The Malling of Long Island

HAROLD BLUMENTHAL felt a mixture of pride and trepidation in 1956 as he watched thousands of construction workers transform an old airfield into Long Island's first shopping mall, and one of the nation's largest.

Blumenthal spent much of his family's wartime savings to open Harwyn Shoes at the new Roosevelt Field. It was a calculated risk, designed to protect his company's other stores in downtown Hempstead and Freeport, and to capitalize on the new retailing concept, should it take off with consumers.

He was optimistic about Roosevelt Field because Macy's was part of it. He figured the department store chain wouldn't spend millions of dollars to construct its largest suburban location, only to see it fail.

"My dad took a chance . . . he risked it all, believing the mall would be successful," recalled son Robert, who joined the family business in 1954 after college graduation. During its first year the Roosevelt Field store almost bankrupted Harwyn Shoes, and it didn't prosper until the late 1960s, when the mall was enclosed, he said.

In 1956, three open-air malls -- Roosevelt Field in Garden City, Green Acres in Valley Stream and Mid-Island Plaza (later renamed Broadway Mall) in Hicksville -- opened in the span of three months. They were joined that year by Manhasset's Americana shopping center. Economic historians say never again would there be so many store openings within a 12-month period on Long Island. Said Blumenthal: "It was a whole new adventure. It was total excitement . . . "

Many residents had similar feelings about Mid-Island Plaza, which debuted in October, 1956, on the site of a former boys' orphanage and a dairy and vegetable farm operated by the Catholic Church. (The same week, Green Acres opened on another abandoned airfield.)Richard and Anne Evers, who have lived in Hicksville for 50 years, remember the anticipation of Mid-Island's grand opening. "Shopping as we understood it would never be the same again," said Richard Evers, village historian and a retired teacher. "It was accessible shopping: plenty of parking and many goods to choose from, all in one place."

Mid-Island, along with the other malls, was a novelty to the veterans, their spouses and others who moved to Nassau County after World War II. They had purchased modest homes in sprawling developments, but their shopping options were limited to a few strip plazas and increasingly congested downtowns. "We were bursting at the seams. You couldn't find a parking space on Broadway," said Evers, a Marine Corps veteran, referring to Hicksville's traditional commercial street.

Mid-Island initially consisted of 10 buildings, including two supermarkets, and 8,000 parking spaces. It was dominated by Gertz department store, now Stern's, housed in a five-story, 300,000-square-foot building. An underground tunnel allowed trucks to make deliveries directly to mall shops. During atomic bomb drills in the 1950s and 1960s, the tunnel also was used for civilian defense.

Explosive population growth and rising incomes in Nassau County accounted for the simultaneous construction of four major shopping centers, according to Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board. In the 1950s, Nassau's population more than doubled to 1.3 million people, making it the fastest-growing U.S. county. (Suffolk won that distinction in the 1960s, and as a result three malls would open there by 1970.)

Many new residents used automobiles for work, pleasure trips and errands. Seeing that downtown shopping districts couldn't handle the increased volume, developers proposed strip plazas and malls. The peak construction year was 1956, when 22 shopping plazas were built.

Long Island didn't invent the mall concept. But the gusto with which area developers first built malls and their accompanying publicity, along with shoppers' response, led many to assume the Island gave birth to the retailing concept. In 1950, the first open-air center debuted in Seattle, followed six years later by the first enclosed mall in Edina, Minn., according to a history by the International Council of Shopping Centers, a Manhattan trade group.

"There was rationing during World War II, so people didn't spend," Koppelman said. "There was all this pent up demand after the war . . . It was a bonanza in terms of retail spending." Yearly sales at Nassau stores rose 73 percent between 1958 and 1967 to $3 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department data.

The malls' share of this growth was small given all their hoopla. By 1967, 11 years after they had opened, Roosevelt Field, Green Acres and Mid-Island together had sales of $254.6 million, 8.5 percent of Nassau's total receipts. The malls' share is higher today, although under 50 percent, said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association. "It's a higher proportion today, simply because we have had the collapse of so many central business districts" or downtowns, she said.

The malls faltered in their early years because each possessed only a single department store, and uncovered concourses exposed shoppers to weather.

Retail experts say their middle-aged developers -- home builders by profession -- knew little about retailing and the importance of having a variety of stores. But they integrated their new malls into community life by playing host to everything from religious services and car shows to firefighting tournaments and fine-art exhibits. These events drew crowds that spent money in the shops.

The Nassau malls faced increased competition in 1962, with the opening of the Island's first enclosed shopping complex: Walt Whitman Mall in South Huntington. Crowds formed to browse its 75 stores and look at the Japanese gardens, all without having to wear a coat or use an umbrella thanks to a 30-foot roof. Rebecca Martins of Jericho, 12 years old when Walt Whitman opened, said: "It became the place to be, and to be seen. I know it sounds naive today, but back then we just marveled at being able to stay inside and go to all the stores."

Suffolk's first mall was enclosed as an afterthought. Originally designed around an open-air promenade, store construction was three-quarters completed when developer David Muss abruptly decided to add a connecting roof. "He thought it was the trend of the future," said Sheldon Klotz, who worked for Winston-Muss Inc., the mall's builder and owner. "So, they redesigned the mall by making sketches on the back of envelopes. They didn't change the poured-concrete floor or duck ponds -- just put a roof over the whole thing," he said.

By enclosing Walt Whitman, the developers ensured it would stand out from its open-air competitors, particularly the South Shore Mall in Bay Shore, under construction at the same time. Klotz also said the novelty of Walt Whitman's roof attracted people and lengthened their stay. Its research showed the average shopper spent 11/2 hours at a covered mall, but only 45 minutes at open-air centers.

Such studies helped persuade the owners of Roosevelt Field to enclose its walkways in 1967, four years after Walt Whitman's debut. Mid-Island and Green Acres quickly followed suit, but South Shore remained open-air for its first dozen years.

In 1968-69, Klotz supervised the building of Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove. The project was made more difficult by Moriches Road, which ran through the proposed mall and had to be relocated.

Opening day also presented challenges. "It was a fiasco," Klotz said. A water main break early in the morning cut off water to Smith Haven and led town officials to propose cancelling the grand opening because the sprinkler system and toilets wouldn't work. "I told them, `We can't cancel it. Thousands of people are going to show up and you don't have enough police officers to turn them away,"' he recalled.

Town leaders agreed, allowing Klotz to invite volunteer fire departments to encircle Smith Haven with pumper trucks in return for allowing them to ask shoppers for donations, and to set up bucket brigades to keep the public toilets filled while a work crew fixed the broken water pipe by mid-afternoon.

But to Klotz what made Smith Haven unique were the works of art commissioned from sculpter Alexander Calder, painters Larry Rivers, Peter Max and others. Much later, sculptures were placed outside Roosevelt Field and The Source mall, both commemorating Charles A. Lindbergh's solo air flight to France in 1927. (The Calder is still in Smith Haven's food court, but the paintings are gone.)Placing fine art in shopping malls symbolized their growing importance in suburbia. They had become like cities to the surrounding housing developments, said William Severini Kowinski, who toured Long Island and other areas for his 1985 book, "The Malling of America."

Ironically, the people who fled crowded neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn after World War II for their dream house with a yard in Levittown and other places found that they still needed a central place to meet neighbors, see a movie, shop or simply hang out. By default, he said, the mall became a new Main Street or corner store for these GIs and their families.

"Today's malls don't have the romance they used to. People aren't excited about going to them. They have become normal," Kowinski said, noting that strip plazas with big-box stores, factory outlets and discounters now compete for shoppers' dollars. The malls have responded by adding food courts, upscale boutiques and more special events. They also have beefed up security after a rash of car thefts and muggings.

Even downtowns, some of which saw their decline accelerate after malls were built, are reinventing themselves by focusing on nostalgia. "The mall didn't do in downtown," Kowinski said. "Downtowns weren't strong enough to resist them and couldn't keep shoppers for other reasons, such as limited parking and hours."

The decline wasn't immediate in downtown Hempstead or Freeport, but Harwyn Shoes eventually closed its stores there to focus on its thriving mall shops, which today total 17. Harwyn's president Robert Blumenthal said, "The malls just overpowered downtown. Businesses disappeared because they didn't see what was coming. If we hadn't opened in the malls, we wouldn't be in business today."