Welcome to 81 Main Street!
Rather than lump this location with others on lower Main Street, I am giving this building its own page due to the images brought forth and a narrative that hopefully you‘ll find interesting. Most likely this will happen with other spots in the Main Street, East New London area as this website continues to expand.
81 Main Street stood at the south corner with John Street, today a short stretch of Atlantic Street that takes you into the Water Street Parking Garage. In early March, 1959, it looked like this:
Credit goes to The Day for having taken this picture and not discarded the negative from which this scanned image was produced through the efforts of Ben Panciera and Bailey Rodgers at the Lear Center for Special Collections at Connecticut College. They have helped me with other images from The Day that will appear elsewhere on this website.
From 1942 to 1951 Sears ran a mail order house in the store front of 81 Main Street. Rather than ordering by mail, you placed your order in person, having any questions immediately answered by knowledgeable staff.
This half-page display ad appeared in The Day on January 14, 1949.
This sales associates want ad appeared in The Day on March 9, 1951. While leaving 81 Main later that summer, it would not be until the mid-fifties when Sears would become an anchor store for the future New London Shopping Center, built for driving convenience along then U.S. Route 1, today’s I-95. For drivers of big cars, tired of street parking, the sea of asphalt must have been appealing.
Apologies to Joni Mitchell…
In September of 1951, Bob Sudlow and Alex Hughes opened up a hobby and craft store called Bob-Al- Link Hobby and Card Shop.
This display ad in The Day appeared September 27, 1951.
A Christmas-time ad later appeared on December 20th.
Later, in ˋ52, this ad appeared in The Day. The Railroad Contest was most likely a drawing, first prize being a Penn Line HO scale model of a Pennsylvania R.R. K-4 Pacific steam locomotive. (Penn Line was a garage business formed in 1947 by 3 model railroaders who saw a market for better detailed HO locomotives and rolling stock.)
credit TCAwestern.org
The bottom fell out in late ´53 for reasons yet to be discovered. For many children, and some adults, there was one less bright light that holiday season along Main Street, New London.
Who got the Buick 4 door sedan?
The following year, in 1954, Irving Lowenthal opened Central TV and Appliance. Over the next three years, he did so well that he planned a move to… you guessed it! That just opening New London Shopping Center. While the name may seem banal to us today, in the mid-fifties, other than Groton, there were no other shopping centers… and the word ˋmall´ for most people, was still decades away.
Courtesy The Day, April 26, 1957.
The article on the right appeared in The Day February 9, 1959 and pretty well sums up what happened next.
