80s News Today

The city, she’s a greedy old sow, and she’s always hungry. You think she cares about your memories? Your first Christmas window display, your mother’s perfume counter? Forget it. The city just wants what’s next. Thirty-eight years ago, on a crisp fall day that promised nothing but the usual urban squalor, a great hole opened up in Herald Square. On September 28, 1986, the lights went out. The doors locked. The escalators froze. Gimbels , that sprawling giant at 33rd Street and Broadway, was dead. And if you listen close, on a foggy New York night, you might still hear the echoes of its final day, like a ghost rattling its chains in the dark. The liquidation sale had been a cruel, lingering wound. People, with that particular vulture-like hunger that comes from thinking you’re getting something for nothing, had picked the store’s bones clean. They’d walked out with cheap toasters and discount sweaters, like little parasites carrying away their last bits of carrion. But even in their tri...

On the second day of September, 1981, a Friday, there came a whisper, a rustle, a certain... frisson of anxiety that ran through the immaculate, polished floors of the Gertz department store in Jamaica, Queens. It was the last gasp of summer, the city still sweating and groaning under a thick blanket of humid air. But in this cool, artificially-lit cathedral of consumerism, a chill had set in. The rumor, which had been circulating for weeks in the coffee shops and beauty salons of the borough, was now an Official Thing, a capital-O, capital-T statement from the high-and-mighty Allied Stores Corporation—the Gertz flagship, the very sine qua non of Long Island style, was to CLOSE. The Gertz in Jamaica! Good heavens! It was like hearing the sun was going to take a permanent vacation, or that the Long Island Rail Road was suddenly going to start running on time. This was not just a store; it was a landmark! A monument to a bygone era of shopping, of a certain kind of refined, leisurely...