Shopping in Downtown Jacksonville in the 1950s and 1960s

My family, minus my father who died in California a couple months before, arrived in Jacksonville in the summer of 1954.  Mom bought a house -- first house she had lived in that wasn't rented since she left her family home in Pensacola, a new Navy bride, in 1937.  The house was on the southside, just around the corner from my grandma and aunt in the neighborhood known as Colonial Manor.  I was 7 years old.

Jacksonville's downtown at the time was a collection of buildings from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  Cohen Brothers, the toniest department store at the time, was in the St. James Building, an elaborate structure taking up one city block.  The building was one of the most magnificent in town after the Great Fire of 1901.  It opened in 1912, and was designed by Henry John Klutho, a young architect schooled in the designs of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who had come to Jacksonville for the architectural opportunities created by that devastating fire.

Another upscale department store in downtown Jacksonville was Furchgott's, begun by three brothers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1866.  The Jacksonville Furchgott's Department Store was established in 1869.  The more middle-class Sears, Roebuck company opened a large store in downtown Jacksonville in 1959, one of the first new buildings in the city in many years, an attractive modern design.  Another middle-class department store, J. C. Penney, also had a location in downtown Jacksonville, facing the west side of what was then known as Hemming Park, the central square of the city and hub for the city's buses.

In one way or another, at one time or another, I shopped at all of these stores. In the 1950s, I would be taken on shopping trips to these stores by my mother or my aunt, who helped raise me.

When I was in the 10th grade in high school, I was allowed to go shopping downtown by myself, usually for a back-to-school selection of a few clothes.  Mom would give me her credit card with a hard-and-fast limit on beyond which I dared not spend.

One blustery, freezing January Saturday morning, my best friend Ellen and I went downtown to shop.  We were waiting outside Cohen Brothers for the store to open.  Apparently the management took pity on us and on two or three other shoppers waiting in that cold, cold air.  An employee came to the door and unlocked it and let us in several minutes before the store opened.  She locked the door, and we waited right there in the warmth, in an area that had been roped-off.  At opening time, the employee came and opened the roped-off area, to the blaring over the loud-speaker of the trumpet fanfare "Post Time," that little riff played at horse races as the race begins.  Ellen and I looked at each other, read each other's minds, and we hollered out, in unison, "Chaaaaaarrge it!" to the laughter of the employee and everyone else who heard us.  That was a fun day.

 

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