by Eric Miller
It was a long trip up the four or five flights of stairs for a little kid, a kid filled with the excitement of rattling off a wish list of presents to the fat bearded man strategically placed at the rear of the children's department at Gables Department Store in downtown Altoona.
Maybe it was those trips to downtown, a place where the lights were dimming by the mid-to-late 1970s, which made my attractions to the city so dear. The downtown I grew up in was a shadow of the one my grandmother knew, or the one in the photograph where my grandfather, who worked in the 11th Avenue Montgomery Wards store, posed in front of a brimming storefront window.
The downtown I was introduced to was still a wonderful place. I made the trip by foot or bus with my grandmother many times, and marveled at the hamsters and plastic cars in the basement of Woolworth's. My father still talks about the bar-be-qued ham sandwiches at McCrory's five and ten, and marvels at the number of theatres that once dotted the downtown streets. The eye doctor was located in a proud building with marble hallways lined with foggy-glassed wooden doors.
The impression downtown made on me was so great that I insisted on renting the tuxedo for my prom at one of the only stores still open on 11th Avenue in 1987, Sammy's Men's Shop. Overturning boxes and stirring up dust to get my measurements was no small sacrifice to pay for getting that suit downtown.
I still remember the jingle for the department store: "Shoes, socks, and Gables." In its heyday it was known as the "people's store." But the people's store closed and became an office building. I memorialized it by naming a stray cat after it--a cat that happened to be living on the lot where my parents built their suburban house in 1984. No doubt Gables the cat is gone today too….
In the early 1980s I had the rewarding experience of wondering through a long-abandoned building that had housed Brett's department store. My grandmother remembered it as one of the best. A dusty mezzanine overlooked a deep basement. The ghosts of a half-century of shoppers haunted the place. I found 70-year old cancelled checks from the bank next door, and a roll of Ford for President stickers in a window-well.
I continued to miss downtown, and later decided I would live there. I started to eat at the lunch counter at Woolworth's on a regular basis. They had boarded over the stairway that led to the bargain basement where the colorful fish and furry mammals lit up my eyes as a child. Downtown connected me to my grandparents, and even to their grandparents, who had shopped the same streets and possibly enjoyed the sweet Cokes out of the same fountains--and took an assortment of green-tinted glasses home with them.
But even before the great chain folded, the Woolworth's in Altoona closed its doors, soon after I had rediscovered it.
The malls that brought an end to downtown brought an end to many others around the country. While living in Akron, Ohio, I had an opportunity to wander through the once-amazing spaces and floors of O'Neil's department sStore. O'Neils was located across the street from Polsky's, which now housed the Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies at the University of Akron. The people at the Mayor's Office of Economic Development claimed the building was so large it outsized any mall ever built in the region. It was too big to redevelop, they said, and most of it was demolished to build a parking garage.
Parking. That's what killed downtown. I'd heard people for years say that downtown Altoona didn't have any business because they charged for parking. More free parking, they thought could reverse the demise. I had my doubts.
Did the great shopping streets of the world have an abundance of parking? No, of course not. And they still don't. The appeal of such places isn't free parking.
The problem was that mass transit was gone, and people had abandoned the city for the suburbs. Without the trolleys and a lot of people living downtown, there was little hope of bringing it back.
Decades later things haven't changed much. There's been a success here and there, a building restored, three more demolished. The offices they put in some of the old stores provide a lunchtime crowd for a few scattered lunch places. They cleaned up some vacant lots and put some imitation brick on the streets, but the life is often limited to the grass that grows between the seams.
It's sad really. All that history gone. Gone to make Altoona just like any other place. A place without the streets and storefornts our grandparents knew; without architecture or shop windows or lunch counters or old theatres; without a ride on the streetcar or in the brass elevator; without friendly eyes greeting each other through the scarves and overcoats. That trolley ride followed by a wonderful trek up those old wooden stairs--the same stairs my parents climbed with me to see Santa Claus--has been diminished to another weary drive through traffic jams and parking lots to the nondescript, uncomforting, replaceable hulk we know all too well today as the mall.
