The three shopping centers that I frequented in the '60s are still alive and kicking today. Their facades have changed to reflect todays envioronment, but otherwise they look pretty much the same as they did forty some years ago.
The Alameda Shopping center was the closest to my house. My brother and I, and our friends, would walk to the drug store there for snowballs, baseball cards, and comics. They also had a Western Auto car parts store in the shopping center that smelled of new car tires, and boasted a great selection of bicycle accessories. The other stores in there, like the A & P grocery store and Epsteins Clothing, were for parents only. We avoided them.
The Medical Center was a little bit farther to walk, but we'd go there for the pharmacy's malted milk shakes. They also had a Jimmy Wu's Chinese carry-out. My father would buy chicken chow-mein from there a lot, but our gang would go there for their french fries smothered in ketchup.
I don't know how we got hooked on this particular American snack at a Chinese carry out, but we did. The Chinese waiter, behind the counter, absolutely dreaded to see us coming. If he was observant enough to see us from a distance, he would switch the open sign to closed, lock the door, and hide behind the counter.
He absolutely hated to serve us french fries. I'm not sure why, perhaps they had an egg roll quota or something. Sometimes, as we entered the shop, he would simply yell "NO FWENCH FWIE! NO FWENCH FWIE!" at the top of his lungs. But we knew he had them back there, and would simply wait him out until he got tired of us being in his store and threw some in the deep fat fryer.
The Northwood Shopping Center was the farthest of the walks, a little over a mile away. This was a full sized shopping center with a Hecht Co. department store at one end and a grocery store at the other. In between was a Read's drug store, an Arundel soda fountain, a movie theater, and a couple of small clothing stores.
The Arundel soda fountain was our main source for the dreaded ammonia cokes that I mentioned in the soda fountains blog. I think we ordered them because we thought the combination of ammonia and coca cola would get us high. It didn't. For some reason, it just made us pee a lot.
Unlike the fwench fwies man, they women behind the counter loved serving us ammonia cokes (they never ran out of ammonia), and would snicker amongst themselves as they did so.
We didn't really hang out in front of any of the stores. Another gang had laid claim to a prime spot in front of Read's and, back then, it was polite to not encroach on someone elses hangout.
If you would visit those shopping centers today, you'd find many different stores on display. Jimmy Wu's, and the french fries, is long gone, as is The Arundel with its ammonia cokes. Read's, and even the Hecht Co. is gone also, their soda fountains with them.
