Posted on 12/16/2019 5:32:28 AM PST by NOBO2012
It’s time once again to reminisce about the days of Christmas Past when shopping entailed a trip downtown to visit the Five and Dimes and your local department stores. From the heyday of downtowns we transitioned first to the era of suburban malls, enclosed meccas of commerce featuring anchor stores, hot pretzels, cheap boutiques and endless parking lots. That vignette too has morphed into Christmas Past as once great malls have become wastelands of obsolescence. By and large they now sit empty awaiting a rebirth.
Somewhere along the line the wizards of marketing decided that people really wanted to be exposed to the winter elements as they did their Christmas shopping. Accordingly commerce complexes moved to even more suburban settings involving an endless collection of Big Box stores congregated around busy intersections, an infinite number of fast food outlets and even more expansive parking lots. This configuration remains a part of the Christmas Present shopping experience but the Big Box era is approaching its own sell-by-date as more and more of the brick and mortars fall by the wayside.
People are quickly migrating to the convenience of a new Christmas Present model: shopping online and having the Amazon elves deliver your Christmas gifts right to the front door.
I’m guessing Christmas Future will bring something even more akin to virtual reality where money changes hands but the physical aspects of selecting, wrapping and delivering of actual gifts will be replaced by an email notice and a computer generated image of things your friends and family imagine you’d like.
So enjoy your actual shopping days before Christmas while you still can: soon enough they’ll become just one more cultural anachronism.
ORIGINALLY POSTED DECEMBER 15, 2018
When I was growing up every town had at least one iconic department store that did Christmas right: fabulous back-lit and magical Christmas displays, often animated, gracing all of their street level windows. In a time before kids were so wired into their iPhones and “social” networks that they missed much of the amazement of the real world, there were all these fabulous windows of mystery and wonder, free for the taking. All it took was a dime bus ride downtown.
I was very lucky as my hometown, Grand Rapids, MI, had three such emporiums of merchandise, all founded in the late 1800’s:
All now long gone. One of them, Herpolsheimer’s, however lives on as it has been memorialized in the film version of Chris Van Allsburg’s book The Polar Express.
The old Herp’s, as the locals called it, had what was called the “Santa Express” – a monorail that ran around the entire basement level of the store during the Christmas season to keep kids occupied as mom and dad shopped.
Santa’s Rocket Express, Herpolsheimer’s 1949
It is said to have served as the inspiration for Van Allsburg’s popular book.
The old Herpolsheimer’s building,
Print found on Pinterest but tracked down to ArleneFaye
which once housed the inspirational train and window wonders currently houses the Grand Rapids Police Department. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you probably wouldn’t want to take your kids there for a festive Christmas pot pie lunch in their tea room.
And don’t even get me started on the “dime” stores, of which Grand Rapids also enjoyed three:
Print found on Pinterest but tracked down to ArleneFaye
Woolworths, above, at the foot of Monroe, Grants, right next door, and Kresge’s just up a block to the east.
Print found on Pinterest but tracked down to ArleneFaye
Also all gone.
What about your town’s locally owned iconic department stores? Do any of them still exist? Are any of them still in the downtown area? Or is your downtown comprised of restaurants, bars and clubs these days? Just wondering.
Posted from: MOTUS A.D.
The burden most Freepers carry is we remember what America used to be like.
Thank you for this. I scream at the TV with the word “holiday” inserted into ads fifty times in a single commercial break with not one “Christmas.” I love Christmas, but despise their dreadful generic “holiday” they won’t even mention but laughingly sell items for.
I remember jostling in the crowds at a mall — absolutely jam-packed, everyone’s arms full of packages, with huge decorations everywhere and Christmas music playing.
It was a struggle, but it was also part of the excitement of the season.
Now the mall is dead, scheduled to be torn down.
My family would go into the city to see the windows of the department stores every year. We would shop for gifts and have lunch. It was an all day event. Sweet memories!
J.L. Hudson... Downtown Detroit...
Oh God, how prescient! At Christmas time my dad and mom would drive us into the city and we would MARVEL at the elaborate mechanical animated displays in the departments stores windows. This would be the mid 1950s. The best representation of those days is in the movie A Christmas Story by one of the best raconteurs of the 20th century, the venerable Jean Shepherd..
We were free range kids in those days. At the age of 5 I would wander the woods, fields, and culverts. The only rule was to be home by dark.
On Saturdays when I was slightly older, I and my buddies would pack a PB&J lunch in a paper sack and fill our boy scout canteens with water. In those days folks left their dogs wander free. Nothing is a major symbiotic combnation than wandering boys and wandering dogs, as a combined pack. We are both cut from the same cloth, and we would wander the woods, creeks, and pastures, avoiding the bulls, till night fall.
PS: I'm going to steal your quote!
Hens & Kelly. Buffalo, NY. Started in 1892. Closed in 1982. Old joke - “Why did the chicken cross the road?” To see the Hens in Kelly’s window!
I was with one of the last group of kids to ride the old Herpolsheimer’s train in the early 80s. Scared the crud out of me. I had no idea that a store like that even existed in the world of big box stores.
I was a mall fan, like most kids back then, so I found the old school city stores to be “quaint”, if not stuffy and dusty. Someplace for the grandparents.
But today I have no love for suburban shopping as those place lack the quaintness and local flavor of the old department stores.
So yeah.....I’m now the old guy.
I really miss old-fashioned dime stores. We had Woolworth’s, Murphy’s and Kresge’s here in DC.
I, my brother, and sister would dress in our best and were taken to downtown Cleveland by Mom to see the “real” Santa at Higbees. We were then told that the rest of the Santas we were going to see were “helpers”, so don’t tell the kids that were in line at those other stores.
We then would go to The May Co., Halle’s, Sterling-Linder-Davis to see an immense Christmas tree going up the center of the store (also got to see Francis the Talking Mule there), Bailey’s, and then Taylor’s, making a day of it carrying whatever dodads we got at each Santa visit.
We’d pass the Peterson Nut Store on the corner of Ontario and Euclid Ave., where the aroma of newly roasted peanuts would deliberately be wafted out on to the street. We’d stop at a Dime Store (remember those? I think it was Kresge’s where there was a grand piano with someone playing Christmas songs) and we’d stand at a counter to feast on a hot dog and birch beer.
Each store had elevators with operators who’d call out whatever each floor was selling. The May Co. actually had a big room somewhere on the 6th floor to babysit your kids while you shopped. I remember there was a big sliding board and lots of sand all over the floor.
Then we’d stop back later at The May Co. to meet our dad who sold furniture on the 6th or 7th floor, and we’d all go down to 9th street to an alley where we’d eat at Chef Hector’s (the original Chef Boyardee) and feast on delicious Italian food, each dish covered with a metal lid.
Then home again on a bus from downtown Cleveland back to Euclid, Ohio. Those were the days. I guess I could write a book, huh?
Are Euclidding me? That was great!
Main St. Flushing was like that for me
we’d also go into Manhattan to see bigger
spectacles of course
Every generation has its ‘land of content’. Thoughtful people recognize the valuable things in their experiences and find them even in the current cultural ‘dead zone’; and they cherish them.
I appreciated laweeks’ memories - they are very much like my own childhood ones.
But I’m making wonderful memories - still, and despite.
(If it weren’t Nature, it would still seem like a ‘duty’ :-)
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