That Time we Got Malled...and Other Retail Musings.

“We’re losing him!” cried the nurse.

“I’m going to have to reroute the artery around the heart!” the doctor shot back. “Quick, I need clamps and a scalpel…and get the stitches ready!”

“Doctor, you can’t reroute that major artery away from the heart, you’ll kill the patient!”

“Do as I say, nurse! This patient elected to do this surgery, and this is how we are going to save him!”

“But Doc-”

“DO IT!”

Of course, the patient died, or at the very least was left on life support.

Kinda like the Urban Renewal project that was going to save downtown Ogdensburg; seems downtown wasn’t doing well after they put in an arterial bypass around the “heart” of the city, a great mystery to this day. I was too young to remember what all the reasoning was behind it, and couldn’t find anything online to research it, but someone in Albany, I suppose, thought it would be a great idea to expand commerce in St Lawerence County by creating a highway around it’s busiest city - the ‘burg.

Somewhat like the doctor did earlier.

They tore down the supposedly decrepit buildings near the corner of Ford and State streets and malled us - literally and figuratively. It was never a mall, really - a mall is covered over to protect one from the elements, and that was a good reason to go there, especially in winter. No, what we had was a rather homely strip mall with a covering over the sidewalk.

It never really took off, even when that guy from Utica bought it and renamed it the “Charlestown Mall”. The only tenants that hung on were state or county-run offices, like the unemployment or Social Security offices. Kinda poetic.  Then they built the twin bridges to usher traffic down steaming in from Morristown, and well….

Ah, but I won’t mall you any more than you have been, but it’s worthwhile to note that Canton and Potsdam’s downtown - which was never bypassed - are still alive and kicking today, though admittedly, they have a large college base of consumers to draw from.

Ogdensburg did have other retailers that did well. Where to start? Let’s revisit the ghost of Park Plaza, shall we? There was Grants Department Store, with the restaurant in which you could get a Thanksgiving dinner for $1.59 and a complimentary Bucky or Becky Bradford plastic mitt puppet (not sure what the child pilgrim tie-in was all about). My mother and I went somewhat often as we lived nearby on lower Hamilton St. Fay’s Drugs, with the big black and yellow pedestal and mortar logo (or was it a martini?), where I could be often found looking through their huge three bins of records. Ames department store, at the far end of the plaza, with its thousands of fluorescent lights in tight rows in the ceiling, would almost blanche your skin by the time you got done making layaway payments on your Christmas presents. K-Mart later came in, and its Blue Light Special attracted shoppers like a bear to honey - willing to get stung for what seemed to be a good thing. Sholettes had a bar and restaurant in there with good pizza and of course Loblaws / Great American food markets.

Kinney Drugs is still around, though not in the original spot in the Seaway Shopping Center but across the street from it, sitting on the old Dairy Queen property. I can recall Bud Grant, a fixture, being a worker there and taking my rolls of film in for processing. Acme and P&C were tenants - I briefly worked at P&C making donuts…briefly. My favorite was Radio Shack, as it was all the Stereophiles and electronic geeks at the time. While the Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs were my sweethearts a few months before Christmas, the Radio Shack catalog was my steady girl all year round (you can see the old catalogs online (radioshackcatalogs.com) Bachelors 3 bar, which I recall being so dark, coal miners would go in there mistakenly, and the bank at the end, which I believe was the St Lawerence National Bank? I used to get a free sucker when I when in….I was 18 at the time, but…

Remember Green Stamps? Ah, that genius marketing idea where you could  get prizes for shopping, somewhat like the “cashback” idea that credit cards dupe you into today (“Fly around the world four times on our American Airlines card and get a free trip from any city to another in Iowa for free!”) For example, if you bought $12,000 in groceries, you could trade in your 432 Green Stamp books for a nice lamp. After having licked more than an old dog with a sore paw, you probably should have seen your doctor to check for glue poisoning.

There were Sears and Montgomery Wards catalog stores, an anomaly in the retail world, and our first taste of what was to come - Amazon. As a kid, I was always very confused going to those places, as they had very little stuff for sale, thwarting my chance to beg my mother for something; a kid doesn’t need a large stand-alone freezer, vacuum cleaner, or oven. Where were all the toys? What kind of cruel hoax was this?! Not even clothes,  just stupid useful, practical house stuff. Ah, but when they published their Christmas catalogs - why, that was more coveted by a kid like me than a Gutenberg bible by the Pope. I would add a lot more ink to that catalog with all of my circling of toys I wanted. Circling many times was an understood signal that you DESPERATELY wanted that toy.

Then Sundays, virtually all retail was closed, and if you really wanted to go shopping, well, over to Canada you went, usually having dinner at the New York Restaurant Chinese food place in Brockville. Then coming back into the ‘burg you’d have to go through an FBI cavity screening to see if you had bought anything (“Are you a US citizen? Why no officer, I’m a Somali pirate”)

If ever torture was in a kid’s life, it was when you had to go to the bathroom while out shopping. Now it’s well known in my family that I had complied in my mind the bathroom locations of retail stores (also many offices and private homes)  all over the north country; If Fodors had a bathroom location edition, I would have written it. Not that my mother would ever pull over to let me go do my business, oh God no. “Just don’t think about it” she’d say. That was kinda like telling a shark bite victim to “just walk it off”. To this day, I pull over more often than is to be believed thanks to that trauma; even if I don’t have to go, I go. You would think a nurse would know a boy’s digestive ability to take in nourishment and distill it down to a waste product was one of nature’s great designs in efficiency. And when you finally did make it to a public bathroom, you needed a quarter to open the door to the stall! What a devilish trick to play on someone. I’m guessing more than one person had to leave a “calling card” for the owner for this clear violation of human rights.

Before all the big box stores, there were the mom-and-pop places that served a neighborhood. Places like Whit’s, on lower Ford, Bennett’s and Steinbergs on upper New York Ave,  or Trevelino’s bakery (and at this very moment, a wafting smell of humid sugary goodness just entered your mind, thinking about the creme horns and other goodies they used to make). They found it hard to compete with these places that offered everything under one roof - tomato paste in 28 different brands, various out-patient medical services, car repair, hotel, pet-sitting, and various community groups outside the door ready to ask for donations - Girl Scouts with their cookies, Veterans with their poppies and politicians with empty promises. I wish they’d bring back little places like that.

And if all those shopping opportunities weren’t enough, off to Watertown you’d go, goaded on by the ads on WWNY by Danny Burgess or Glen Gough to visit Empsalls or Household Merit or Arsenal St. And if you REALLY wanted a modern American shopping experience, then Syracuse was the place to go with the ShoppingTown Mall being the ultimate.

Today, we still have a good deal of retail. Nobody was more surprised than me when an overly huge Lowe’s home improvement showed up. Of course, a Walmart would come into smaller markets like this, mopping up all the loose dollars in the area and practically writing the obituaries of small businesses. It’s no wonder businesses like the the Seaway Plaza, McDonald’s, Burger King Lowe’s or Walmart do so well - they are located on an arterial bypass, a main road, where the blood of commerce comes through regularly.

Wish the doctor who engineered the ‘burgs downtown revitalization in the ‘70s had known that.