Now Trending at Hallandale Beach Blog: Nobody -anywhere- is saying, "I miss seeing Katie Couric on TV"; 163rd Street Shopping Center

WTVJ-TV (Miami) video: 1984 Katie Couric report for the-then WTVJ/Channel 4 on increase in crime at South Florida shopping malls, reporting from the-then extant 163rd Street Mall in North Miami Beach,FL, which no longer exists as shown. Above, Couric is standing in the eastern-side mall parking garage next to what was once the Jordan Marsh Dept. store, near the N.E. 15th Avenue entrance to the complex.
http://youtu.be/rbpHgMvM918



In the background above -thru the garage and across the street- is the location of my favorite job as a teen in NMB, Record Shack, on NE 164th Street, the BEST record store in all of northeast Dade County, which I've previously mentioned in a July 9th, 2009 post, viz a viz some news re Benny Andersson of ABBA.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/abba-geniuses-at-it-again-story-of.html


Now Trending at Hallandale Beach Blog: Nobody -anywhere- is saying, "I miss seeing Katie Couric on TV."
Who's going to watch her upcoming daytime talk show on ABC-TV?

I grew-up in North Miami Beach in the 1970's just four blocks from there -on N.E. 159th Street & 14th Avenue- and worked at a couple of retail shops there while in high school at NMB Senior High, including the Burdine's in the middle of the three-block long facility when it was an outdoor pedestrian complex called the 163rd Street Shopping Center, a name that many people in South Florida recall fondly.

NMB Sr. High and JFK Jr. High were just across the street from the shopping center on the north side, which made it a huge social hang-out, back before the Aventura Mall -or the City of Aventura- existed, something I mentioned a few years back on my 2007 Wikipedia entry for NMB HS and the shopping center, both of which were eventually shorn of their color and context by the Wiki editing police, who only want name, rank and serial number.
I'll post that information full of facts and anecdotes here soon, so people can benefit from my under-appreciated effort then as a griot.


Meanwhile, up in Canada, our neighbor to the north, which lends Hallandale Beach savvy former MP from Ontario Don Boudria for a few months every year...



Robin Sparkles - "Let's Go To The Mall" (full version, from CBS-TV's 'How I Met Your Mother')
http://youtu.be/GF1b1pf9DRY

Cobie Smulders, above, is easily one of the ten most attractive actresses on American TV today, even when she plays a Canadian newscaster -like Peter Jennings.
But then she's not from fashionable Westmount like my smart, savvy, chic and super-cute friend and NMB classmate Tracey was, so I know a thing or two about very attractive Canadian teenagers, in or out of the Mall.

Real Canadians Elisha Cuthbert and Kari Matchett, whom I've mentioned here before, are also on that carefully thought-out short list.
Another win for Canada, eh?


Trust me, you can spend an entire day looking at these old South Florida photos!
Main webpage http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories

I'm going to be adding some memories here in the next few months:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mall_at_163rd_Street

http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/mall_at_163rd_st.html

http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_shopping

a. -1960 - Artist's rendition of the proposed Wometco 163rd Street Theatres,
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/80670007

b. -1960's/70's? - a night time view looking west in the 163rd Street Shopping Center
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/125600809

See also, this Facebook page titled, "Teenager's jobs in the '70's in NMB" as for some blog readers finding this site, it will be a blast to the past -like a night out having Figaro's pizza and garlic rolls with Coach Pete Saponaro and the NMB Mens and Womens gymnastics team after a home meet.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=46380987521&topic=9655

The Nordiska Kompaniet Dept. Store in downtown Stockholm has a surprise guest in its Christmas window display: a small squatter!

Råttan mitt bland NK:s mjukisdjur
http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/nyheter/inrikes/article8291800.ab

NK is Nordiska Kompaniet, the larger-than-life Swedish department store company with hugely popular locations in downtown Stockholm and Göteborg, that is, in ways that are hard to fathom for many Western consumers under the age of forty who never knew that era, both a mythical and magical name in the world of consumer retailing, and an aspirational lifestyle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordiska_Kompaniet
In Swedish: http://www.nk.se/
In English: http://www.nk.se/en/nk-stockholm/

NK Vintersaga - 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4r7gvi96kU

Much more than almost any other current department store I can think of, NK is like the old-fashioned dept. stores that, in the United States, used to populate large northern cities, as well as Atlanta, large cities in California and a handful of other larger cities, where the promotional activities within the store as well as the print/TV/radio advertising campaigns were a staple of both everyday amusement and general conversation among the local citizenry.

Personal evaluations were made not only on the quality and service of the stores, but also of their ad campaigns, not unlike frank discussions of sports teams or favorite players, whether in a hot-streak or in a slump, and if the latter, what would be needed to change the dynamic?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianmontone/4338039892/

My sense of things from reading about that era and talking to people very involved in top-tier advertising agencies from the 1950's thru the late '80's, is that people then had a much stronger sense of loyalty to some dept. stores and an equally strong animus or aversion towards patronizing others, often built over personal slights years before, or in some cases, longstanding racial prejudice not easily forgotten.

Now, it's largely about the cost of an item and where you can it cheapest, NOT the retail experience, and I'm as guilty as anyone else, even though I wish it weren't so.

Until the mid-1960's, when the upwardly mobile suburbs and their growing affluence beckoned them, especially in the growing Sunbelt states -until the notion of a large downtown department store without a large nearby parking garage seemed patently absurd on its face- they often played a larger role in a city's commerce and business image than you might think because of the variety of professionals who worked there and who were available to pitch-in and lend their expertise to community groups like the Junior League, United Way, et al.
These professionals were the key to the dept. stores protecting and preserving their upscale image.

For most of the 1970's, I lived four blocks south of the 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach, when it was an open-air mall, long before it had a fabric roof erected over it as part of a massive renovation in 1979.

Everyday for years, I walked thru it twice a day on my way to and from JFK Jr, High and NMBHS, so I knew every single inch of it, as did my friends, especially the Burdine's,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdines where I worked part-time while in high school and while back from IU in the summer a few years later.

http://mall-hall-of-fame.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mall_at_163rd_Street
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_shopping

See this amazing JFK speech -delivered at 163rd Street!- on, of all things, Castro's Cuba
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/JFK+Pre-Pres/1960/002PREPRES12SPEECHES_60OCT18a.htm

http://www.labelscar.com/



Katie Couric, circa 1984, reporting from the former 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach on the subject of shopping mall crime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbpHgMvM918


The sorts of dept. stores that I'm thinking of, and which applies to NK's now, are the sort of place that would have been the go-to store for not only visiting tourists, but the local smart-set as well, especially twenty-somethings finally coming into some money and eager to spend a little of it on themselves for an emotional pick me-up, a suit for a man an evening dress for a woman.
Or a new electronic device that promised to change your life, like a VCR.

That sort of dept. store, regardless of where it was located, were also where many of our common sense notions of contemporary consumer behavior first came into play, and in the case of women's fashion, were often deliberately reversed just to catch the attention of influential young would-be fashionistas of the time, whose word-of-mouth was golden in that pre-cell phone and Internet era.

Quite sensibly, some upscale dept. stores created a group of female teen 'insiders,' a talkative and opinionated bunch whose minds and imaginations they plumbed and mined for insight into teen tastes and aspirations, as a sort of in-house focus group.

For instance, the Burdines Teen Board, which when I was still at NMB, had some of my friends on it.
If only those girls had blogs back then, they'd be mini-media moguls!

http://absolutboston.se/
http://www.labelscar.com/
http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/fashion/

FYI, circa 2007, the Top 100 Fashion Blogs may've looked like this:
http://www.customizedgirl.com/blog/?p=9

A newer perspective on the most popular fashion blogs, especially those in Europe, can be found at the updated list at popular blogging network Bloglovin.
http://www.bloglovin.com/

There's some pretty amazing things there by some very creative and perceptive people.

There have been so many movies and TV shows made about the inter-relationships of people working at dept. stores that even if you lived in a small town in the '50's that was bereft of that sort of upscale and sophisticated operation, you knew what it was like by cinema osmosis, so you knew EXACTLY what you were missing out on.
Which is part of why you wanted to leave Dodge, pronto!

For me, growing-up in South Florida, far from a traditional hotbed of holiday window displays like what you saw in films or TV, the closest to anything like it that I had any first-hand experience came with the Marshall Field's stores in Chicagoland in the mid-'80's, when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Field%27s

On a slightly smaller scale compared to the huge flagship State Street store in downtown Chicago, the Loop, where my talented fashion-forward friend Madeleine Moulton worked, that included the Marshall Field's in Evanston that was located not far from where I lived.

In 1986, that was where I first bought a favorite red Lacoste sweater before catching an early holiday flight to Miami -a sweater that populated many Christmas photos for years- in order to be down here when my nephew Mario was born a week before Christmas.

That was not unlike an earlier red one I bought at the-then L.S. Ayres at the College Mall in Bloomington, that populated many photos of me and various friends at IU and several memorable dates from 1979-'84.

You might want to read my May 26, 2007 post at South Beach Hoosier titled
South Florida's epidemic apathy shows itself once again.

It was about the Macy's store -the old Burdines store- in downtown Miami on Flagler Street, and the shabby conditions of downtown Miami, and Macy's purchase of Marshall Field's and its effect on Chicago area consumers.
That was a follow-up on something that Transit Miami founder Gabriel Lopez-Bernal had written on the subject on his popular blog.
http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2007/05/while-marshall-fields-loyalists-fight.html

http://www.transitmiami.com/

http://bobmiami.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/bob-prediction-macys-downtown-will-get-revamped/

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?s=1f53638a57498918e3b9f1e1ca54bdd5&f=513

------
http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/

http://www.youtube.com/user/NordiskaKompanietTV

Sorry this reads so blah but my original post here on NK's and the role of department stores vanished when my computer crashed this morning, so I will try to re-post it later if I can.

Bundesliga Fashion Gone Wrong! I Did My Part to Prevent This.

___________________________

To be honest, this video is like some terrible ménage à trois gone wrong between 1970's Houston Astros & San Diego Padres jerseys, some ugly YSL haute couture I saw in a Michigan Avenue window display in the mid-'80's before a Cubs game, and listening to Heino music with early '70's Sally Kellerman lookalikes from the Leipzig Revolutionary Ballet dancing for Der Kommissar  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q0-rh7F-64

Bundesliga fashion gone wrong!

The crazy thing is, the afternoon that the Steelers beat the Raiders in the "Immaculate Reception" game in December of 1972, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07zsdF0ysP0 , I was throwing a football around during halftime with a neighborhood kid named Kris whose family had actually escaped from East Germany, and he wore clothes that looked a lot like the ones in this video.

Especially brown with stripes!

Finally, one afternoon, under the pretext of us going to see a movie at the 163rd Street Shopping Center up the street, when it was still an outdoor center, and walked him into the Burdine's that I'd work at a few years later, and introduced him to the classic world of Izod Lacoste.

I explained to him that he wasn't in East Germany anymore and that everyone at JFK Junior High School, regardless of their sex, race, ethnicity, wealth, personality or looks had to have three of these double knit cotton shirts in their closet, since first of all, everyone looked good in them, and secondly, they went so well with accessories, so he needed to have the following colored shirts: white, red, and navy blue.

I further explained that regardless of what the social norms were in his old stomping grounds, American girls could handle different as long as it was on their terms, but strange was a different situation all together.

He'd never be able to be friends with classy and ethereally good-looking girls like Marybeth Irizarry if he persisted in wearing brown shirts with vertical stripes. 

It was just not gonna happen if he's walking around looking like a Gulden's mustard container.

The rest is history. 

De nada Kris from Deutschland!

See also: http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/treasure-trove-on-tcm-today-casablanca.html