Category:Cinruss, Allentown, Pennsylvania

The Cinruss Company started in 1961 when Ed Russoli opened 'Cinruss Creations at 942 Hamilton Street in Allentown. The store specialized in sterling silver jewelry and was a big hit with teens. On Saturdays, teens would flock to the store to buy I.D. bracelets, initial rings and bangles. In April 1967 Russoli decided that the hip youth of the city needed their own clothing store, and he opened Cinruss Garb, a women's clothing store that specialized in minis. About a year later, in September 1968, The Upper Story, a counter-culture "head shop" opened on the second floor of the building.

Drawing from the hippie culture of San Francisco, the interior of the store and the stairs leading up to the second floor was painted in psychedelic Day-Glo paint and illuminated with black lights. Customers entered the store by going though a bead curtain at the top of the stairs. Inside the store was the fragrance of sandalwood, or other incenses that were burning, and psychedelic music from Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Jefferson Airplane and other current 1960s bands was playing. It was at the Upper Story that customers could buy flower power buttons, peace signs, floppy hats, Nehru jackets and Landlubber jeans. It was one of the few places you could buy The Village Voice, Rolling Stone magazine and albums by underground musicians such as Janis Joplin, The Doors, Cream and Jimi Hendrix.

The Upper Story gave the Valley's youth a chance to be part of the Haight-Ashbury experience. In the late 60s, when college students locally began using drugs, the store sold drug paraphernalia such as bongs, cigarette paper rollers and various pipes. Eventually, there were Upper Story stores in Reading, Easton, Stroudsburg and Wilkes-Barre, being stocked with items that were sold in New York's Greenwich Village.

In 1973, Russoli moved all of his stores to 730 Hamilton Mall (as Hamilton Street was referred to at the time) and re-branded the Upper Story as Cinruss-Upper Story. The store was moved to a more traditional ground-floor location at . As the hippie counter-Culture passed into their late 20s and into history, the store refocused as a hip 20-somethings women's clothing store and dropped the bongs, incense, beads and albums. By 1977, the store was simply known as "Cinruss", and in February 1983, Cinruss closed its doors for the final time.

The original building that housed the "Upper Story" at 942 Hamilton was torn down in 1974, later becoming the "Gallery-On-The-Mall" building in 1975 as part of a plan to revitalize several blocks of downtown Allentown by raising older buildings and replacing them with new, modern ones. It eventually became a PP&L office building in 1999. PP&L tore down the building in 2012 and today the site of the original "Upper Story" is a new NIZ office building, with no evidence of it's counter-culture hippie past.

The 730 Hamilton Street building, the former home of Cinruss, was demolished as part of the NIZ 5 City Center building.