| The
Wonder Years
By David Diamond |
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| Levittown's Shop-a-Rama was more than a shopping center. It was a celebration of postwar prosperity.
Even in the hopeful, prosperous, fairy-tale-esque early 1950's, the name sounded like somebody's idea of a joke. The Levittown Shop-a-Rama. We could endure the stigma of living in look-alike homes because, as Levittowners and only Levittowners knew, those 17,311 houses going up in former orchards and fields truly were distinct from one another, regardless of what the humorists were telling us. And despite the warnings of our less-adventurous relatives back in places like Kensington, Hazleton, Brooklyn and Trenton, we were fairly certain that Mr. Levitt's tidy little structures, going up at the mind numbing rate of 200 a week, were not going to be whisked into oblivion with the first brisk wind. But when it came to attaching a name to the brand-new downtown for this sprawling and visionary suburbia, when it came to deciding what to call this truly revolutionary-in-design commercial district to serve the burgeoning consumer habits of the world's largest planned suburban community, they really lost us. What Fairless steelworker in his right mind would end his shift with the words "Hey pal, want to stop by the Shop-a-Rama on the way home?" What housewife could stoop so low as to suggest to a neighbor: "I need a new toaster. Want to take a spin down to the Shop-a-Rama with me?" As a matter of fact, by bestowing the tacky title of Shop-a-Rama on their new creation nearly 40 years ago, Levitt and Sons Inc. inadvertently gave birth to what was perhaps the world's largest nonviolent protest. Signs and promotional literature to the contrary, nobody, Nobody, NOBODY used the word Shop-a-Rama. Instead, the place was simply referred to as the Shopping Center.
And there were 10 times as many applicants for leases as there were stores; each new building was preceded by headlines bearing the identities of committed tenants. "Twelve Take Leases at Levittown," screamed a Bulletin headline. The names said it all: W.T. Grant & Co., Sears Roebuck (appliances only), Sun Ray Drugs, Singer Sewing Machines, F.W. Woolworth, S.S. Kresge, Lerner Shops, Lobel Kiddie Shops, Wilbur-Rogers. According to early reports, opening day ribbons for Food Fair, the second supermarket, were snipped by none other than Renee Castro, "Mrs. Levittown of 1954." A group of leading citizens was invited to inspect the air-conditioned, 30,000-square-foot wonder, with its "mammoth 100-footlong wall directory, listing the location of all items, readable from any spot in the store." In advance of the May 1955 opening of Pomeroy's, its parent company, Allied Stores Corp., sent out 20,000 questionnaires to potential shoppers. The findings? Women wanted the retailer to provide free baby-sitters—or at the very least baby strollers—and a men's lounge where their husbands could relax while waiting for them to finish shopping. Some respondents suggested enrolling clerks in a special course on politeness. The clerks themselves wanted a store-paid chiropodist to tend to their aching feet. THE LEVITTOWN SHOPPING CENTER GOT its start the same year I did, so many of my earliest and sweetest memories take place in its landscaped midst. When I was a toddler, this exuberant destination was the stage for our family's Friday night payday ritual. While Mom purchased groceries at Food Fair, Dad would hoist me on his shoulders and take me for a sunset stroll along the banks of the Delaware Canal, which ran north and south from the shopping center's parking lot. (Levitt had secured a lease with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to build part of the parking lot over the historic 60-mile canal.) My sisters would head out to rendezvous with friends, listening to records in the booths of Central Melody, or hanging out behind Sun Ray Drugs, probably smoking cigarettes. Those Friday nights were a dizzying spectacle of paycheck-rich steel worker family members fanning out every which way: to the Philadelphia National Bank and Levittown Tavern; to the pet department in Woolworth's; to the fresh-baked soft-pretzel stand at Pomeroy's rear entrance. And there was much more, every day of the week: Choral groups performed on the grassy front lawn of the adjacent Levittown Public Recreation Association building, our "Town Hall." Inside the LPRA building, a chess match or an art exhibit was always in progress. (My first published writing—a second-grade poem about the sky—was displayed at a children's art and literature show there.) There were weekly lectures in Pomeroy's community room. And the vast parking fields offered diversions which, over the course of the years, felt limitless: The St. Michael's fair, with its rides and its grifters and its smell of sausage and peppers. Custom car shows. The circus. Covered wagon rides. There was nothing like it anywhere, no such open-air gathering place dedicated to the celebration of prosperity, which is why both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy visited the Levittown Shopping Center during the 1960 presidential campaign. With a huge Catholic population, Levittown clearly favored Kennedy, and an estimated 100,000 people— the largest crowd in Bucks County history—assembled in the parking lot to catch a glimpse of the charismatic senator from Massachusetts. Even the U.S.S.R.'s Nikita Khrushchev wanted to tour this monument to capitalism during his famous U.S. trip in the fall of 1959, but he reportedly ran short on time. On January 23, 1963, the shopping center gained a bit of notoriety for an inexplicable disturbance among what passed at the time as teenage gangs. The "rumble" occurred on an otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon, when an estimated 1,000 shoppers were presumably minding their own business. The fighting involved more than 200 members of the Conservatives, the Ivy Leaguers and the Jives gangs, all of whom called the shopping center their home turf. (They were distinguishable by their dress: Jives wore white socks; Conservatives wore dark socks; Ivy Leaguers, if memory serves, wore button-down shirts. All, it almost goes without saying, were white.) Teenage shoppers were randomly assaulted based on nothing other than their mode of dress. Before a rumored second rumble could occur, Tullytown Boro set up a special two-policeman shopping center patrol. But the threat of being attacked based on one's apparel was not enough to keep uninvolved teens from shopping. " From now on, I'm just dressing neat," said a seventh grade friend of mine. Although they were unaware of it at the time, the kids who hung out at the center in '63 actually had good reason to be frustrated to the point of violence. Little more than a year earlier, the roofed-over Cherry Hill Mall, alien and futuristic, had risen out of an orchard in Camden County, New Jersey. Commercially and geographically speaking, the new enclosed mall was no threat to the Levittown Shopping Center, but it was only a matter of time before that blasted concept would take hold. An aunt of mine from Philadelphia who had moved to Levittown in its earliest days and praised the shopping center because, "It doesn't have streets," moved to Haddonfield and was now enthusing that at the Cherry Hill Mall, "Everything is under one roof." Like an invading force approaching steadily from the west, the malls took strongholds along the Pennsylvania Turnpike: King of Prussia, Plymouth Meeting, Neshaminy. And in 1973, the Oxford Valley Mall claimed the site at the opposite terminus of Oxford Valley Road (part of which had been renamed the Levittown Parkway) from the Levittown Center. It was too close to home. But it's too simple to say that the malls killed the Levittown Shopping Center. In a sense, Levittown has been a victim of the upwardly mobile aspirations of many of its early residents. For a large percentage of its pioneers, Levittown was not the dream city everybody talked about— an end in itself—but a way station to prosperity. If the parents didn't move to an affluent community as soon as they could afford to, the children probably did. "The neighborhood changed," is how Joseph Strouse, of Strouse Greenberg & Co., the Philadelphia real estate organization that originally developed the shopping center for Levitt, put it. And as the era of U.S. industrial dominance came to an end, so did the jobs that brought everybody to lower Bucks in the first place. Eventually, even U.S. Steel's massive Fairless Works, the major employer at this end of the county and the raison d'ętre for Levittown in the first place, became a sickly shadow of its former self.
The Levittown Shopping Center, too, was left to tarnish as an outdated relic. Oh, there were several unsuccessful resuscitation attempts. In fact, at one point it was officially renamed the Levittown Shopping Center. But, over time, the sidewalks started to crack and the parking lot in which 100,000 optimists once cheered John F. Kennedy began to develop puddles. The store names also started to change, and once again, those names told the story: Kaye's Incredible Meat Store and Beef Grinding Place, Chain Store Outlet at Discount Prices and Beb's Budget Books. In 1962, when it had still been the largest shopping center in Pennsylvania, brothers and owners William and Alfred Levitt had sold their creation to a syndicate headed by Philadelphia manufacturer and real estate investor Robert Seligman. By 1972, an entity named the Levittown Center Corp., using the address of Strouse Greenberg & Co., picked up the property. Three years later ElKlor Properties of Glenolden bought the center at a sheriff's sale. Three years after that it changed hands at another sheriff's sale. This time Republic National Life Insurance Co., of Dallas, which held El-Klor's mortgage, picked up the property. At the time, Playtown, one of the biggest stores, had been burned out and empty for a year-and-a-half. By 1982, Republic sold the center to the current owners, Bramalea Ltd. of Toronto, for a mere $3 million (a price that included two other properties as well). Today the shopping center is administered by the company's Dallas-based subsidiary, Bramalea Centers Inc., which operates under something of a shroud of secrecy and in a more-or-less hands-off management style. There is no on-site manager, just a pleasant, laconic, white-haired secretary named Lee Martini who sits behind a locked door in a storefront office. She communicates with her elderly maintenance men via walkie-talkie, and looks out at the few people who wander by. The plentiful wooden benches have been replaced by a few cheap metal ones. The bicycle racks are bent and missing poles. The maroon and yellow awnings are faded and ripped, and many of them indicate stores that no longer exist. The Greenwood Cleaners sign is above a magazine subscription telephone enterprise named BMS, which operates behind locked doors and shade drawn windows. The sign above Liberty Auto Tags reads "Computer Basics P.C. Training." Inevitably, there's a pawn shop. It's on the site of a deli that years ago hosted a regular basement-level hootenanny. Many of the stores are vacant, their glass windows either covered with brown paper or unobstructed for all to see inside. Food Fair is a fenced-off hole in the ground. I recently counted 29 tenants in all, including an unmarked karate dojo and the Delaware Valley Vietnam Veterans. The stores fetch $4 a square foot in rent, as opposed to the original $11 a square foot, according to one tenant, who complains about his leaky ceilings. The only original tenants are the post office, the two banks, a beauty parlor, the barbershop (where I found a barber sitting alone, smoking cigarettes, mesmerized by easy listening music), and the Woolworth's (where a widow sat alone at the snack bar fretting that her husband died too soon to enjoy the fruits of his investments). The Penn Fruit is now a Thriftway, which actually is flourishing. The only other store that seems even remotely alive is Ports, at the site of the old Pomeroy's, but it feels terribly downgraded. And the soft pretzels no longer bake in the rear entrance. Today there is far too little to enjoy. It's like picking over the remains of a loved one. Even the Towne Theatre, where I delighted in Saturday kiddie matinees, is boarded up, supposedly to become the site of senior citizen housing. A corner of the grassy stage where choral groups performed is now the location of a veterans memorial. This is no longer a place for fun. Even the Bishop Conwell students who congregate with the pigeons in a vacant store alcove would probably roost elsewhere if they could. Those who work at what remains of the Levittown Shopping Center report that they hear an endless succession of rumors about its future. One minute Bramalea has found buyers who are willing to invest the millions needed for a true renovation; the next minute the place is scheduled to be leveled. So on a particularly nippy day this winter, I drove my infant daughter Kaley out to see the shopping center that held such a prominent place in my heart. I hoisted her up on my shoulders and took her for a quick walk along the Delaware Canal, where mules once towed coal barges. Heading south from the shopping center parking lot, the water is still and smelly, littered with sneakers and taco bags. Another 200 feet and the water is moving, becoming clear and alive. Two years ago, Pennsylvania's Bureau of State Parks decided not to renew the lease under which the Levittown Shopping Center's parking lot was permitted to obstruct the historic canal. The state eventually wants to tear up a portion of the parking lot as part of an effort to restore the canal to its former glory. Bramalea has put $282,000 in escrow so that it, or whoever may buy the center in the near future, can help finance the project. "The ultimate goal is to be able to canoe from Easton to Bristol," says Ray Williams, chief of program services for the Bureau of State Parks. Hiking along the towpath with my daughter, heading away from the decayed resplendence of the Shop-a-Rama, it seemed like an idea whose time had come. David Diamond now shops and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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