[PRCo] Suburban shopping areas

[Fred Schneider]

My wife gets on me because my definition of suburban and hers do not  
match.   I refer to suburban as anything beyond the original and then  
existing core ... there were foot suburbs, then horsecar suburbs,  
then trolley suburbs, then bus suburbs, and eventually automobile  
suburbs, and then we got to acre building lot suburbs made possible  
by expressways into the city.   Her idea of a suburb is what she  
called suburbs in her lifetime.

If you become adept at identifying the ages when buildings were  
erected you can play a neat little game of recognizing how houses  
were built when or just before the trolleys came to an area.   In  
Lancaster County it's astonishing how many homes alongside the major  
rural highways were built in the teens and twenties because the  
trolley was there, often even before the road was paved.   If you are  
lucky you might find a program in your local historical society that  
will teach you how to recognize the ages of buildings.   It can be a  
lot of fun.

So go back and think of those earlier suburbs in our cities.  Each of  
them had their own shopping districts.   Mount Lebanon, Carson  
Street, McKees Rocks, Wilkinsburg, Homestead, Allegheny, Dormant  
(ooops, Dormont), Mt. Lebanon, Squirrel Hill, etc.

If Rich Allman is still reading, he'll remember when 69th St.  
Terminal in Upper Darby vibrant ... and Lancaster Avenue and  
Frankford and we could find other neighborhoods all over Philadelpha.

Most of them also had neighborhood theaters.   I think East Liberty  
had seven of them at one time.

As much as I don't like chain merchandising, we can probably all  
remember some early chains ... F. W. Woolworth (instead of Woolco),  
S. S. Kresge (instead of K-Mart), G. C. Murphy (instead of  
Murphymart), Sears Roebuck (before the malls there used to be one on  
the North Side and one in East Liberty and probably quite a few  
others scattered around Pittsburgh).   Remember Fanny Farmer candy  
stores.   And all those bakeries that served wonderful granulated  
sugar donuts?   Thy were everywhere.   Every neighborhood had them.    
And Isalys was everywhere purveying chipped ham and milkshakes and  
Klondikes.

As I pointed out before, my Pittsburgh grandparents lived off  
Perrysville Avenue ... 3462 Delaware Avenue to be precise ... one  
block up Chemung Street from the car stop.   It was a streetcar  
suburb.   They moved there from an earlier home on Veteran Street  
just off the north end of the Fineview line.    Grandma patronized a  
little corner grocery store down at Perrysville and Chemung; it was  
still there a couple of years ago.  But she was in between two  
neighborhood shopping districts.   One was Perrysville and Charles  
Streets.   I remember being asked to take a hike down there to a  
hardware store once when she needed a toilet plunger.  I also  
remember a small store with a black sign across the front emblazoned  
with gold letters with read THE GREAT ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC TEA  
COMPANY.   Long before A&P had supermarkets, they were the champion  
of the chain corner grocery store.   This one was on the west side of  
Perrysville Avenue just south of Charles Street.

The other neighborhood shopping center that she could use was at  
Perrysville Avenue and East Streets.  My mother went to high school  
at Perry High School (now Perry Academy) out there and she even  
remembered a girl friend who came in on the interurban from  
Warrendale (PHB&NC).   Why, because cities had high schools and most  
rural areas did not.   Oh yes, Perrysville and East had a movie  
theater.   Wasn't it called the East Street Theater?   I remember  
that before I learned how to do, I at least knew how to watch.   Went  
there once when I was 14 or 15 to watch Marilyn Monroe in the movie  
Niagara.   As the neighborhoods turned, the shopping district at  
Charles Street faltered.  I'm not sure what is out at East Street any  
longer.

Even the little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we moved in  
1949, population 65,000 in 1950 and 55,000 today, once had at least  
one neighborhood shopping districts.   The Laurel and Filbert street  
car served the intersection of Old Dorwart Street and Manor Street,  
not even 3/4s of a mile from the main shopping district.   Yet this  
little neighborhood then nicknamed Cabbage Hill because of all the  
Germans cooking sauerkraut had its own supermarket, the Manor five  
and dime, a hardware store, and the Manor Theater.   They're all  
closed today.   The highlight of the neighborhood today is a couple  
that made the mistake of standing up during a wedding reception on  
Old Dorwart Street last spring and got nailed by a hail of  
bullets ... the court room replay was going on in the paper last  
night.   The wedding reception just happened to get in the way of a  
drug deal gone sour.   Oh yes, the Germans are  gone.   Columbians  
moved in.

Hope it brought back a few memories.