Fondly Remembered & Now Making New Improved Memories Laurel Shopping Center

I found myself recently doing a bit of research on our Laurel Shopping Center to see just how long the center has been there, how it came to be, and if anything interesting had EVER happened there.

I stumbled upon a really great and interesting resource created by Richard Friend at Lost in Laurel.  If you haven’t checked this site out, you definitely should! I realized as I paged through the historical archives, our little Laurel Shopping Center brings to life an ever-changing landscape of a once small town locals treasured calling home.

Perhaps you valued the Laurel Shopping Center for their “Open Late Every Night” convenience (by the way… what was “late” in 1976??), the $.99 cent Twin Cinema movie admission, or the simple pleasure that LSC was among the first shopping centers in the area to open every Sunday. Whatever the reason, if walls could talk, our Laurel Shopping Center (and the drive-thru Fotomat in the parking lot) would have a mouthful to share. Unfortunately for the Fotomat, there success was short lived. Photo printing as a business grew and surpassed  the drive-thru Fotomat business by the mid 1980s.
  

The humble beginning for Laurel Shopping Center came to be in 1956 by young Melvin Berman and Arthur Robinson with a mere 30 stores. Anchored by the Giant Food and its iconic, gargantuan sky-scraper high sign still stands today, Hecht’s, Montgomery Ward, J.C.Penny and Woolco also jumped onto the anchoring bandwagon at LSC.

It appears back in the day, Laurel Shopping Center was quite the place to be! Between their Annual Air Shows, Laurel Car Wash, owned by the Mayor, and advertised total of “90 stores to serve you,” (which actually only totaled a little over 80 stores, even if you count “Dentist Office” and “Dentist’s Office” separately…) LSC was fully leased and booming. Many of the stores maintained their success and still appear in the shopping center today (see store listing photo). 

Sadly, Laurel Shopping Center made its claim to fame and engraved its place on the map as result of the attempted assassination of Alabama Governor, George Wallace on May 15, 1972. Following Wallace’s campaign speech, he stepped down from the podium, removed his jacket, and was unexpectedly shot by a reputedly insane individual, 21-year old Milwaukee native Arthur Bremer, reportedly thirsting for fame. Now, the first thought that comes to my mind is, “What on earth brings someone all the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to our small town Laurel Shopping Center for an attempted assassination,” but in spite of this perplexity, Wallace, who was running campaigning as presidential candidate at the time, would survive the shooting with irreversible paralysis from the waist down.
            
It was never a dull moment at the center – the following year, Laurel Shopping Center experienced the 1973 boycotting presentation outside their Hecht’s store for the new Farah Pants. Farah Pants, the largest manufacturer of men’s and boy’s slacks in the country at the time, had been guilty of attributing much of their success to their sweatshops.

Over 3,000 under compensated, over worked Farah employees walked out on their jobs. Outraged, the public responded with mass picketing and boycotting across the United States. Farah Pants was hit hard with an annual report depicting an $8.3 million fiscal loss that year versus the preceding year’s profit of $6 million; launching the company into an overall $10 million decrease in sales (www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=1038 ).  This boycott; however, obviously did not impact the Hecht’s Department store considering they lived on at the Laurel Shopping Center until their relocation to Laurel Mall in the mid-1980s.
 
Remember Jamesway? The 1980s “Big Lots,” where everything is ALWAYS a sale, wanna-be attracted hundreds of Laurel residents to attend the store’s opening day to take their chances at catching ping-pong balls being tossed from the roof by skydivers. If they caught a ping-pong ball, a door prize would be awarded. Yes… I said skydivers on the roof of a department store… and personally,  I’m not sure the opportunity of a “door-prize” is enough to lure me to a store’s grand opening where I could potentially be pelted with ping-pong balls from a roof, but hey, to each their own.
         
R.I.P. Cinema Sign, abandoned Toys’R’Us/Woolco… Hello, Upgrades!
“The 60s called and they want this sign back,” was the final message the once state-of-the-art Laurel Shopping Center Cinema sign read before it’s tear down on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012. If you visit the present day Laurel Shopping Center, you will find sign construction underway for a new pylon, a fabulous state-of-the-art work out facility, L.A.Fitness, and the modern shoe destination, Shoe City, among the still surviving originals like  Bart’s Hair Shop (who still maintains their original opening phone number: 498-HAIR) and Astor Liquors.
Here’s to 56 years of Laurel-Making memories and many more to come!