Thruway Shopping Center
Riverside, Connecticut - circa 1950s
Nice dusk shot of the Woolworth's and Liggett Rexall Drug Store, at the Thruway Shopping Center in Riverside, Connecticut.
Mall history: 1955 - present
Current website: n/a
Current aerial view
Previous entries: none
posted by Keith @ 9/09/2006
4 Comments:
It is such a lovely shade of gloomy yet warm and happy blue. It is almost as if this shopping center is simply glowing with pride.
A beauty!
what's crazy is I was just looking at a vintage issue of National Geographic last night (August 1962) and I saw part of this Shopping center in an aerial picture of Riverside, Conneticut taken back then, in the magazine.....I couldn't figure out what the 'red' lettering said on the main store, though. Now I think I know.....WOOLWORTH'S. I saw the picture in the NG and wanted to know more about it. It's sweet that there is a site devoted to lost, old malls and that I found the shopping plaza I was looking at in the magazine on here.
For what it's worth, the article was entitled 'Along the Post Road Today' and talked about the old Boston Post Road which was for years after colonization apparently the only 'road' the first post-riders would travel from New York City to Seaboard New England. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)
Wow!
I am always interested in mid-century vintage stuff.....great pic and great site!
Cheers
I was born in 1954 and grew up going to the Thruway shooping center everyday. I used to ride the horse outside Liggetts-Woolworths had balloons you would pop to get a banana split from 1 penny to 35 cents-my sister and brother worked at the shoe store Endicott Johnsons. We got our hair cut from Joe the barber every few monts. We used to stand outside the Apine Bakery back screen door and watch the sweedish people make pastry-they gave us some every time we stopped by. Joe Socci has a shoe store-he used to call me little one-even when i stopped back there in the mid eightys he still called me little one-even though i was iver 2 hudred pounds and 6 foot 4. Then there was the Pickle Barrel-big barrel of pickles at this dli-all for a nuckle a piece, Then my favorite-the soda fountain at Sam and Dinah's stationary store-stopped there every day for candy and a vanilla coke. My mother used to send us there for Coke syrup when we were sick. I emember one time Sam screamed at me because I left some ketchup on a plate from my hamburger and fries- and how wasteful I was. I think he was in a concentration camp in WW II. The Golden Galace chinese restaurant (Peter, Kai, Mr Lee) was there for years-the best fried rice and egg rolls. That shopping center was a huge piece of my chldhood. We used to climb up onto the roof from the dumpster of the Golden Palace and walked all the way to the end to the Putnam Trust bank. I remember the shopping ceneter owner would chase us-we used to hide behind the letters of Woolworths so he couldnt see us. I remember Jiffy cleaners-a man with white hair and smoked a big cigar did dry cleaning-we used to stop in there and he would give us free penny Bazooka Bubble gum. And of course te good old A&P-we used to collect soda bottle for 2 cents and the brown beer bottel were wortth a nickle. We used to go ouround our project with a shooping cart and collect bottel fro people then redeem them at the A&P and go to Woolworths for banana splits. Those were the days. Bill Whelan
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