Category — Leonard Pierce

All large cities feature that staple of stand-up comedy, the retail storefront which seems to change hands every few weeks, and our own is no exception. The left-center unit of the Pioneer Square strip mall, currently S.E. Huang’s Kenpo-Karaterie, was a Spanish-language tax preparation service catering to the South Street area’s large Ecuadorian population as recently as last November- and, in the summer of 2006, it was a boutique specializing in salsa-related merchandise. Lot 47 in the Galleria at Woldman Heights is particularly infamous in this regard; in the last three years alone, it has been a Wittman’s, a Sunglass Hut, a Gap for Seniors, a Dobbins Farm Dairy outlet store, and a shop where one could commission tailor-made potato chip varieties.

Perhaps more curious, however, is the diametric opposite of this phenomenon: the retail store that has remained exactly the same, regardless of market forces or consumer trends, defying all known rules of shopping for astonishing periods of time. There is no more stubborn an example in the city than that of Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service, which has occupied the same spot at 2704 West 31st Avenue since 1911.

Located on the ground floor of what was once a necktie factory but was converted into budget apartments in the early 1940s, Gillard’s has weathered the changing of its neighborhood from industrial to commercial to residential and from nearly uninhabited to fashionably hip to working-class. It has seen its nearest neighbor change from a chemical plant specializing in dry cleaning agents to a middle school to the city’s only cricket grounds to, currently, an Estonian Orthodox Church. When it opened for business in February 1911, William Howard Taft was president, the neighborhood – now Furleigh Park – was known as Badgerton, the Chicago Cubs were a mere three years from their last World Series win, and the founding of the IBM Corporation (as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation of New York City) was a good four months away.

IBM, of course, would play a rather large role in the fortunes of Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service – with the introduction of the IBM Selectric in 1961 came their greatest period of success, a twenty-year span during which they made so much money repairing and supplying downtown businesses with electric typewriters that they were able to advertise for the first and only time in their history. Anyone who was a regular radio listener in the late 1960s and mid-1970s remembers the “Gillard’s gets it done” jingle, accompanied by a harpsichord and sung in an unidentifiable accent. Just as difficult to pin down was how, exactly, Gillard’s stayed in business the fifty years prior to the invention of the Selectric; the number of electric typewriters in the entire city prior to the mid-fifties could not have exceeded a few hundred, and Gillard’s opened its doors only two years after the invention of the Krum Machine, a teletype device, at which time the electric typewriter was scarcely known outside of a few industrial development laboratories.

There has been even more curiosity about how Gillard’s has remained in business after the widespread popularity of word processors and personal computers has relegated the typewriter to the status of the buggy whip. In 2005, the New Press (the city’s leading alternative weekly prior to its purchase earlier this year by a west coast conglomerate which converted it to a coupon book) launched an investigation into the baffling persistence of Gillard’s; they discovered the shop had a 99-year lease on its current location, but yielded very little information about its ownership, learning only that it was registered as a holding of the Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service Corporation, traceable to a post office box at the Willow Avenue postal station. The only regular employees are a Slovakian immigrant couple and their teenage son, none of whom appear to speak English and who spend most of their work day playing preferans, and the walls are lined with only a few electric typewriters and a large number of nesting dolls. Gillard’s has not advertised since 1979, its tax records indicate that it has been a money-losing operation for at least three decades of its existence, and on top of everything else, it is only open Monday through Thursday from 11AM until 2:30PM. Still, Harvey Preakston, who writes the for-amusement-only “I Make the Odds” column in the News, gives better chances to the Cubs winning a World Series by 2010 than of Gillard’s closing its doors.
- L. Pierce

Hello, everyone. Due to the upcoming holiday week, posting will be rather light. So, we leave you with a holiday-oriented Friday Facts and hope that all of you have a relaxing and happy holiday, with your friends and family.

:: The most recent volume of the city’s telephone directory features a Santos Klaussen, a Szandor Klausz, and a Mary O. Sannicola.

:: The city is home to three regionally produced egg nogs. The best-selling is that produced by Dobbins Farm Dairy, but the ‘micro-brewed’ GregNog (manufactured by radio personality Greg McMullen) was named the best nog three years in a row by Dairy Fare magazine.

:: Each year since 1958, editorial cartoonist Jack Belinsky has hidden the names of all eight of Santa’s reindeer in the art of comics he has drawn during December — except three years ago, when he inexplicably replaced “Blitzen” with “Buford” in a cartoon about SARS.

:: Due to poor planning, a runoff election for mayor in 1976 was scheduled for Christmas Eve, and resulted in the lowest voter turnout in civic history.

:: In 1985, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was belatedly chosen as the city’s “official” Christmas song. Only Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet and Pete Briquette of the Boomtown Rats were able to attend the ceremony.

:: Lanes are the most popular type of thoroughfare on the city’s east side, followed closely by streets and avenues. Boulevards, circles and ways are next; the entire area features only three terraces, and not a single row.

:: The International Jedi Ministry has recently announced a campaign to make ours the first large American city to officially recognize Life Day as a municipal holiday.

:: Number of lawsuits generated by WAIC Radio’s infamous 1983 “Christmas is Cancelled” stunt broadcast: 328

:: Citizens donated 850 fruitcakes to a holiday fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Two-thirds of them are reported by FEMA auditors as still uneaten.

:: One of the few musicians from the city to ever score a national hit was Henry ‘Hot-Rods’ Phelan, who hit the Top 40 in December of 1964 with his novelty number “We’ll Be Rocking in My Stocking Tonight.”

:: Number of people who jumped from the 86th street bridge in 2006: 14

:: Number in December: 9

:: Number successfully talked down by suicide counselors dressed as Santa: 4

:: Unsuccessful: 1
- L. Pierce, M. Vermeulen, R. White

As Christmastime approaches, the face of the city tends to drop its often-cynical sneer and begins to sport a smile. The smiles on the faces of innocent children; the smiles on the faces of far-from-innocent retailers; the smiles on the faces of bartenders at the sight of the frowns on the faces of their customers — all are common sights the minute the Thanksgiving leftovers get wrapped in aluminum foil. Those visiting relatives or just making an unplanned tourist stop (as did thousands of air travelers during the Blizzard of ‘89) might wish to take their smiles to one of the holiday celebrations unique to the area.

The Santa’s Village in Monument Plaza — sponsored by real estate maven Lucas Hrosbek and his family since 1931 — is always a draw, with its uncanny recreation of St. Nicholas’ North Pole workshop growing more elaborate each year. Originally a small lot containing the grand old man of Christmas on a candy-cane throne and a small set of workbenches where his elves constructed wooden dolls, as the Hrosbek fortune has grown, so has the Village. Now occupying nearly two city blocks, it now features a 36-stall reindeer pen, living quarters and a cafeteria for the Claus family and its diminutive employees, an actual functioning toy factory, and, in one of the less popular features, climate control technology that replicates weather conditions at the North Pole. The original ‘elves’ were brought back every year — many of them residents of Gulliver Lane in Samson Heights, which almost competed with the Monument Plaza attraction when its industrial utility disappeared — but the last of them passed on in 1991 (his funeral at St. Herbert of Derwentwater’s was attended by dozens of local luminaries who remembered visiting him as children); with a limited number of roles to be filled and the city’s little-person population increasing annually, competition can be quite fierce, and callow local teens from nearby Kissinger High often show up during the pre-Thanksgiving casting calls to watch what have become known as “elf brawls.”

The annual Christmas Game played by the Mighty Elms minor-league baseball franchise is truly unique. Enjoyed — insofar as one can enjoy a baseball game played in an outdoor stadium in late December — by fans since 1958, the Christmas Game features Woldward Park Woodsmen decked out in special red-and-green home uniforms and sporting jingle bells on their cleats, which, although they add a festive air to the proceedings, tend to cut down on steals. Since the baseball season is long over in December, there are no regular games, and hence opponents, to play; the Mighty Elms are pitted against teams made up of amateurs culled from the ranks of companies run by friends of owner Walter K. Wilton. Curiously, the semi-pro franchise has accumulated only a 25-22 record in these meetings despite the level of competition.

Finally, an interfaithfully good time can always had at Temple Shalom Beth-Israel’s annual and inexplicable “A Very Jewish Christmas” pageant, the city’s leading tourist draw for fans of ironic air-quotes.
- L. Pierce