This has got to be Peak Department Store Era, when it seems some made the effort to make visiting them an event.

Stores were in downtown, right? Among the skyscrapers.
As late as the 1970s, when I was a boy, I think I remember visiting the old Downtown of Los Angeles near Christmas and it still had at least one of its’ old big chain stores, I remember walking down the street outside and looking at the Nativity and Santa Claus displays in the storefront windows.

They had also installed Christmas decorations and lights in Downtown, hanging overhead, that entire hazy memory is quite magical. Then in the blink of an eye, it seems, before my mind was fully developed, everything switched to malls near suburbs.

The thing is I can still glimpse a tiny bit that old era in my mind. Then I can clearly see the mall era when downtowns crumbled, and then the new re-emergence of this part of cities as a desirable place to be or visit.

is there a chance the track could bend?

Wanamaker’s, most of it passed over the toy department

ETA: that’s according to my mom. I was looking through an old photo album and saw a photo of her and my uncle. They both look very happy, my uncle is pointing down at something.

Apparently we had relatives there and before Christmas they always visited and went to Wanamaker’s. Mom said it was the highlight of the trip (as kids), all the newest toys and you got to ride a monorail. After that they went to the restaurant and had a ‘snowball’ which was vanilla ice cream, rolled in coconut, with a plastic sprig of holly on top.

My childhood did not involve monorails and it shows

We can’t have anything cool anymore. Every little thing is cost optimized down to the last penny. Self checkout in a soulless white box is the future.

Clearly having the time of their lives