CALDOR, Flushing

by Kevin Walsh

Here’s a view of the Long Island Rail Road tracks from the elevated Flushing Main Street station looking east in 2009. Note the pair of Caldor signs: the company had gone nearly bankrupt and closed its 160 retail stores and laid off nearly 24,000 employees in 1999, but it’s a testimony to how slow real estate deals can sometimes move in that the old Caldor location on Main Street, which wrapped around to Roosevelt Avenue, lay empty for several years. An Asian-owned department store, New World Mall, now occupies the space.

4 comments

jerry October 23, 2014 - 8:09 pm

Will always be Gertz to me. Memories of being brought kicking and screaming by mom to buy new clothes……

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Fred Mayer October 25, 2014 - 7:45 am

I fell down on the Gertz escalator. The Gertz nurse (Yes, they had one on staff) patched up my rump from cuts caused by the stair comb at he bottom. I was around 5 or 6.

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Bill October 27, 2014 - 10:07 am

That Caldor logo is not that great, but it’s a lot better than an older one of theirs, which I’d forgotten about until a few days ago when I saw an abandoned trailer parked near the Hackensack in Jersey City with the older 70s (?) logo still on it. Man was that ugly!

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simon November 3, 2014 - 8:13 pm

I remember it as alexanders. It was still quite a cosmopolitan area through the mid 80s , up until rampant asian immigration destroyed flushings character, giving way to the building junk we see there today. With the t-amo smoke shop / luncheonette , the wiz , burger king , and barnes and noble / egghead rounding out the south block.

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