The Caldor Rainbow-Hartford Courant Story

[XISMZERO]

Well folks, here it is. Chris and I are mentioned and detailed in a Monday February 18, 2008 article in the Life section of the Hartford Courant.

Chris, you've been mentioned in the article as well...

The print version is a bit more flashy, but the online one has a video segment.

Enjoy!

[greg8370]

congrats on the article!

[C. Fontaine]

This is truly a great day for dead retail devotee's.  

Nick, is there any way you can grab two paper copies for myself?  I can give you the $ for the papers and postage!

[NJxxJon]

Now we need our site plugged!

[dmx10101]

awesome article, I emailed it to my parents in FLA to read.

[greg8370]

getting some pretty interesting stories under the "comments" section of the on-line copy of the article.

[C. Fontaine]

Haha I agree, I've also been watching them!

[GothicPrincess]

That's so awesome!!! Congrats, Nick!!!!!! big hugs

[amesman]

Congratulations to you both, Chris and Nick. I also liked the mention of www.deadmalls.com in the article. Since I now help out with site updates and web production for the site, it makes it feel even more rewarding. :) Congrats to you both again!

[C. Fontaine]

No thank you Amesman, and everyone here.  It couldn't have been done without you all and the base you have all created!

[C. Fontaine]

Here is something I didn't expect!  The widow of one of Ames's founders, Herbert Gilman, contacted the author of the article, and she subsequently forwarded it.  Evelyn Gilman knows her husband would be so happy to know they have not been forgotten!

[jmcnamara96]

sice it isnt avabile any more any one have a full copy?

[C. Fontaine]

Ah, the heyday of this site.

I'm posting a hard copy of this article from the wayback machine to forever immortalize it on the board.

By DANIELA ALTIMARI |COURANT STAFF WRITER February 18, 2008

Nicholas DiMaio is obsessed with the past. Not the golden, glorious past of kings and

presidents. Not history with a capital H.

But the recent past. Our past. A past filled with dead malls, abandoned suburban shopping

strips, derelict discounters and other late-20th-century commercial relics.

His holy grail? Caldor, the Connecticut-based retailer that went out of business in 1999.





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Nicholas DiMaioPhoto


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DiMaio, a 22-year-old community college student from Farmington, is part of a tight subculture

of retail history buffs who spend their days charting the rise and fall of malls and discount

chains, from Ames to Zayre.

Like classic-car aficionados or Civil War re-enactors, DiMaio and his ilk are determined to

keep bits of the past alive. Part online support group, part amateur history club, they are

bound by an unshakable yearning for the days before Wal-Mart ruled the earth.

Even now, the sight of that odd, earth-toned rainbow that served as the Caldor logo in the

1970s is enough to get DiMaio's heart racing. It's displayed on his blog,

thecaldorrainbow.blogspot.com, a repository of photos, lists, old ads and other ephemera

related to the ghosts of retail past.

"It's just a hobby of mine," DiMaio says. "Caldor was the store my mom dragged me to as a kid.

It reminds me of my childhood." For his family, and millions of others scattered across 11

states, Caldor was "the everyday discount store," the place you went for a Fisher Price toy, a

cheesy paperback, a Corning Ware casserole dish or a new pair of Dickies.

DiMaio routinely makes pilgrimages to the sites of these former discounters, trusty digital

camera always in hand. Like a birder hot on the trail of the long-lost ivory-billed woodpecker,

he's always on the hunt, tracking down the last remaining Bradlees that hasn't been demolished

or converted into something else (it's in Foxborough, Mass., in case you were wondering), and

checking out a friend's report of a vintage Caldor tractor-trailer parked on Queen Street in

Southington.

DiMaio and other devotees have even been known to comb the lots behind the shuttered buildings

in hopes of finding a scrap of evidence — part of a sign, perhaps, or a battered shopping cart

— to prove that these hollow shells were once thriving marketplaces.

"They are such neat artifacts," DiMaio says of his assorted retail cast-offs. He admits that

his friends think his collection is a little, well ... weird.

They have a point. Like any obsession, this one is hard for outsiders to understand. But

fixating on retail corpses is no more perplexing, really, than any other hobby.

"They simply have a fascination with the idea that chain stores and malls can disappear," said

Emile Pocock, a professor of history and American studies at Eastern Connecticut State

University who has studied the shopping mall as a cultural icon. "They're sort of historic

sites and ruins. Very modern ruins."

W.T. Grant, Zayre, Bradlees, Hills — they all have their groupies. There's the Ames Fan Club, a

loose gathering of folks with an unusual devotion to the defunct Connecticut-based discounter,

and Deadmalls.com, a clearinghouse of information on that most forlorn suburban ruin, the

abandoned shopping mall. Another site, Labelscar.com, is the work of two guys who estimate they

have visited two-thirds of the nation's enclosed malls, both thriving and dormant. And Discount

Stores of the '60s ( www.wtv-zone.com/dpjohnson/60sdiscountstores) is a baby-boomer's online

valentine to "those 65,000- to 110,000-square-foot shrines to inexpensive merchandise for the

masses, with interior walls painted aqua, salmon and dull yellow, [and] huge, gaudy signs in

the midst of the parking lot."

There is a certain wistfulness to their quest. The bones of these retail dinosaurs are quickly

disappearing; just last month, workers began gutting one of the last remaining vacant Caldors

in Connecticut, on New Britain Avenue in the Elmwood section of West Hartford. It will become a

grocery store.

"If you lived in the Northeast [in] the late 20th century ... there's a good chance you've

shopped, remember and possibly miss Caldor," DiMaio writes on his blog. "Our times shopping at

Caldor are ... but cherished memories. ... Even today [at] Wal-Mart, at the New Britain

location, I still see the ghost of a swept-angled, stucco-facade that was once gleaming, its

Plexiglas rainbow goodness, from the perch of Farmington Avenue."

Funny, In A Sad Way

It started, as these things often do, as a joke. It was the summer of 2002. Ames had just

announced it was closing all of its stores and Chris Fontaine, then a 16-year-old high school

student in the small, central Massachusetts town of Dudley, launched the Ames Fan Club.

"The only thing to do was to hang out at the shopping mall," Fontaine says, and his hometown

Ames had always occupied a special place in his heart. Now 21, he lives in Providence and

attends the New England Institute of Technology. He likes Bill O'Reilly, fast food and doesn't

smoke or do drugs, according to his profile on www.amesfanclub.com.

Instead, Fontaine devotes his time to lovingly cataloging everything connected to Ames, the

Rocky Hill-based retailer that, in its heyday, operated 467 stores in 19 states. "I've always

enjoyed collecting and indexing information," he says.

Besides photos and lists, the site has a lively message board; the tone of the postings ranging

from affectionate ("Does anyone remember the lunch counters inside Ames? We had one in

Gouverneur, N.Y. My grandmother always used to takes us there after shopping. The hamburgers

and fries can not be matched at any restaurant today.") to heartbreaking ("We are looking for

Bobby Burton, former Ames Remodel Team Project Manager, as we want to inform him that his son

has graduated college. He has not contacted family in years; if anyone knows his whereabouts

please inform us.").

An overwhelming air of nostalgia hangs over these endeavors, which is puzzling because most of

the guys behind the blogs are in their 20s, hardly the Caldor and Ames demographic. Perhaps it

is an ache for world they experienced only peripherally, as kids dragged by their parents on

shopping expeditions.

"Their whole lives have been steeped in consumer culture," says Pocock, the professor from

Eastern. "These places are part of their personal history but part of a larger history as

well."

It's a history that's fading fast in an age of lifestyle centers and Internet shopping. DiMaio

points to Kmart, which he fears will become the next once-mighty discounter to relocate to that

great strip mall in the sky.

"One who walks into a Kmart these days feel exactly what we felt when we stepped into a

Bradlees — almost 10 years ago," he writes. "Musty odors abound, off-colored fluorescents and

floor tiles, bunkered foam-board ceilings, hive-like ventilation ducts sum up to an overall

distressed, tired environment.

"Who shops here anymore?" DiMaio wonders. "Wal-Mart haters? Those deterred by Target and its

exuberant trends? Certainly, [K Mart] cater to a largely unchanged market ... one that died

with the Caldor, Bradlees, Ames and Woolworth deaths around the millennial turn."

Contact Daniela Altimari at altimari@courant.com