually are.
What's Actually Open Right Now
Inside the casino, the dining lineup has grown into something closer to a small entertainment district than a casino snack bar. When Live! Casino Pittsburgh first opened in November 2020, the marquee restaurant was Guy Fieri's American Kitchen and Bar. That original lineup has since been rebuilt around a different set of names. Today the floor holds:
- Sports & Social Steel City, a sports bar and gaming lounge that anchors the casino's entertainment side
- A PBR-branded country bar, complete with a mechanical bull
- Mangia Featuring DeLallo, the newest addition as of April 2026. It runs as both a quick-service counter for pizza, pasta and hoagies and a small retail shelf where you can buy the same jarred sauces and boxed pastas that DeLallo, the Jeannette-based Italian foods company, sells in grocery stores across the region.
A few steps away, in the mall proper, the old Sears building is being converted into a Dick's House of Sport, the sporting goods chain's experiential retail format built around a climbing wall, a turf field, and interactive practice space rather than aisles of boxed merchandise. This move follows the opening of the first Dick's House of Sport in the Pittsburgh area at Ross Park Mall, a store complete with a climbing wall, demo cage, putting green, turf field, and running track. When it opens, it will be only the second House of Sport in the Pittsburgh region. As of this writing, Dick's has not published a firm opening date for the Westmoreland location, so the honest answer for anyone planning around it is "sometime in 2026, watch the storefront."
The Hotel That Keeps Almost Happening
The part of this story that hasn't landed yet is the one that got the most press coverage. In August 2025, the Westmoreland County Chamber of Commerce released a six-month feasibility study from CBRE Hotels recommending a 200-room hotel next to Live! Casino, paired with a large event center. The exact size of that event center depends on which report you read. CBS Pittsburgh's coverage at the time cited a 60,000-square-foot facility, while later reporting from the chamber and TribLive put the figure closer to 50,000 square feet. Either way, the pitch was the same: a hotel and conference space that would give the county its first large-scale meeting venue since the Ramada Greensburg Hotel and Conference Center across Route 30 closed in 2020.
The projected numbers were big enough to make headlines on their own. An $86 million hotel and conference center adjacent to Live Casino Pittsburgh at Westmoreland Mall could infuse more than $720 million into the community in just 10 years, according to the study commissioned by the Westmoreland County Chamber of Commerce. A separate summary of the same study broke that down further, estimating nearly $270 million in direct revenue, another $16.2 million in local taxes, and more than 120 jobs in the first decade of operation. The preferred site, according to reporting from WPXI, sits between Live! Casino and the new Dick's House of Sport location in the old Sears building. Live! Casino representatives even referenced the study's findings at a public hearing before the state gaming board, presenting an artist's rendering of a high-rise hotel in what is currently a stretch of parking lot. Even chamber president Dan DeBone was upfront at the time about the one piece nobody had solved: "Now the $86 million question is how do you pay for it?"
That was August 2025. By February 2026, the story had quietly shifted from "here's the vision" to "here's why nothing has moved."
"I think it depends how much money they would be asking for. But we've still never been approached."
That's Westmoreland County Commissioner Sean Kertes, describing the state of talks between the chamber and county leadership six months after the study's release. Hempfield Supervisor Doug Weimer, who sat on the committee that oversaw the study, told the Mon Valley Independent that township officials have had informal conversations with casino representatives, but conceded there has been little forward motion in the six months since the numbers came out.
Here's the timeline as it actually happened, stripped of the press-release framing:
- June 2025 – Live! Casino references preliminary study findings at a public gaming board hearing and shows a rendering of a proposed hotel tower.
- August 2025 – CBRE Hotels formally releases its feasibility study, projecting $720 million in ten-year economic impact from a 200-room hotel and event center.
- February 2026 – County commissioners confirm no funding conversations have taken place and no one has formally approached them about financing the project.
None of that means the hotel won't get built eventually. It means the county has a study, a preferred location, and a rendering, and not much else yet.
What This Means If You Actually Live Here
If you drive Route 30 through Hempfield on a normal week, the useful way to sort all of this is by how real it is right now. Mangia and the rest of Live! Casino's dining lineup are open today, no asterisk needed. Dick's House of Sport is under construction in a building you can already see taking shape, with an opening that should land sometime this year even without a published date. The hotel and convention center are still a study, a number, and a handful of quotes from officials who agree it would help the county but haven't figured out who writes the check.
Weimer has described the project as something that would "act as a gateway to the Laurel Highlands and establish tourism as an economic anchor in Westmoreland County," benefiting local residents and small business owners along the way. Whether that turns into steel and concrete or stays a rendering on a slide deck is genuinely an open question, and it's one worth watching if you spend any time on that stretch of Route 30, whether you're grabbing a hoagie at Mangia, testing a climbing wall at the new Dick's, or just wondering what that empty patch of parking lot between the casino and the old Sears building might look like in five years.
If you're curious how changes like this ripple into property values and buyer interest along the Route 30 corridor, the team at LaBoonSmith has been watching Westmoreland County's commercial and residential patterns for years and is happy to talk through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the press release said. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to dig into it.
