Korvettes

Today, a friend was lamenting that she had to go to the end of the 7 train to have dinner with some friends. Though she grew up in Long Island, she has never been to Main Street!

I spent a bit of time at Main Street as a child because that was where I changed buses to get to school. There was a CVS where we stole candy. And a store that sold jeans, back in the days before Gap was everywhere and jeans were actually not that easy to find - the Army Navy store was the main place to get them. In fact, we didn't call them jeans, we called them dungarees. Now that I'm writing the word dungaree, I can't even imagine that this isn't something from Australia that hops around and looks vaguely familiar yet foreign.

The big thing that was on Main Street, where my Aunt Phyllis shopped, was either Korvettes or Gertz. And honestly I can't actually remember which one it was. Gertz became Sterns at some point and then faded away. Korvettes decline seemed instant and sudden. I am certain that I bought several albums at Korvettes, on sale for really cheap, probably just before they closed. I can picture the round sticker with the price on the plastic wrap.

Ultimately, what this led me to was this Korvettes commercial from the '70s which has a jingle that anybody alive in NY then will remember clearly. And as an added bonus, the first comment under the video is perfection: "Wow, a glimpse into the future, of what a Salvation Army or Goodwill would look like today."