When downtown retail was king

Retail is rebounding in downtown Birmingham. However, as baby boomers and their parents will testify, it will be difficult to bring back the throngs of people who did their Christmas shopping downtown in the decades after World War II.

In the 1940s, 1950s and even 1960s, downtown Birmingham was the region’s center of social and commercial life.

Two large department stores, Loveman’s and Pizitz, anchored the district. They were joined by numerous other department stores and specialty retailers that included Parisian, Blach’s and Burger-Phillips.

There were large “five and dimes” — back when things actually cost 10 cents — including Woolworth’s and Newberry’s. 

Downtown even had a Christmas Carnival parade in the 1930s and 1940s and another Christmas parade for three years in the late 1960s. The large retailers went all out with lush holiday decorations in their windows and on their retail floors.

Pizitz, for example, was known for its lavish “Enchanted Forest” display on the sixth floor featuring Santa and his elves.

But after WWII, Americans fell in love with the automobile and the new highways that opened the vast suburbs. Shopping eventually followed them as malls became dominant.

The trend began in Birmingham with the opening of the Roebuck Plaza Shopping Center in 1957 and Eastwood Mall — the first covered mall in the South — in 1960. In addition, chains and big-box stores offered crippling competition for the small, local retailers that served as downtown’s backbone, alongside steady decreases in the city’s population.  

By the 1970s, the decline of downtown retail was evident as even more malls opened — Century Plaza near Eastwood Mall in 1975 and Brookwood Village in 1974. By the end of the 1980s, virtually all of the large downtown stores had closed, including Pizitz, which had been bought by McRae’s, and Loveman’s. Parisian’s — later bought out by Belk’s — continued to operate other locations but closed its downtown flagship store in 1989.

But downtown slowly turned things around, setting the stage for its recent comeback.

Birmingham’s City Center, like others around the country, is seeing a renaissance driven largely by a romance with the vitality and convenience of urban living shared by many Millennials and Gen Xers and even some Baby Boomers, especially empty nesters.

Commute-free shopping seems to be the final piece needed to satisfy this new downtown generation.

No one is predicting the return of the big department stores of Birmingham’s past, but downtown retail seems to have woken up again.