In Memory of Shoppers’ World

“No, do it like this. Damnit, Susan! You’re a woman! You’re supposed to know how to use these things!”

Indulge me in something personal here.

I grew up near the Golden Triangle, slightly west of Boston, along the Route 9 corridor in the meaty part of Framingham and Natick. It’s one of the largest shopping areas in New England, a simple factoid one can recall but doesn’t often come into consciousness when it’s your everyday environment. It seemed like I went there every Saturday in those formidable years where memory isn’t so reliable; recollection is up for meager debate. But, to me, it certainly felt like every Saturday.

That “every Saturday” protocol became almost “every day” when I started actually working in the thick of it, at the Sam Goody (“Goody got it!”) in the Natick Mall, back when Sam Goody’s existed, and well before the mall metamorphosed with its overwhelming but high-end revamped experience. But even before that era, there were plenty of haunts in the area for me: tiny Harry’s Restaurant (still standing!), with its clam mascot, the Wonder Bread factory with its nuclear blast of free smells within its two mile radius, Joan and Ed’s Deli, that one small movie theater in the Sherwood South plaza, and probably the crowning jewel of my grade- and middle-school boyhood parent-less outings: Fun and Games.

Later on, in the restless teenage years, there was Newbury Comics, but the version of it where they only sold CDs, comics, and weed stickers, instead of silly Funko Pop figurines, manga collections, and a thousand weed stickers. There was that one Strawberry’s with the second floor and the touchscreen kiosk where I heard Death’s Human for the first time, and then the house-shaped independent bookstore where I found a copy of Mind Fields and copied one of the stories for a speech project, right there in the store, so I wouldn’t have to buy the thing.

The greatest of them all, however, was Shoppers’ World; but that, too, was bulldozed into a past memory. The huge concrete pedestrian ramps that I liked to run up and down are gone; the Papa Gino’s, where just outside and over the balcony I barfed after picking my sister’s boyfriend’s nose, has shut down; the Toys ‘R’ Us, where I ignored every aisle except the one with all the Commodore 64 software titles, moved buildings. I ended up at Shoppers’ World a few times in the early 1990s, when it really was on the decline, to visit some New Age trinket store with a girlfriend. The grandest of all of the experiences might be the Cinema at Shoppers’ World, the interior of which is pictured at the top of this post, though the photo was probably taken well before my time at some point in the early 1970s. It was “the” cinema to go to when you really wanted the experience—a much better option than the tiny dumpy quaint theater in my actual hometown. The Cinema goes down in history as the place where I finally got to play Tempest, after hearing my sister talk it up for a few days.

Shopper’s World (now a singular possessive noun) has changed drastically since its revamp in 1995, so the original double-decker, open air structure design has been replaced with a boring shopping plaza plan. There’s a Toys ‘R’ Us there, but no cool curved hallway leading to the back, mall-facing entrance. There’s a movie theater, but it’s a gargantuan, upscale affair—alluring, but not the same. Probably no Tempest, either. At least there’s a nice Barnes & Noble still standing to draw me in at the next visit.

View some video footage of Shoppers’ World, especially at the 22:16 mark.