Before advent of malls, shoppers strolled the city

By Carol Trapani
Poughkeepsie Journal

It was an event.

That was because most people made do with what they had. ‘‘You weren’t buying clothes every five minutes,’’ said former Dutchess County historian Joyce Ghee.

And if you lived in Dutchess County, or just across the Hudson River in Ulster County, you did most of your important shopping in downtown Poughkeepsie.

‘‘When you would go shop on Main Street, you would run into all your friends,’’ said Poughkeepsie businessman Thomas A. Johnson Jr., who remembers Poughkeepsie in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mike Kristofik of Rhinebeck grew up in Hyde Park in the 1960s. ‘‘A shopping trip meant downtown Poughkeepsie since malls were nonexistent,’’ he said.

Since not everyone had a car, many people took the bus or the train to Poughkeepsie. By the early 1960s, those World War II veterans’ babies were old enough to drive. Did they ever! Teenagers cruised Main Street in their suped-up Chevys and their fathers’ respectable Oldsmobiles on Thursday nights, when the stores stayed open late, until 9.

‘‘Those were the days when the biggest (shopping) day of the year was the day after Thanksgiving,’’ said Michael Gordon, vice president of Zimmer Brothers jewelers, once located on Main Street in Poughkeepsie. ‘‘If you didn’t get downtown by 8:45 a.m., you weren’t going to get a parking space.’’

What has become the great American pastime just isn’t what it used to be.

‘‘It was white gloves and a hat,’’ affirmed Ghee, remembering shopping in Poughkeepsie in the 1940s and 1950s.

These days, shopping is a whirlwind, 24-hour, seven-day activity. Malls miles from city centers throb with people from morning til night, some sales start at 7 a.m. and dressing for the occasion means pulling on the sweats or jeans. After the stores close, assuming no midnight madness sale, the catalogs beckon with their 24-hour, toll-free 800 numbers. And just push a few keys to spend money and acquire more stuff over the Internet any time.

‘‘Saturday was an event,’’ Ghee said of her shopping excursions years ago. The Saturday shopping ritual included Ghee and her parents lunching with Ghee’s grandfather at the Nelson House hotel and then visiting stores on Main Street. Then it was to the butcher’s on Main Street, to Arlington to her aunt’s grocery store and then dinner with Ghee’s grandmother. Saturday evening, it was a movie at the Bardavon or Stratford, two of several movie theaters in the City of Poughkeepsie.

‘‘Sunday was church and a ride in the car. I wasn’t unique. This is the way it was,’’ Ghee said.

City of Poughkeepsie resident Ella Spooner moved to Poughkeepsie from Brooklyn in 1958. ‘‘I remember the first time I went to Main Street. It was a Monday and all the stores were closed. But everything that you needed was in the stores down on Main Street. I bought a pair of shoes at French Boot and I still have those shoes. They are now back in style.’’

If you and a friend were lunching and shopping downtown, ‘‘it was ‘meet me under the clock at Luckey’s’,’’ Spooner said.

Tom Johnson sold J.D. Johnson Co. Inc., a plumbing, heating and industrial supply company, a few years ago, but he owns the historic building in which it was located near the foot of Main Street. He remembers rough and tumble days near the docks and railroad tracks in the 1930s.

The restaurant that is now River Station was a clam bar. At the foot of Main Street was an oil depot and a ferry slip. Taverns on the other side of the railroad tracks went all the way up to Main Street. ‘‘Passengers would go eat at Smith Brothers (restaurant on Market Street), which was dry, but they’d stop at the bars both ways,’’ he said.

One of the biggest differences between shopping then and now is then salespeople were more knowledgeable, Johnson said. ‘‘You went back to them. They knew your child’s size and what you wanted.’’

Shopping centers, malls and mega-stores displaced the corn fields and cow pastures not long after most folks acquired cars.

Poughkeepsie Plaza in the Town of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess Mall in Fishkill are two of the county’s earliest. Poughkeepsie Plaza opened in 1958 as a strip shopping center. It was enclosed in 1976. Dutchess Mall opened in 1977. The Poughkeepsie Galleria, today the county’s principal shopping mall, opened in 1987 and has plans to expand from 1.2 million square feet to 2.1 million square feet.

Septuagenarian Florence Lewis of Beacon said she likes the mall, that shopping years ago was more difficult.

‘‘When Dutchess Mall opened, it was a revelation,’’ said Lewis, who has lived in Beacon nearly 50 years. ’‘The mall made a revolution of shopping.’’

No longer did a shopper have to trek outside from store to store. Still, she recalls the service once found in Beacon, and the amenities, too.

‘‘Schoonmaker’s was a very nice department store in Beacon. They had a luncheonette section and all the facilities a small department store would have. ... Service was very nice.’’

Today, a visit to the mall is necessary to buy a simple thing, such as a spool of thread, Lewis said.

Lyn Burnstine of the City of Poughkeepsie shopped in Kingston during the 1950s and early ’60s. ‘‘You would go there for anything you needed,’’ she said. ‘‘I remember the Chinese restaurant that was kind of the center of our lives.’’

Burnstine lived in Shokan for a few years before moving to Kingston and recalled that shopping in Kingston often was a family event, reserved for Saturdays and other special occasions. ’’My oldest daughter’s birthday every year was to go and get a new pair of shoes.’’

The numbers of stores that have gone out of business in downtown Poughkeepsie since mid-century are too numerous to count. The tune is similar in Beacon, Newburgh and Kingston. Beacon has seen a rebirth as a place to shop for antiques and visit the waterfront and Kingston’s renaissance has centered around boutiques, galleries, museums and restaurants in a revitalized waterfront on the Rondout Creek.

Poughkeepsie is searching for ways to re-invent itself, with discussion under way about opening all of the Main Mall, the shopping district along Main Street, to traffic and developing its Hudson River waterfront. But the good old days of traditional retail shopping are gone.

In 1948, when his father-in-law joined Zimmer Brothers, Gordon said, there were 26 jewelry stores in downtown Poughkeepsie.

One of the retail stores left from the turn of the century in Poughkeepsie is Friedman’s Shoes on the Main Mall.

In operation 106 years, Friedman’s is run by Stanley Friedman, whose grandfather, Edward, started the store.

‘‘I’ve been in this business almost 50 years myself,’’ Friedman said. Now at its third location in its history, at 354 Main St., Friedman’s has withstood the departure of dozens of other retail stores.

Asked if he was astounded to still be conducting business in the City of Poughkeepsie, Friedman said: ‘‘We’re not astounded, but the customers are.’’

The biggest change in retail is the rise of what Zimmer’s Gordon called the ‘‘category killers,’’ the big stores that specialize in one area.

‘‘It was inevitable. Today, people are less service conscious.’’

People today have more time on their hands to shop all year round, said Gordon. And stores are open more hours.

‘‘Years ago, the day after Thanksgiving was the only holiday the average working person had before Christmas, other than Saturday. Stores weren’t open Sunday or at night.’’

The lifestyle was different, too. People who had survived the Great Depression were not eager to part with their dollars. ‘‘You only bought what you needed. People sewed their own clothes. If you needed one button, that’s what you bought,’’ Ghee said.

Poughkeepsie resident Margaret Hof Martinko recalled Haber’s bicycle store on Main Street in Poughkeepsie, where bikes were repaired and second-hand bikes could be bought.

‘‘I saved up $10 when I was 13 and hurried down to Haber’s for my first bike,’’ Martinko said. ‘‘Mr. Haber had a bike for me that I rode for many years and took with me to college.’’

These days, credit card debt amounts to more than $337 billion and is climbing. It’s expected that 1998 will mark the first time credit card spending exceeds $1 trillion.

Shopping will always be part of people’s lives, but in the future people will have more options about how and where to shop. E-commerce, shopping or conducting business on the Internet, is expected to explode as the personal computer becomes ubiquitous.

Even the need for sales people is undergoing a change. Consumers educated via a web of information sources from newspapers to television to the Internet are more and more likely to know what they want. The sales jobs of the 21st century aren’t likely to focus on convincing customers that they need something as much as convincing customers who already know what they want that a company’s product is tailor-made for them.

But Ghee and others see a longing to return to the past, at least as far as the kinds of communities in which people live.

There’s a resurgence of interest in the small community, Ghee said.

People want the new places where they live to mimic the small towns of the past, Ghee said. Hamlets of old had a general store, a blacksmith, ‘‘the basic stuff people needed to feed themselves for awhile or get a basic piece of work done,’’ she said.

‘‘When business people lived in the community, it made a difference. Businesses developed because people knew and trusted the folks who owned them.’’

Sally Mazzarella, chairwoman of the Rhinebeck Planning Board and president of the New York state Planning Federation and Dutchess County Planning Federation for many years, said there’s an emphasis on developing village centers and hamlets so they accommodate everyday needs.

Internet shopping will increase, ‘‘but in time people will miss that one-on-one relationship,’’ Mazzarella said. ‘‘There’s a lot of joy in shopping. To press a couple of keys and have something be delivered, it’s very cold. It’s important for society to interact."