Text size:

To the Mall, Bearing Money

By Michele Ingrassia | Staff Writer

When 6-year-old Lois Sabatella moved to Valley Stream in 1955, Green Acres was just being built, a gleaming 300-acre retail nirvana that beckoned from Sunrise Highway. It didn't take long before she was hooked. Every Saturday, from puberty to prom, she would curl her hair in rollers, tie a kerchief around her head and hop on the Elmont Road bus to the hippest hangout around, eager to snap up 29-cent records at Sam Goody's, 79-cent mascara at Woolworth's and $2.98 school shoes at A.S. Beck.

``We couldn't wait for Saturday,'' says Sabatella, now 49, her enthusiasm undiminished by the decades. ``There were thousands and thousands of teenagers there. It was the place to be - the WMCA `Good Guys' would broadcast from the mall; so would WABC. And we all had allowance money to spend - around $3 a week in those days - and when you had a birthday, you got money, too. For $10, you went home with a pocketbook and makeup and even had money left for lunch.''

It was the dawn of the modern retail age, when suburbanites turned shopping into leisure sport and malls into theater, a magnet for every teenager with birthday money and every housewife with a few hours to spare. And who could blame them? After decades of Depression-era poverty and wartime shortages, legions of GIs and their brides fled Mom's attic for 800 square feet of subdivision heaven. Suddenly, they had the bucks to furnish their nests and the time to do it.

``My father lived through the Depression, and when he moved from Corona to Long Island, he didn't want anything old in the house,'' says Amy Kraker, owner of Village Green, a Port Washington shop that sells the sort of vintage dishware that once filled her parents' kitchen.

Postwar Long Islanders hungered for all things modern - television sets, spun aluminum pitchers, New Look dresses and enough chrome to trim a squadron of B-52 bombers. And storeowners clamored to satisfy them. Between 1940 and 1970, when baby boomers filled suburban homes and schools faster than they could be built, Nassau and Suffolk annual retail sales soared from $270 million to $6.8 billion - staggering, considering that, even in 1970, median family income on the Island scarcely topped $13,000.

No matter. In 1956, three regional shopping centers opened in Nassau County - Green Acres, Roosevelt Field in Garden City and Mid-Island Plaza in Hicksville. But main streets, like downtown Hempstead, and community malls, like the Lake Success Shopping Center, were thriving, too, as certain a measure of the exploding consumer madness of the '50s and '60s as the Davy Crockett caps and Hula Hoops that boomers were demanding. By the time the Arab oil embargo and runaway inflation burst the spending bubble in 1973, retail space in Nassau had ballooned to 8 million square feet, nearly six square feet for every man, woman and child in the county. The pattern was set.

``The weekly shopping trip became fairly standard early on,'' says Barbara Kelly, curator of the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University. ``People thought of it as going shopping because they needed new curtains for the basement windows when, in reality, the windows were perfectly fine with the old curtains.''

Still, shopping-as-entertainment didn't begin with the mall. ``Even a few hundred years ago, people were getting off the farm, going to the general store and interacting with storekeepers and other people,'' says Hofstra University marketing professor Joel Evans. Shopping took on its modern persona at the turn of the century when respectable New York City women were permitted to go out unescorted, as long as they confined themselves to the Ladies Mile, the Manhattan retail district between Broadway and Sixth Avenues, from Union Square to 24th Street.

Overnight, women had an excuse to meet friends for lunch, to saunter over to Siegel-Cooper for the feather boas and A.T. Stewart for the dry goods. As stores blossomed and advertising expanded beyond snake oil, woman-as-domestic turned into woman-as-consumer.

And when the urban consumer became the suburban consumer, it was only logical that the great department stores would follow, abetted by a growing highway system that allowed retailers to stock their eastern outposts in days rather than weeks. Arnold Constable opened in Hempstead in 1936, followed by Bloomingdale's in Fresh Meadows in 1949, Abraham & Straus in Hempstead in 1955 and the first mall linchpins the following year - Macy's and Gimbel's at Roosevelt Field, Gimbel's at Green Acres and Gertz at Mid-Island Plaza.

Of course, before there were malls, there was Hempstead. For decades, ``the Hub'' was the center of transportation and shopping on Long Island, supporting not just Arnold Constable and A&S, Grant's and Woolworth's, but scores of mom-and-pop operations in an era when Mom and Pop still mattered. Even more important, Hempstead housed the county's largest bus terminus, making it a quick trip from as near as Garden City (before Garden City took over the carriage trade) and as far as Jamaica (whose own downtown dominated Queens).

``You have to remember how important the bus was,'' says Hempstead Village historian James York. ``When Nassau started to expand, many GIs didn't have a job, much less an automobile.'' But as the bus gave way to the car and the downtown gave way to the mall, shopping began to change. By the 1960s, though, no downtown could compete with the malls' ever-growing array of card stores and shoe stores, their parking fields and their newfangled traditions (the department store Santa-turned-mall Santa, the indoor arts-and-crafts shows).

The modern shopper wanted to be entertained. And she wanted to buy - anything ``modern'' and ``new.'' This was the era of wash-and-wear, of polyester shirts and Orlon sweaters, the age of Pyrex and Melmac and Bakelite. Even more, it was the dawn of television. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of American households with TVs soared from 4.6 million to 45.2 million, and retailers couldn't stock enough of them.

Of course, in the days before electronics, appliances cost a fortune. In 1957, a sewing machine fetched $400, a Kenmore washer $218, a Sears bench saw $75. But there were bargains in low-tech: The man in the gray flannel suit could pick up a new one at Wallach's for $59.75. His wife could snap up a mink-collared cashmere coat at Arnold Constable for $89, though, for many, even that was a bit steep. But Long Island was always a bargain-hunter's paradise - girls' sundresses for 97 cents, women's loden coats at E.J. Korvette for $7.97.

Even so, modern shopping was less about price than a dream - the quintessentially suburban dream of reinventing yourself daily. ``After the war, people looked forward to new and exciting things,'' says Lois Sabatella, who came to Valley Stream from South Ozone Park and now lives in Plainview. ``I remember going to Gimbel's with my mother so she could shop for a dress for Saturday night because people went out on Saturday night.

``And, as teenagers, someone was always having a party in their basement, so we'd buy a new top for $1.99 or a new piece of fake jewelry or new makeup,'' added Sabatella, who went from shopping at Green Acres to managing the Littman Jewelers there. ``You always had a purpose for coming to the mall. Even if you didn't want to buy, it was enough to just window shop.''