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HAROLD BLUMENTHAL felt a mixture of pride and trepidation in 1956 as he watched thousands of construction workers transform an old airfield into Long Island's first shopping mall, and one of the nation's largest.
Blumenthal spent much of his family's wartime savings to open Harwyn Shoes at the new Roosevelt Field. It was a calculated risk, designed to protect his company's other stores in downtown Hempstead and Freeport, and to capitalize on the new retailing concept, should it take off with consumers.
He was optimistic about Roosevelt Field because Macy's was part of it. He figured the department store chain wouldn't spend millions of dollars to construct its largest suburban location, only to see it fail.
"My dad took a chance . . . he risked it all, believing the mall would be successful," recalled son Robert, who joined the family business in 1954 after college graduation. During its first year the Roosevelt Field store almost bankrupted Harwyn Shoes, and it didn't prosper until the late 1960s, when the mall was enclosed, he said.
In 1956, three open-air malls - Roosevelt Field in Garden City, Green Acres in Valley Stream and Mid-Island Plaza (later renamed Broadway Mall) in Hicksville - opened in the span of three months. They were joined that year by Manhasset's Americana shopping center. Economic historians say never again would there be so many store openings within a 12-month period on Long Island. Said Blumenthal: "It was a whole new adventure. It was total excitement . . . "
Many residents had similar feelings about Mid-Island Plaza, which debuted in October, 1956, on the site of a former boys' orphanage and a dairy and vegetable farm operated by the Catholic Church. (The same week, Green Acres opened on another abandoned airfield.) Richard and Anne Evers, who have lived in Hicksville for 50 years, remember the anticipation of Mid-Island's grand opening. "Shopping as we understood it would never be the same again," said Richard Evers, village historian and a retired teacher. "It was accessible shopping: plenty of parking and many goods to choose from, all in one place."
Mid-Island, along with the other malls, was a novelty to the veterans, their spouses and others who moved to Nassau County after World War II....