A nice remembrance today from Catherine Seipp on NRO.
This Jersey guy remembers, as a Long Island boy, the fabulous enterprise of going to TSS on Montauk Highway circa 1978. Probably already gone to seed by earlier standards, but that doesn't compute to a child. And they had everything - each new department was like a separate store. It felt like you could just keep walking until you wound up like that kid in the woods in the Far Side cartoon. First day of school? No problem - shoes and clothes in front with Mom while Dad went for the hardware: stationary, knapsack, and cartoon-tie in lunch box. Then I got a haircut in the salon in back, while Dad visited the nearby tobacconist section. If I behaved, I got a hot pretzel from the front lunch counter on the way out.
I'm lucky enough to have seen a lot of those holdouts: local savings banks (with passbooks filled with typewritten entries), Howard Johnson’s (31 Flavors under one Orange Roof!), that TSS (I still own the baseball glove I got there at age 14), and an A & W Root Beer stand. (These guys have it backwards on the list - NOW it's a Taco Bell.) Twenty years on, I’d give a lot to have a Teenburger again. (Surprisingly, there's an impressive list of still-operating stores, including a few I could reach by car. There are only nine remaining HoJo's, however.)
And what happened to Times Square Stores? The last one held out until 1990. (The store I'm remembering is the Babylon location mentioned in the article.) It was the same all over, as demonstrated by a quick scan of the headlines here. Our family had been gone to Jersey nearly four years by then (but we were still bennies). And before the advent of the digital camera, such things were harder to chronicle, especially for the impending web age. Perhaps it's better that way. Sears, for example, hasn't aged well for me. But TSS will always seem to be its own little city, pearl of a bygone year. If you didn't see what you liked right away, there was another neighborhood along past the checkout clerk, and on the way, something really neat was sure to surprise you.
5 comments:
hahaha....tss...they tried a tss in jersey when i was a kid, but the store originally was a two guys, anyone remember that one, department store and a food store, when the two guys closed and it became tss after playing an empty building for a while, the food store area became a channel, does anyone even know what that was??? ha! needless to say it was turned into a rickel while the once two guys turned tss was vacant, now a days the two guys turned tss turned vacant building has become a pathmark while the once two guys food store turned channel turned rickels turned abandoned building has become a marshalls, on the positive at least for my mom, marshalls has some good deals...i guess those two guys couldn't manage a business...and then home depot killed rickels...capitalism kills...
I have a permanent dent in my forehead from an accident I had in a Rickels store when I was like a year and a half old. My older brother was told not to stand on the end of the otherwise empty shopping cart that my parents had my sitting in. Needless to say, he stood on the end of that same cart and basically, I got catapulted out of the cart and landed forehead first onto the bottom of one of the shelves...I’ve heard many the stories about how huge the lump on my head was until it faded away to reveal the loverly indent in my skull...yay...
~eryn lynn
OH! OH! OH! WE GOTTA GO! GO! GO! One of those last remaining HoJo's is not too far away in good ol' Jersey!!! It's "Seasonal" but it's all good... summer's almost here...kinda... :-D
New Jersey:
1213 Boardwalk (seasonal)
Asbury Park, NJ 07712
(732) 988-3434
~ eryn lynn
heck i remember two guys. there used to be one on rt 23 in wayne on the northbound side just down from batman's house ("wayne manor").
we always hit the stewart's root beer stands in the summer; at least they're still around
Mr. Bingley
i know about that hojo, its always open when i goto shows at the convention hall...
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