Holiday season sparks Orlando retail memories
In the 1950s and ’60s, many Central Floridians did their holiday shopping at the kind of department stores that had revolutionized Americans’ retail experience a century earlier. In 1957, both the Dickson & Ives and Ivey’s stores at Orange Avenue and Central Boulevard reported record business. Jim Keith, manager of Ivey’s, told the Sentinel that the decades-old store at One South Orange had enjoyed its biggest shopping day ever that season.
Star stores
Ivey’s occupied the southeast corner of Orange and Central, facing Dickson & Ives on the southwest. In 1955, the rival stores had cooperated to create a large illuminated star that hung suspended over Orange Avenue for the holidays, beginning an Orlando tradition that continues today with the Jack Kazanzas Star, named in honor of its biggest supporter. The department store buildings remain, too, and now house offices and businesses.
My fondness for the city’s biggest holiday bauble is linked to memories of the stores that originally supported it and to the downtown community that existed in the 1950s and early ’60s.
In Ivey’s, a patient salesperson taught me to knit on Saturday mornings on one of its upper floors after I spent my allowance on the latest Nancy Drew mystery on the first floor.
A whooshing, mysterious system of pneumatic tubes carried money and charge slips up and down throughout the building, and, at a counter near the
rear entrance, shoppers could indulge in candy to take home.
My mother was a Welcome Wagon hostess in the 1950s and Ivey’s was among the businesses she represented. As a kid, I spent so much time in the store that it still turns up
in my dreams. In the early 1960s, Mom went to work at the new Jordan Marsh store, which opened in October 1962 — the finishing touch to the Colonial Plaza Shopping Center, which had opened in 1956. (Almost all vestiges of the original Colonial Plaza
have vanished, including Jordan Marsh, which closed in 1991.)
Announcing Jordan Marsh’s opening, an Ocala newspaper announced that it would offer “a complete selection of high fashion and famous-name merchandise.” Folks came to Orlando to shop at the store from at least that far away. They could also relax at the 200-seat Oakmont restaurant, where they might even order a cocktail.
Customers found a ready sales force to help them, former Jordan Marsh executive Larry Signorile remembered in the 1990s. He had moved from New York City in 1962 to manage the toy and houseware departments. During the holiday season, his staff numbered 30 in the toy department alone and 26 in housewares.
In the 1960s, Jordan Marsh would typically add
about 250 extra workers for the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas buying blitz, Signorile recalled. The store’s dapper manager, Henri Guertin, got a kick out of pulling a red wagon around the store to help customers with their packages.
It was a symbol of service. Customers could have purchases delivered to their homes on Jordan Marsh trucks at no charge. As many as 17 tailors stood ready to make their new clothes fit just right.
For many people who shopped and worked there, Jordan Marsh was a special place — a Florida example of the department stores that began in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, offering an array of merchandise for a wide clientele, as did the downtown Orlando department stores that had preceded it.
These businesses exemplified a kind of store that helped widen the horizons of shoppers and make retail opportunities more available to the average Floridian. As the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote in “The Americans: The Democratic Experience,” the rise of department stores “gave dignity, importance, and publicity to the acts of shopping and buying — new communal acts in a new America.”
Lesson in goodwill
Perhaps nowhere is the 20th-century American department store so lovingly presented as in the 1947 movie “Miracle on 34th Street,” in which the real Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, works in Macy’s in New York City.
In one memorable scene, the great character actress Thelma Ritter (in her first screen role) appears as a Macy’s shopper who is thrilled with gratitude when Kringle suggests she go to another store — Schoenfeld’s on Lexington Avenue — to buy the toy fire engine that Macy’s doesn’t have.
“Macy’s sending people to other stores? You kidding me?” Ritter’s character says.
The moment offered a lesson in how to merchandise not only store products but goodwill that was just dandy, a reviewer enthused in 1947. That sentiment remains dandy, still. Sometimes it does take tough times to remind us what matters most in life. A healthy helping of goodwill can always find a place in our budget.