Sears as a dinosaur Jan. 11, 2024
I passed through Newport Mall yesterday to and from Bayonne,
glancing up at the Sears sign and feeling intense regret.
The news came earlier this week that this – the last Sears
store in New Jersey – will be closing in the spring, one more icon fading into
history.
For years, Sears was the workingman’s store, a place where
you could go to buy clothing, tools, even tires for your car.
Such places became center pieces in many of the big cities
such as Newark and Hackensack.
I don’t remember one being in Paterson. But when Willowbrook
Mall opened in 1969, the Sears became an anchor store there, and it was a place
I took my car for repair.
The closing of these kinds of stores is nothing new. Two Guys
began closing some of its stores in the 1970s, and in some cases, these were
far more local icons that Sears.
Korvettes went out of business in the early 1980s, after
having taken over a number of Two Guys locations, including the one in Totowa
where Hank and I used to go to, and where other members of the Garly Gang hung
out after Great Eastern Mills closed on Route 46 in West Paterson.
The Korvettes in West Orange was one of the places where
Hank and I went to buy records, and I recall one horrible trip in a car with
stick shift I struggled to drive.
The Two Guy in Totowa became a Korvettes, then a Bradlees,
and a Caldor after that, all of these places shutting their doors during my
life time.
I didn’t do much business at the Sears at Newport, although I
did get tires there when someone lashed mine over Thanksgiving in 1992 because
I had dared park my car in a place in Hoboken claimed by one of the other
residents. I also brought a car battery there later.
I worked in the Two Guys in Garfield over the summer of 1980,
which I’ve written pretty extensively about, and went back there in 2010 after
it had closed and left abandoned, the city eventually allowing the whole place
along with many of the mills my family worked in during the early part of the
20th Century to get demolished to make way for the current superstore, Walmart.
The news of the last Sears store closing comes the same week
that the demolition of Monmouth Mall was announced, built in 1957, it is the
oldest of the Jersey Malls, and suggests we might soon see other malls
including Willowbrook vanishing shortly.
Since I worked in Willowbrook as a baker for most of the
1980s, its passing sends signals of my own morality.
Paulie and Rick were among the crowds the day Willowbrook
Mall opened in 1969 and pulled a stunt that I still marvel at. Rick, a
photographer, pretended to be working for Rolling Stone magazine and somehow
Paulie convinced the crowds to lay down in the mall’s center and pretend to be
dead so Rick could take the picture.
Although I have passed that mall many times over the long
years, I have not actually gone in there since my leaving the Dunkin in 1988,
having no reason nor inclination to.
But the whole idea that the mall culture is coming to an end
strikes me as sad, even though malls like Willowbrook tried their best to be isolated
from the community, cracking down on mall rats, and preventing free speech –
Willowbrook banned the distribution of my underground newspaper and other such
activities.
Although many blame COVID for the decline in businesses like
Sears, the truth is that these institutions have a life span of their own, and
over time, they fade away. COVID only exasperated the death of malls, which
were already doomed, not just because of the internet and door to door
delivery, but like downtowns which they replaced, they no longer served as
comfortable venues. New malls are basically a series of stand alone box stores
and people do not walk from one to the other they way they do in Newport or Willowbrook
but drive between them.
A sign of our laziness perhaps. Ultimately, the internet
will kill these off, too, and everyone will simply order on line and wait for
the delivery trucks to drop off their purchases, and any sense of culture will vanish
entirely. No more mall rats, no more sense of artificial cities built in the
middle of nowhere, made into ghost towns and graveyards, much the way malls did
to downtowns like Paterson.
We will be tied to the world through the internet, a life
line to reality which leaves no room for dinosaurs like Sears or Two Guys or
Korvettes, places that represented a blue collar life we no longer embrace.
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