The Bargain Center

 

It's Friday but I am not going to post about food. The photo above appeared in my Facebook feed today and it unleashed a torrent of memories. This photo is of the opening day of The Bargain Center in 1937. 

Even people who have never been to Boston know about the wonders of  Filene's Basement, no, not the one that appeared in malls during the 1990's but the original Basement in the basement of Filene's on Washington Street in Boston.

The Bargain Center was the Quincy version of excellent bargain hunting. You just never knew what you might find there. New England was a manufacturing center and the Bargain Center scoured the factories to buy unsold products.

 My father often used to stop by after his morning swim at the YMCA a couple of blocks away. Once my father brought home a beautiful hand-beaded evening bag for my mother. 

similar to this one. It was exactly right for my mother. It was classic, elegant, and not too flashy. It was classic enough that she used this bag from the time it was purchased in the late 1950s and for every elegant event that required an evening bag until she died. 

Unlike Filene's basement which had an automatic price reduction policy and after several weeks the goods would be donated to charity The Bargain Center never got rid of anything. When midi-skirts came into style in the early 1970s they brought a load of long skirts from the 1950s out to the selling floor.

In the 1970s you could still purchase cotton bullet bras on the second floor. A skirt or blouse I had rejected a couple of years before might still be on the racks and perhaps this year I might decide that it looked great on me. 

The sold bolts and bolts of fabric. My mother used to walk through the fabric section fingering bolt after bolt. "This is good", she would tell me, " This is bad".

On the other side of the fabric department was the hosiery department. My mother bought herself good stocking for a song. She bought my older sister dozens of pairs of pearl-colored stockings with the Dior logo knitted into the ankle. 

You just never knew what you might find there, like Austrian Loden jackets for children. My mother wanted me to buy one but it was too itchy for me to bear. I did buy a pair of pink denim bell-bottoms on the same day. I was six and they were the height of style. A few years later I bought a pair of corduroy bellbottoms in a tapestry print there. 

When I was in high school and wearing men's jeans was the rage I got mine there. I bought the Carhart carpenter's pants that I wore in college there.

You needed to walk in with an open mind because you never knew what would be there. I learned to figure out how to make vintage clothing ( OK it was just old stock) work for today there at the Bargain Center. I learned to look beyond a label at the actual object and see if it had real value or not.

The artbooks I grew up with were found on a table there in the 1960s. 

Like many parts of my childhood, The Bargain Center is no more. I see the ugly sign on the photo below and am filled with happy memories.