Mary Ann Brown of Adamsburg got a sneak peak Friday at an indoor entertainment venue in North Huntingdon replete with a zip line hanging from the ceiling, a double-layer 1,000-foot electric go-kart track, four 30-foot-high climbing walls, a battle beam and a sea of 200,000 plastic balls for youngsters to jump into.
“It’s really impressive. I’ve been watching it being built,” Brown said.
John Wambold, owner of newly built Urban Air Adventure Park at Huntingdon Marketplace has millions of reasons to hope that youngsters and adults are equally impressed by all of what the sprawling 70,000-square-foot indoor center has to offer. It also has rooms to host parties.
The adventure park on Mills Drive in the Huntingdon Marketplace shopping complex off Route 30 officially opens Saturday morning.
It cost about $5 million to outfit the Urban Air park with all of the extensive amenities, said Wambold, who now has four Urban Air franchises.
Colony Holdings Co.’s construction of the building and all of Urban Air’s furnishings to make it an adventure park have a price tag of about $12 million, said Don Tarosky Jr., a partner and chief operating officer in Colony Holdings, which owns the Huntingdon Marketplace shopping complex.
Wambold is confident the Urban Air site in North Huntingdon will be a draw.
Demographics show that within a 15-minute drive, there are about 50,000 youngsters, Wambold said. The location is advantageous because it is off Route 30, about a mile from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, within a 30-minute drive of Pittsburgh’s eastern communities and far enough from his Urban Air parks in Cranberry and North Fayette.
His fourth Urban Air park is in Middletown, N.Y.
“There’s nothing like this in the Pittsburgh area. People will drive to come here,” said Wambold, whose other two Urban Air parks in the region are smaller.
The new Urban Air is one of 290 locations of the Texas-based nationwide franchiser that’s either open or in the pipeline. Urban Air is one of five entertainment platforms of the Unleashed Brands Group of Bedford, Texas.
By opening the doors on Saturday, Wambold’s venture will be able to take advantage of what he said is its busiest months of the year: March and April. Conversely, the slowest months of the year are when youngsters are leaving school in June and returning to classes in September, he noted.
The park will offer not only indoor adventure, but also about 150 full-time and part-time jobs. Wambold said Urban Air likely will employ about 100 young adults in high school and college, giving them an opportunity to earn money in a fun setting.
Tarosky and Wambold said Friday that Urban Air’s opening here was a long time coming. Tarosky said he signed a lease with Wambold for his Urban Air site in August 2019. Then the covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and those plans, like so many other developments, were waylaid.
Urban Air is in a shopping area that features a Walmart and Colony Holdings’ building with multiple storefronts along Mills Drive.
The company has plans for two other buildings containing several storefronts along Mills Drive, plus an annex to the Urban Air building that will contain offices above a Primanti Bros. Restaurant & Bar on the ground floor. That building featuring a Primanti restaurant should be ready to be occupied in the first quarter of 2025, Tarosky said.
The anticipated draw of Urban Air and the Walmart on Mills Drive is bound to make the remaining properties even more attractive to prospective tenants, said Don Tarosky Sr., a partner with Colony Holdings.
Joe Napsha is a TribLive reporter covering Irwin, North Huntingdon and the Norwin School District. He also writes about business issues. He grew up on Neville Island and has worked at the Trib since the early 1980s. He can be reached at jnapsha@triblive.com.