Broadway Mall/Mid Island Plaza

The Mid-Island Plaza in Hicksville was one of the first malls I ever frequented. My uncle used to manage the Record World there, and I would tag along with my older cousins during my weekend and holiday excursions to my grandfather's in Levittown. My dad used to love taking me to the old My Pie pizza restaurant there as well during his yearly visit with me. It was definitely one of the coolest malls I ever went to, especially in the days when it was an open air plaza, but now it looks like every other boring-ass mall out there.

Enjoy this wonderfully written history of the Mid Island Plaza, now known as the Broadway Mall from Labelscar.com:

The Broadway Mall is one of the largest–and perhaps strangest–malls on Long Island. The mall opened in the 1956 on the site of a former boys’ orphanage as the open-air Mid-Island Plaza. The Hicksville area of Long Island was in the middle of a building and population boom at the time, as residents were flocking to the suburbs in great numbers. Some of the largest strictly suburban areas on the entire east coast are located in the vicinity of the center, including archetypal post-war suburbs like Levittown and Hempstead (which, with over 700,000 people, is the second most populous census-designated place in New York State).

The original Mid-Island Plaza consisted of 10 buildings and 8,000 parking spaces. The center’s main anchor, Gertz, was a local store from downtown Jamaica Queens who opened a major outpost in Hicksville to follow the population trends. Gertz’ 5-story, 300,000 square foot store dominated the center’s original design, and its rumored that this store is the tallest suburban department store ever built. At some point the mall also was home to an EJ Korvette’s store. The mall was even structured with an underground tunnel (still in use today) that allowed deliveries to be made directly to the stores underneath the mall. The Mid-Island Plaza was being enclosed in 1968 (and perhaps renamed at the same time?), then renovated again in 1989 and 1995. Gertz Department Stores parent company, Allied, united the Gertz stores under the Stern’s banner in the 1980s before becoming a Macy’s in 2001. The mall’s website offers a bit of its history.

The Broadway Mall is located only a few miles from Roosevelt Field Mall, the largest mall in all of New York state and one of the largest on the entire eastern seaboard. As a result, it has an interesting feel and has an unusual store roster. The center is shaped like an “H”, with Macy’s at one of the junctions. Its other two anchors are a Target (which had been a JCPenney very briefly from 1999 to 2001 or 2002) and an IKEA, making for one of the stranger rosters of anchor stores of any mall in the northeast. Broadway Mall also boasts Steve & Barry’s University Sportswear, H&M, Old Navy, and a movie theatre as junior anchors. I’m not entirely sure what the IKEA or Target stores were initially, but the mall did boast EJ Korvette’s as one of its original anchors. Korvette’s stores tended to have large footprints, so it’s possible that IKEA took this space after the mall’s major redevelopment in 1995.

MallsofAmerica has some really cool photos of the Broadway Mall during its Mid-Island Plaza days, and our photos were all taken in May of 2007. I’ve been to this mall many times since 1999 (until 2004, this IKEA was the closest one to Boston) and it hasn’t changed much in that time, beyond when Target replaced JCPenney at the rear anchor. The imposing, humungous Macy’s store is certainly a highlight here, as is the cavernous center court and the strange way the food court is cantilevered onto a second level. But really, Broadway Mall is most interesting as an example of how a second-tier mall that would normally be crowded out by larger siblings is able to hang on with some less-than-traditional anchor stores and make out just fine.

DUNKIN' DONUTS: Old School Edition

This morning I decided to check out the new Dunkin' Donuts that opened up on Main St. in my fiancee's hometown, Lincoln Park, NJ.

It went against my better judgment to walk through the door of this place, because in the last 10 years Dunkin' Donuts chains, with its ugly new colors and ugly new logo and due to the fact that anyone with the capability of breathing in oxygen can open one up, have been popping up like roaches in otherwise small business-friendly streets like Main St. in Lincoln Park, driving up rents so the Moms and Pops of America whose dream it might have been to open up a florist shop or luncheonette could never do so.

I went in there and a Spanish woman who could barely speak a word of English. I asked for a bacon, egg and cheese on a flatbread and a medium coffee coolata and wound up with a medium hot coffee with cream and sugar and a ham, egg and cheese sandwich.

And now I'm left with a bellyache and a strong feeling of guilt for going against my small business minded morale. Not to mention a longing for the Dunkin' Donuts of my early youth on Old Country Road in Plainview, with the funky logo and the question mark style counter that I would sit at with my mom and grandparents and have my honey-dipped donut and chocolate milk. The days of the Old Fashioned Donut and those killer souvenir coffee mugs you could get for less than a buck.

This post is a testament to those days.

Thank you. -MGMT

1975 Dunkin' Donuts commercial with Mason Reese:

Mays Department Stores

Here are some commercials from the old Mays department store. The one by where we grew up in Levittown closed in the mid-80s and is now the home of the Tri-County Flea Market, which opened up shortly after Mays went under. If you go to Tri-County, you can still see remnants of the old Mays, including door handles with the store's name on them and the old elevators and escalators from the Mays era. These commercials span from the late 70s on through to 1983, a couple of years before the whole chain went out of business. Pictured above is a shot of the old Mays store in Union Square, which later became the now-sadly closed Virgin Megastore.

Early 80's Commercial Break -WNYW Channel 5