Postcard from America Past

When I was a child, mom taking us shopping in downtown New Brunswick, NJ, was a big deal. We used to get dressed up to go into 'the city.' New Brunswick felt like the city to kids growing up in Franklin Township, off Easton Avenue.

New Brunswick had a train station where all the dads drove to every morning (or moms dropped them off in families with only one car) and the dads took the Pennsylvania Railroad trains to exotic places like Linden, Elizabeth and Penn Station in Downtown Manhattan literally underneath Madison Square Garden. 

Families were large and were mostly people who had moved out of New York City to the 'country' (wilds of Central Jersey) for their kids' sake and the fresh air. We all lived in cookie-cutters houses, mostly ranches and upstairs-downstairs split levels. The houses in our development on Bloomfield Avenue all had basements. A short bike ride from where we lived Levitt and Sons came in as they had in Long Island and elsewhere and put up thousands of houses in every direction imaginable all built on concrete pads with no basements. 

Once housing reached that critical mass level, the merchants in downtowns like New Brunswick didn't know it but their days were numbered. New Brunswick had enough stores, Stride-Rite Shoes, PJ Arnolds, and Littman's Jewelers with enough parking spaces to accommodate all the people who lived there. But when we descended like locusts from the suburbs, consuming all the parking and hogging the sidewalks, things went sideways. 

Out on Route 18, just beyond the Route 1 traffic circle where Route 22 headed North to New York and south towards Princeton, huge tracts of land in North Brunswick and East Brunswick became the homes for one-stop retailers like Two Guys from Harrison, Modell's Shoppers World, EJ Korvettes, Sear and Roebuck (no idea who Roebuck was) and lots of smaller merchants who had been squeezed out of downtown.

These shopping areas had parking lots that stretched for miles and we stopped going downtown because it was too hard to find a parking space and hit the strip malls on the highways because they had everything we wanted to buy. And when someone came up with the idea of enclosing those malls, we sold our clothes because we thought we were in heaven.

Downtown died. But so what? We had The Gap and the triumph of Retail Darwinism. More people opened more malls and we all drove farther and faster to shop at them. And life was good, or so we believed. And then the Internet and online commerce came along and left concrete mausoleums where thriving retailers had been. 

If you doubt me, don't doubt David Bell who's made a career of documenting dead and dying malls. If you watch enough of these carefully you can probably see yourself unless you choose to look away.
-bill kenny