Soon-to-be Former Acme — Glassboro, NJ

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Location: 731 Delsea Drive North, Glassboro, NJ

After years of closing smaller, outdated stores, Acme is starting to drop the ax on the huge stores of the 90's. Both the Glassboro store and the "fortress" styled Morrisville store are on the list this time around. I believe the only other 90's stores to have closed are Quakertown, Cinnaminson and Collegeville. Morrisville and Quakertown being the only two being built from the ground up during Acme's new store construction boom of the 90's.

I've been hearing for a while that Glassboro was in danger. Kept postponing a visit since I didn't know much about it and was't aware of any interesting aspects to its history. When the closings were announced recently, a visit became a top priority.

What I had expected to find here and what I actually saw turned out to be two very different things. I had imagined a tired, old store which had been in decline for years. The ShopRite across the street opened in the early 2000's so I figured the Acme had been in serious decline since then. We all unfortunately know what a ShopRite can do to an Acme... total destruction. After touring the store, I was shocked at how nice it was. Not only that, service departments were fully up and running including Seafood. Produce was stocked beautifully as you will see in a couple of pictures below. I very well know when I'm in a store that's in trouble. Besides being somewhat of a mess, there's just a sadness hanging in the air. I didn't find that here in Glassboro. After a good decade of going head to head with ShopRite, I'm not sure what has gone wrong. I do know a Bottom Dollar opened recently up across the street. Are people really turning away from traditional grocery stores in such mass numbers for these randomly stocked, off-brand stores? I haven't been in a Bottom Dollar yet. Feel like I've seen it all when it comes to those types of stores after being in an Aldi and several Sav A Lots. Back to the Acme...



We'll head into the entrance on the right...


Albertsons Marketplace decor here with plenty of left over 90's Red/White/Blue decor items throughout. The original box lights hanging from the ceiling remain in place. Newer, taller cases have been installed. No longer do they extend across the entire back wall.


You can see from these pictures that the produce was stocked beautifully. Too bad there weren't more people shopping here to appreciate it.




A look down the front-end before proceeding. 90's light boxes still above the registers, painted cream now.


Newer letters mounted onto the former 90's Bakery sign.


How the Bakery looked in the 90's.


What's this? Something that actually says "ACME" on it? I could barely believe my eyes. A while back I took a picture of these fresh baked cookies when SuperValu first made the switch to the plain white bag. They used to come in colorfully designed, "ACME" branded bag. The plain bags had a round sticker placed on the them that said the kind of cookie inside with "ACME" no where to be found. This all came about around the same time Essential Everyday products were being rolled out and the "ACME" name was being wiped away from stores. Looks like the it's making it's way back! To some degree anyway. Too bad the packaging is so lame now. The cookies are surprisingly good.


One of the first departments to go in a troubled store is Seafood. It's still up and running here and looking really good too. These cases seem to be newer than the Albertsons Marketplace decor package. In fact, they look brand new.


Unlike most 90's stores, Deli and Seafood are in the corner while Meat is at the center of the back of the store.


Wow! What do you see on the walls?


The keystones from the former fake windows that used to be here! Love it! We'll see more of these around the store.


As this area would have looked in the 90's.


Premium Fresh and Healthy aisle markers. In jet-black here AND with the Albertsons' leaf.


90's floor still in place showing it's age in many areas. Overall the store was impeccably clean.




Newer cases on the right. The ones of the left are looking relatively new. It seems there has been a decent amount of investment in this store in recent years.


Next aisle over.




One aspect of the store needing some help were the ceiling tiles.






An impressive 21 aisles! The aisles are not split like in most 90's stores. I'm not sure at what point this building became an Acme. We'll see evidence in the satellite images that it did not start out as a grocery store. Acme may have taken over at a later date and either expanded the store in the 90's or possibly just arrived in the 90's. I'm sure our helpful commenters will fill us in.






The one department already winding down is Floral. Once an eye-catching feature here with windows over by the entrance. I visited about 10 Acme's on this day and I saw Floral barely hanging on in many of them.


The windows now blocked with displays.


They did get the big fancy store directory!




Not sure if I've seen this in any other store before. I liked the signs back in the days that I worked for Acme much better... "Your Store for Low Prices!"




This looks like a parking lot sign from the 50's. I'm not convinced that it is. At least not from an Acme.




Kmart at the end of the shopping center.


And now for the aerial tour...


Get a load of that parking lot! Looks like business was pretty good just a few years ago. What happened? You can see on the roof that a newer section was added to the right side. We'll see down in the historic images that the first two thirds of the building were built along with the center. It does not appear that an Acme was in the space at that time.


Additional back room space added to the side of the store with a sloped ceiling.




A look at the competition. SuperFresh originally across the street in an A&P "Future Store" styled building. Changed over to Food Basics, probably in the early 2000's.


Now closed and gone as many are. A failed concept that arrived on the scene with so much fanfare. A&P touted it as its saving grace there in the beginning. Probably more to scare the unions than anything else. Food Basics is void of all high paid service employees. Everything except produce comes in prepackage. I've read online that the format here was tweaked over the years. Apparently some service departments were added near the end to help business. The location in North Bergen too has undergone many incarnations, the latest of which was a downsizing of sales floor with yet another round of new decor. I believe the format is basically dead at this point. As mentioned in the recent Glen Rock Bonus Store post, only 11 stores remain open.


Image above courtesy of Josh Austin
Josh caught a picture of the store as it was being transformed into a Bottom Dollar. Is this what finally did the Acme in? They survived SuperFresh, Food Basics AND ShopRite but finally had to toss in the towel with the arrival of this place?


Acme may have this place beat on size but they've got Acme beat on prices. It's too bad Acme has never figured out a way to compete. Question: why is Jewel-Osco in the midst of a huge price cutting ad campaign and Acme isn't? They've "lowered everyday prices". Why can't Acme get a piece of that action?



Jewel-Osco commercial explaining new lower prices. They have been advertising sweeping prices changes throughout their stores both in advertising and in their circulars. Acme is participating in the "Gotta Love Great Deals" campaign with the unusual strategy of featuring one item per day at a super low prince.

Through the years...


2007

2002

1995
So here's the million dollar question... was this an Acme back in 1995? It's impossible to tell from this image. What would lead me to say no is that the building appears to have the same four air conditioner units that it has in the 1970 image below. These units would seem to indicate that that building was a big box store instead of a grocery store.

Update 10.21.12: oA comment left by Bill Haines sheds some more light on the history of the store...

" I believe that this store was originally one of the Pantry Pride stores that Acme purchased in 1979, just as Skaggs was buying the company. From my collection of "Trumpeter's" I found this reference: Glassboro was enlarged with the new facade in 1995, and received the Red, White, & Blue decor package. The grand reopening was held December 5, 1995."

1970
The Kmart had yet to arrive as of 1970

1970
A closer look. 

1965
Construction just beginning in 1965. You can see the outlines of the stores.

2002
And now for a broader look of the area through the years.

1995
SuperFresh was there but was Acme? No ShopRite. 

1970
So few shopping options back in 1970. Kind of a simpler time. 

Just a brief look at a former Glassboro Acme. Opened way back in January 1943 at the intersection of College Ave and Academy Street. I didn't venture over that way since there isn't much to see these days.


From one former Acme to a soon-to-be former Acme...


Sad to see a place like this go. I've read a lot of comments online from people who are mystified that this location is closing while the nearby Clayton store remains open. (As a crazy Acme fan I say "hands off the Clayton store people! Gotta keep that classic open!!") Found an interesting letter to the editor of nj.com alluding to the fact that rent increases here may have affected Acme's closing as well as other stores in the center. Click here to read the letter. Updates to this post will be made as more information comes in about its history.

"The Beat Goes On" at Dillard's

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Here’s a set of vintage snapshot photos I purchased severalmonths back. Taken in Austin, Texas in April 1967, they depict famed pop stars Sonnyand Cher on a bandstand in front of a Dillard’s department store. The photosare a bit overlit and fuzzy (not unusual for outdoor shots from an inexpensiveKodak 126 Instamatic – like millions of others in those days, most of mychildhood photos were taken on this exact type of camera), but you can tellthat Sonny and Cher seem to be having a good time and the crowd is excited.  
When I first saw these photos I was intrigued, and twoquestions came to mind: What brought these entertainers, L.A. denizens to thecore, to Texas? And what prompted a personal appearance at Dillard’s, thenamong the smallest specks on America’s department store landscape? (We’ll getto that in a minute.) Through a bit of research I found a satisfactory answerto first question and reached a fairly obvious conclusion about the second.
It turns out that Sonny and Cher were in town for a moviepremiere. On April 11, 1967, the world premiere for the movie “Good Times”, thefirst picture to feature the couple in starring roles, was held in Austin. The premierewas part of a weeklong promotional Texas trek that, according to an April 29Billboard magazine article, included stops in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston,Abilene and El Paso. (“A cowboy’s work is never done”, they say.) My guess is afashion show at Dillard’s was added at some point to the duo’s itinerary.
The “rock and roll movie” was a fixture of American cultureby 1967, and if an artist had a few hits under their belt (Sonny and Cher hadscored a number one smash with “I Got You Babe” in 1965, one of five Top 20 hitsfor the pair in just a little over a year), some personality and a unique presence(Cher’s dusky voice and exotic looks, Sonny’s fur vests and bowl haircut), amovie offer was usually a solid bet. These movies varied wildly in quality, andmore often than not were “star vehicles” with minimal, hackneyed plots. “GoodTimes” featured the rock and roll singers in a movie about…well, rock and roll singers becoming movie stars. (Viewing it today, it’s a fun, much better thanaverage sixties romp. And the styles were incredible, topped off by GeorgeBarris-designed his-and-her Mustangs specially built for the film. Long clipscan be found on YouTube, but you didn’t read that here!)
History shows that 1967 was the start of a long dry spellfor Sonny and Cher. “Good Times” bombed at the box office, and “The Beat GoesOn”, a number 6 pop hit, would provide the Bonos’ last Billboard chart actionfor a very long time. So they headed for Las Vegas. Only made it out toNeedles. There, they found steady work as a casino act, and over the nextfew years they carefully honed their stage personas (personae?) – Sonny, thenaïve, somewhat air-headed dreamer, and Cher, his quick-witted, sharp-tonguedwife, always ready to burst his bubble with the perfectly timed wisecrack.
Audiences loved it, and in 1971 CBS came forward with anoffer for an hour-long summer replacement series. “The Sonny and Cher ComedyHour” quickly became a national sensation, a Top 10 show for several seasons ina row, and a weekly fixture of millions of TV viewers’ homes, mine included.
When the couple announced their divorce in 1974, it was apalpable shock. Their lives took very different courses over the ensuingdecades, with Sonny eventually entering Republican politics, winning the officeof Mayor of Palm Springs, California then a seat as a U.S. congressman. In1998, he died in a tragic skiing accident. Cher, no last name necessary,remains an entertainment icon, with at least number one hit in each decadesince her first emergence on the scene. I still think of her 1999 hit “Believe”as “the inescapable song”, because unless you stayed in your house all yearwith a supply of food, windows and doors duct-taped shut and the lights turnedoff, you couldn’t escape it. We took a family vacation to California that yearand heard it at least once every 15 minutes, including while standing in linefor the mine train at Calico. Somehow it made perfect sense.
All right. Lest you think this site has turned into “RetroEntertainment Tonight”, I figure it’s about time I said something about that statelystructure behind our Hollywood heroes. That, my friends, is the first “real”Dillard’s store, which opened in February 1964 in Austin’s Hancock Shopping Center.
It was a far cry from the first store opened by William T.Dillard in Nashville, Arkansas, a rural town southwest of Hot Springs, in thelate 1930’s. Born in 1914, Dillard grew up in the tiny town of Mineral Springs,Arkansas, where his father owned a dry goods store. His early years weretypified by hard work at the family store and a desire to learn the retailingbusiness inside and out, the quintessential American story of a young mandiligently following in his father’s footsteps.
By his mid-twenties, however, Dillard had earned adistinction that set him apart from most American young men of the day,certainly those from rural Arkansas. In 1938, he earned a masters’ degree inbusiness from New York’s prestigious Columbia University, where he attended ona scholarship.  Valuable as a Columbiaeducation was, however, Dillard’s exposure to the Big Apple’s legendarydepartment stores – Macy’s, Gimbels and John Wanamaker (Dillard worked at theirManhattan branch while in school there) – arguably did as much to shape hisfuture career.  
Leaving New York, Dillard pursued management trainee jobswith Sears, Roebuck and Co. and J.C. Penney, and received offers from both. Penneyoffered Dillard positions in Walla Walla, Washington, of all places, and themuch closer to home Topeka, Kansas. Dillard took Sears’ offer, which was closerstill –a Tulsa, Oklahoma store. He stayed there only seven months beforeleaving to open his own store, in Nashville, Arkansas, as mentioned.
The store did well, but over time Dillard grew restless. Mostof all, he was eager to avoid his father’s mistake of “wast(ing) many of hisabilities because he was confined to a small town”, according to author LeonJoseph Rosenfeld in his brief but excellent 1988 book “Dillard’s: The FirstFifty Years”. In 1948, Dillard purchased a 40 percent in Wooten’s departmentstore in Texarkana, -- miles to the southwest on the Texas border, a muchlarger market with a population of 55,000. The following year, he bought theremaining interest in the Texarkana store (by then called “Wooten &Dillard”) and sold off the Nashville business.  Within five years it became the leading storein Texarkana, and Dillard, who had relocated his family there, was one thearea’s prominent citizens.
Interestingly, Dillard reversed course in a sense when hebought back into a small market with the March 1955 purchase of adepartment  store in Magnolia, Arkansasfrom a friend. It was back to bigger things the following year, however, whenthe opportunity arose to acquire a well-respected East Texas  department store. For years, Dillard hadadmired Mayer & Schmidt, the leading store in Tyler, Texas, a town with apopulation similar to that of Texarkana.
Mayer & Schmidt, founded in 1899, was a well run storewith a fine reputation, drawing customers from a radius well beyond the city ofTyler. In 1956, however, they were in trouble. The previous year, Mayer &Schmidt opened a second store in town “to capitalize on its prosperity”, but thenew location turned out to be a flop, and “within a year it was closed anddeeply in debt”, according to Rosenberg. Based on his success in Texarkana,Dillard was able to line up financing, and in April 1956, acquired a majoritystake in the Mayer & Schmidt store. Dillard immediately embarked on acomplete remodeling and expansion of the store, adding furniture, appliance,jewelry, records and hi-fi departments along with leased shoe, book and fur operations.The revamped Mayer & Schmidt debuted on September 17, 1956, and would proveto be a great success under Dillard’s ownership.
In 1959, a banker friend of Dillard’s informed him of anotherwell-regarded department store recently befallen by rocky times. Brown-Dunkin Companywas Tulsa, Oklahoma’s largest department store (more than twice as large anenterprise as Mayer & Schmidt), founded in 1924 by brothers-in-law John H.Dunkin and John A. Brown, and “occup(ied) the first nine floors of thefifteen-story Hunt building at Fourth and Main streets, the city’s busiestcorner”, Rosenberg states, and “had become a household word in northeastOklahoma”.    
Brown-Dunkin’s problem was one of succession. Dunkin hadpassed away in 1958 and Brown some years before that, and the store went intodecline under the management left in place by the founders’ widows. Intrigued bythe challenge of running a well-known store and the chance “to prove hisabilities before a national audience” as Rosenberg put it, Dillard set off onan arduous seven-month process of negotiations with the Brown and Dunkin widowsand numerous banks. Ultimately, he was required to put up the Mayer &Schmidt store as security for the transaction. Knowing he could fall back onthe Texarkana and Magnolia stores should things go awry, Dillard pressedforward confidently. On the last day of February 1960, Dillard took control ofthe Brown-Dunkin store.
Initially there were headaches – after the ownership changewas publicized, picketers from the local Building Services Union showed up onthe sidewalks outside the Brown-Dunkin store. Unbeknownst to Dillard, theprevious ownership had recently dismissed the store’s cleaning ladies and elevatoroperators, contracting out those functions to outside firms. Dillard refused toreopen the issue and eventually the picketing stopped. Then there was thematter of $150,000 worth of unpaid invoices discovered in a drawer, whichforced Dillard to obtain an additional line of credit.
On top of these hassles was one more that ended up turninginto a considerable plus. In sharp contrast to today, mid-20th century America was dotted with department store companies that ranged in sizefrom single-store outfits to 20-plus-unit multi-regional chains, with mostfalling somewhere in between. To increase their negotiating power with clothingmanufacturers and other suppliers, many department store firms signed up with(usually New York-based) buying cooperative agencies. These agencies strove torepresent one department store chain in each major city, while doing their bestto avoid any competitive overlap between clients. When Brown-Dunkin’s buyingagency, Mutual, caught wind of the buyout, they figured Dillard wasn’t capableof pulling the potatoes out of the proverbial fire and dumped Brown-Dunkin infavor of Vandever’s, another Tulsa department store.
Not long afterward, Dillard joined up with the FrederickAtkins Company, “one of the more prestigious buying houses in the country”, asRosenberg put it. The Atkins firm represented a host of marquee names includingJohn Wanamaker (Philadelphia), B. Altman (New York), Hochschild-Kohn(Baltimore), Miller & Rhoads (Richmond), Ivey’s (the Carolinas and Florida), Pizitz(awesomely-named, Birmingham), Chas. A. Stevens (Chicago – did you really thinkI’d leave that out?) and The Broadway (of latent “Mad Men” fame, Los Angeles),among many others. When he signed on with Atkins in 1962, Dillard was theirsmallest client. By the early 1980’s, he was their largest.
Two years on and these problems behind him, Dillard waseager to expand.  Dillard had “recognizedthe shift of the population to the suburbs and the need to provide stores closeto them” as far back as his brief tenure with Sears, Rosenberg noted, and he“had wanted to open a unit in a mall for some time to see if it would work”.  For this exciting new venture he partneredwith Homart, a recently created mall development subsidiary of Sears, thenferociously active in the Southwest. Dillard initially considered Homart’s first mall project, the just openedSeminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas. (Many years later, in1987, Dillard finally put in a store there.) Also in the running was Homart’s still-in-developmentCoronado Center in Albuquerque.
Instead, he chose a third Homart project, the HancockShopping Center, to be located in Austin and co-anchored, of course, by Sears(second photo here). Dillard’s methodology behind this choice was novel, to putit mildly. From Rosenberg’s book: “Dillard had been visiting in the city(Austin) and was waiting for his flight to Albuquerque when he happened tothumb through a telephone book. He noticed there were more Lutheran churches inAustin than any other denomination and associated the churches with Germans,who had always impressed him with their work ethic and honesty. On that basis,he decided that Austin would be an excellent place for his store.”  (And here I always thought the Methodistswere the benchmark for retail site selection. Shows you what I know.)
Obviously the Lutherans and a great many others likedDillard’s store. It was an unqualified success, resetting the template for allof the company’s future growth. From that point forward, Dillard “took everyopportunity in subsequent years to co-anchor new malls with Sears or Penney’s”,Rosenberg wrote, “…he was not in direct competition with either store, and theyboth made good mall partners for him”.
Importantly, the store was the first to carry Dillard’s ownname, not counting his early dry goods stores in southwest Arkansas. (As a sidenote, Dillard sold the Texarkana and Magnolia stores in 1962 to Aldens, aChicago-based catalog retailer then seeking a piece of the brick-and-mortarside of the business. Aldens had recently bought out Shoppers World, and woulditself be absorbed by Gamble-Skogmo in 1964.) Although he would continue to puthis own name on stores in markets that were new to the company (Austin, forexample), for years he maintained the names of acquired companies in theirrespective markets, such as Mayer & Schmidt and Brown-Dunkin, even whenadding new mall-based stores in their areas.
As mentioned, the Austin, Texas Dillard’s store opened inFebruary 1964. Later that year saw the return of Dillard and his family (fromTulsa) to Arkansas, this time to Little Rock, the state capital, where he had recentlyassembled a considerable retail enterprise. Over the previous year, Dillardbought out the Gus Blass Company and Pfiefer’s, two of the three largestdepartment stores in the area, the other being M.M. Cohn. The buyouts werecarried out with the help of funds from the Mayer & Schmidt stockholdersand $1.5 million kicked in from Sperry & Hutchinson, who invested on thecondition that Dillard hand out their S&H Green Stamps in his stores. BothBlass and Pfeifer’s were large downtown stores with one branch apiece – Blassin Pine Bluff and Pfeifer’s in Hot Springs. In 1965 a mall-based Blass storewas opened at Park Plaza in Little Rock, and two years after that, another atthe then new (and just recently torn down, except for Sears) Indian Mall inJonesboro. Starting in 1967, Dillard’s Little Rock-based operations werecombined under the name of Pfeifer-Blass, although I don’t know for surewhether this change was extended to store signage.    
The late 60’s and early 70’s were a furious period of growthfor Dillard’s companies, and virtually all of it took place at the malls. 1965saw a Brown-Dunkin store at Southland Shopping Mall in Tulsa, followed byanother at the Northland Shopping center the following year. In Oklahoma City,he opened a “Dillard’s Brown-Dunkin” store at the Sheppard Mall, “a first stepin phasing in his own name for all his stores”, according to Rosenberg’s book.In 1968, two Dillard’s stores were opened in San Antonio, at Central Park Malland what is now known as South Park Mall. And the growth continued from there –the first Missouri location, at Springfield’s Battlefield Mall was added in1970, as was the first Louisiana location at Shreveport’s Shreve City Center.
In 1974, the various Dillard-controlled stores all took onthe “Dillard’s” name, reflecting the incorporation of Dillard’s enterprisesunder one financial umbrella. More importantly, it provided a consistent brandimage for marketing purposes. While many (including me) lament the passing ofso many great department store nameplates in recent decades, it has proven to bean unstoppable, irreversible trend.  It’sinteresting to note, however, that even Macy’s, the proverbial poster child”for department store rebranding, owned Davison’s (Atlanta) for 61 years beforeconverting them to Macy’s in 1986 and Bamberger’s (“New Jersey’s greateststore, and one of America’s finest”) for 57 years before finally hanging the red star onits front door that same year. 
When William T. Dillard passed away at age 87 in 2002, hisnamesake company that began so humbly was America’s third largest departmentstore chain, according to his New York Times obituary. Today, among “luxury” departmentstores (i.e.: not including Sears, Kohl’s and J.C. Penney), they remain numberthree, behind Macy’s and Nordstrom and ahead of Neiman Marcus and Belk, perStores Magazine’s latest rankings. Today, Dillard’s boasts over 300 stores in acoast-to-coast empire. And the beat goes on.
Below, a 1972 newspaper ad hailing the new Dillard’s storeat the Northwest Arkansas Plaza, as reproduced in the Rosenberg book - anenjoyable hodgepodge of names and architectural styles if there ever was one.

Bring Back the San Fernando Penney's!

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You know, there must be some people who read this siteregularly and wonder – “Dave, you’re a blogger. Why don’t you ever take a standon anything? You never weigh in on the big issues of our time. You’re always onthe fence. Asleep at the wheel. Out to lunch. AWOL!”
Well, friends, I want you to know that I hear you, and todayI’m answering the call! And the issue I herewith weigh in on is one that is, orshould be, near and dear to our classic retail-loving hearts. It can be summedup in one phrase:
Bring back the San Fernando J.C. Penney.
When a national retail chain closes shop in a long-standinglocation, it’s typically news – in the local area, that is, and not far outsideit. But this summer, when J.C. Penney ended an 80-year tenure in San Fernando,California (the city of San Fernando, specifically, which lies within the SanFernando Valley, part of Greater L.A.), it set off a furor that popped in andout of national headlines for weeks.
On Saturday, July 28^th, despite rallies in thelocal community, online petitions, celebrity pleas, tons of local news storiesand national coverage from the likes of the Huffington Post, the public radioshow Marketplace, Bloomberg Businessweek (Plain old “Business Week” was muchmore concise, right? But hey, it’s his magazine now!) among others, J.C. Penneyshuttered the San Fernando store, which had existed in its current locationsince February 1953.
Official comment from JCP on the matter has been terse,putting it charitably. “We would not have moved forward with this difficultdecision if we did not believe it was absolutely necessary for the futuregrowth of our company”, the company’s press response read.
Speculations behind the closing have been raised (and shotdown) from several angles, with some alleging the closing was part of an effortto trim costs in light of huge losses JCP has experienced this year as aconsequence of its controversial rebranding/repositioning efforts.  Others contend the small store (60,000 squarefeet with just over half of that space devoted to selling, three floors, noescalators), long an anomaly for Penney, is a poor fit for the rebrandingconcept. Still others claim the San Fernando location itself has beenunprofitable for years.
It’s easy to understand why San Fernando residents are upsetabout losing their Penney store, an obvious point of pride for the community.The store has been an anchor for their downtown at a time when most big-nameretailers long ago abandoned downtown locations for the “wide open spaces” werefer to today as malls and shopping centers. Certainly it was handy – whilePenney has no shortage of huge stores in The Valley, it’s hard to beat “downthe block” for convenience, even though selections were limited compared tostandard Penney stores. There’s the longevity factor – the San Fernandolocation far outlasted the hundreds of downtown Penney stores built through thedecades up until the late 50’s. Indeed, had JCP opted to close it down in 1970or 1980, the uproar might never have materialized.
Lastly, the store’s timeless deco-influenced facades, frontand rear, remain a thing of beauty. Most late 1940’s/early 1950’s Penney storesacross the country were very plain in appearance, while the San Fernando unitexemplifies the extra effort that many national retailers poured into theirCalifornia locations. Just two years ago, the building’s owner, AshkenazyDevelopment, spent some $350,000, including the services of a historian, torestore the facades and the “Penney’s” blade sign, which reportedly hadn’tworked for nearly forty years. 
The story took a nasty turn on the second night after thestore’s closing, when residents discovered sign crews (after dark, with the companyname on their truck covered up) pulling the “J.C. Penney Co.” lettering off theback of the building and one worker preparing to go after the neon blade signwith a torch, all in violation of an order to leave them alone pending ahistorical preservation hearing. The removed letters were reinstalled the nextday.
At this late date, it seems unlikely that J.C. Penney willreopen the store, but you have to admit it would be a great public relations gestureand would serve to counteract some of the negative publicity the company hasreceived in recent months. The “Save San Fernando’s JCPenney” site features acouple of interesting concepts for expansion, should JCP reverse theirdecision. At any rate, the store’s designation as a historic site appears to beassured. Rightfully so.
Our goal here, of course, is to depict great stores likethis in their heyday, and once again I thank the J.C. Penney Archives at theDeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University for their invaluablecooperation in supplying these photos – festooned in Grand Opening glory, followedby an interior view, then front and rear facade views from after thefestivities cooled down.
As a postscript, here’s a sidenote from the “Basic DataSheet”, a centrally-maintained dossier of sorts, for this store, last updatedin 1971 and now part of the JCP archives. It’s interesting to note who Penney’s regarded as competition in thosedays -within a four-mile radius, there were department stores: Ohrbach’s, TheBroadway, Robinson’s, a small Sears “hard-lines” store, discounters White Front,Kmart, Gemco and Cal Stores (sister division of Baza’r stores). “Fantastic Fair”one of my ultra-faves, is also listed, but I’m pretty sure they were gone bythat time. (I’ll have to do a 10-part series on that one someday.)There were alsothe variety stores Grants and Newberrys, and apparel stores Scotts, the Melody Shopand Sally Dresses. The Penney’s unit outlasted them all.