Sullivan's Department Store in Liberty & Middletown: Some Picture To Remember Them By

 

Sullivan's was a department store from my old hometown of Liberty, New York. It was a normal department store, such as it was. Yet, for a town like Liberty, which being deep in the heart of the Catskills,  is actually quite far from the greater New York City metropolitan area. Monticello is a comparably large town, and within a ten minute drive. After that, it takes maybe twenty minutes to get to a decent sized city, which would be Middletown. Going the other way, it is more or less remote mountain area, driving through the deep greenery of the Catskills, which is limited in development.

So, for such a relatively isolated region, a department store can be quite important. Sullivan's, thus, became kind of a local icon.

It started as more or less an Surplus store, back in the 1950's. But it must have enjoyed some success, because it expanded, to become an impressive sized department store. In fact, it was apparently so successful, that they decided to build a second one in Middletown. This one was larger, and in the Orange Plaza Mall. 

Some day, I might like to learn a bit more about it, and write more extensively and in a more informed, less sketchy manner about the actual history of the store.

However, I had long been looking for an exterior photo of the Liberty store, and only recently came across one. It is from an advertisement, and it shows what I always took to be more or less the front of the store, as it could be seen when getting off the nearby Route 17 (soon to be Interstate 86) on Exit 100, and more or less in the shadow of the more famous "Borscht Belt" hotel, Grossinger's.

When my brother and I were kids, we were both interested in obtaining a decent music collection via cassette tapes, which seemed to be the leading technology of the day. Together, we had almost the entire collection of Beatles and Rolling Stones albums. Not all of them came from Sullivan's, but I suspect a good deal of them did. Also, I associate one clearance rack album from Journey, in particular, from Sullivan's in Liberty. 

So, here is another blog entry dedicated to Sullivan's. This one has more of an emphasis on Liberty, because having lived in Liberty, and having had some family there, it is this store that I was most familiar with, and which we visited most frequently. I remember going to the one in Middletown, probably around 1985 or 1986. I remember Michael Jackson came on, and the radio dj's were talking about how phenomenally popular he had been not too long before. I got myself a bit prize: the Galvatron figure, the character who replaced Megatron as the Decepticon leader. 

Much later on, I would start to shop at Sullivan's in Liberty, obtaining Gobots from the clearance racks, and a Terry Bradshaw book. This book I remember, because I still have it, with the Sullivan's price tag still stuck on there. 

Here I mention the specifics, because it helps me to recall the store, and evoke the pleasant memories of it that I still have. In fairness, I have spoken to some former employee's, and the reviews were more or less mixed, with some saying it was a good place to work (especially the one in Middletown, as many have fond memories of the cafeteria there), while others say that it was not a pleasant place to work.

No way for me to be sure how I would have viewed it, because I never worked there. Was not living in Liberty at any point past the eighties, although I thought about it briefly. But the store closed by the early to mid-nineties, and any opportunity, if you want to call it that, was lost.

In any case, here are some pictures to remember Liberty by:

Here is my former blog entry about Sullivan's, which was titled "Oh, Yeah! Sullivan’s Got It All! Sullivan's Commercial From the 1980's" and was published on July 26, 2020:

When my family moved here from France, we initially spent a year living in Liberty, New York, where my grandparents lived. Even after we moved out, and to Lodi, New Jersey, and eventually to West Milford, we still visited Liberty fairly regularly.  

And when you grow up in a town like that, you will usually have some fond memories of something or other. So it was with Liberty and the surrounding area, which has an interesting mixture of pleasant, even beautiful things, mixed with depressing things. It is stunning countryside and natural beauty, but the region is upstate New York, which is infamous for having very depressing towns.  

Be that as it may, most of my memories from childhood of Liberty were pleasant. It sometimes felt a little bit like it was stuck in the past, as there were everywhere reminders of bygone days and ages. The whole town kind of felt like that, truth be told. If Liberty and the surrounding region in Sullivan County had something that could pass as glory days, than it has been in the decades before my childhood, when there had been the so-called “Borscht Belt” and when there were famous entertainers who regularly performed at these hotels. Some famous boxers also trained in the region, including Muhammad Ali (and later Mike Tyson). And, of course, the most legendary three-day concert event in rock history, Woodstock, happened in Sullivan County, maybe twenty minutes of so drive from Liberty.  

However, by the time I was growing up in the eighties, and growing familiar, all of that was well behind the region. It was all in the past, and there were already clear indications that the region was beginning to fall on hard times. It would be a long and painful fall from grace, with one formerly prestigious “Borscht Belt” hotels after another closing it’s doors, and with more and more boarded up shops lining the downtown areas of towns in the region like weeds impossible to root out.  

Yet, I was largely blissfully aware of all of this. Liberty seemed to be a pleasant town, with an abundance of greenery and lakes and such, as it was blessed with an obvious natural beauty. Even when we moved out, I always enjoyed return trips to Liberty for weekends or sometimes for a week or two during summer vacation. My brother and I had our own rooms, and my grandparents also had cable (mostly due to the lack of good reception locally). All of that made trips there often quite the treat, on top of visiting the family, and a place where we had some mostly pleasant memories from earlier in childhood.  

One of the things that reminds me of those early days and pleasant memories was a store that long ago also closed it’s doors. It was called Sullivan’s, after the county name, even though there was a second one in Middletown, which is in Orange County. In retrospect, it may not have been a great store, as I recall it tended to be a bit pricey. Yet, it was one of the few big stores in Liberty (Middletown had numerous malls, and thus plenty of big stores), so it was hardly a place with stiff competition to keep prices low. 

I liked Sullivan’s. I liked the fact that it was a store that people near me, in New Jersey, had never even heard of, but which I knew and shopped at occasionally. I remember my brother and I getting cassette tapes there (Journey albums always seemed to be on the discount racks). Later, I associated Sullivan’s with toys, particularly Transformers and Gobots, specifically. Near the end of the days when Sullivan’s was closing, they still had some leftover Gobots, by this time with clearance prices, as they were years outdated. I also got a book by Terry Bradshaw, the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, which I had hung onto, and which still actually has the Sullivan’s price tag on it.  

At the time, I did not know that Sullivan’s was soon to close it’s doors. Had I known, I think I might have tried to do some things a little bit differently. Maybe I would have bought some small things, mostly as memories (although I am glad to have that Bradshaw book, which reminds me more of Sullivan’s than of Bradshaw himself, admittedly). What I wished for a long time, though, is that I had taken pictures of the actual store in Liberty itself, and gotten a recording of the commercial that I used to hear on the radio, for whatever station my grandparents were listening to when it came on. There are some pictures online of the Middletown store, and I was pleased to see them, and took pictures of the pictures. But I never did get pictures of the Liberty store, and wish that I had.  

However, there is one thing that I recently ran into, which kind of helps with other memories of the store. I ran into the commercial, and the song that Sullivan’s used to play in their advertisements. It had likely been over three decades since I had actually last heard that tune, and it brought back memories. Surely, it will bring back some memories to family members who will read this, and presumably watch the video, with that little jingle.  

So it felt appropriate to share some pictures, many of which I had shared before, as well as the video of the Sullivan’s commercial. I was very glad to have run into this, and am also happy to be able to share it here. The video is nothing special, just the Sullivan's store logo. But it is the song, the entire song, which I am not entirely sure that I had heard before. And the last verse, I believe, was the one that the commercials kept repeating. The video is available down below.

I happened to run into that video clip maybe a couple of weekends ago, or so. It had literally been probably at least three decades since the last time that I had heard it. Instantly, I felt transported back to a different time and place. Perhaps Liberty, but the tune in those commercials was something I must have heard repeatedly on the local radio stations that my grandparents, particularly my grandmother, used to listen to, also over and over. And Sullivan's itself was kind of a local institution.

There is a link to an article that I found also, which argues that Sullivan's was more than just a store. Maybe it was. To be sure, it was a store, of course. But it seemed that in the places where I ran into memories of it, such as the original video of the Sullivan's commercial, and on the Orange Plaza appreciation page on Facebook (the other Sullivan's store that existed, the one that was not in Liberty, was in Middletown's Orange Plaza Mall, until that closed it's doors in 1992), it did indeed seem to spark some strong memories for many people.

So it seems that maybe Sullivan's was indeed more than a store. It seems to have been memories, as well. For me and many others. For me, perhaps the strongest memory was not even being in the store, but just outside of it. No idea any longer how old I was at the time, but we had just driven there, and my grandfather got out of the car, and then pulled the seat so that I could get out. Pretty sure it was summertime, but it might not have been. There are other memories, as well. Looking at cassette tapes, particularly for the Beatles and/or the Stones. And toys, which I continued to collect as a teenager. As mentioned earlier, in the early nineties, it seemed that Sullivan's may have been the last store to still have Gobots, on the clearance racks, and so I obtained some back then.

Many other people seem to have memories of the place, as well. On the Orange Plaza page mentioned earlier, I read quite a few comments from people who used to work there, and many others who frequented the place. They talked about the restaurant inside, which I barely remember. Apparently, it was good. On the other hand, it seemed that working at Sullivan's was not such a pleasant experience, at least for some. Not sure why, because most of the people who said that just left it at that. I myself used to work at a department store that is now defunct - Steinbach. It was for minimum wage, and most of it consisted of trying to look busy, folding clothes and sorting through the display tables. Perhaps picking up garments that people had thrown carelessly aside. Putting up signs for an upcoming sale. Often standing around at the cash register when the place was empty. So, I can kind of imagine what working at Sullivan's might have been like, and why some were less than thrilled by the experience of it.

Still, given the significance of the memories that this store conjures up for people to this day, it seemed appropriate to me to dedicate a blog page to those memories. So, I am including numerous pictures, including the logo, some bags, and the Terry Bradshaw book that I obtained, and which still had the price sticker on it with the Sullivan's logo. Also, some pictures that can be found on the web of the store in Middletown. If you have memories of the place that you remember fondly, then maybe this triggers some of those pleasant memories. Enjoy!

Sullivan's Was More Than a Store by Barry Lewis for The Times Herald-Record, January 25, 2001 (updated December 15, 2010):

http://www.recordonline.com/article/20010125/news/301259980

The Sullivan's store at Orange Plaza Mall in Middletown,  New York

Sullivan's even sold their own brand name shirts. 

Original newspaper add showing the Grand Opening of the then new Sullivan's Department Store in Liberty, New York. Image taken from  Catskill Mountain news., November 21, 1958, Page 9, Image 9:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83031247/1958-11-21/ed-1/seq-9/

From that same page was the closest thing that I could find to an actual picture of the Sullivan's Department Store in Liberty, New York. This is an artist's rendering of it, and it kind of looked like the building as I remember it, with some relatively minor differences. I remember it being a bit taller than this in the back, where the people couple with the child are walking away from, and towards the main entrance. There was the name of the store, simply "SULLIVAN'S" in big, red letters on the top of it, as well. And at least by the time that I got familiar with the store, I think that they had changed the name of "Sullivan's Surplus Sales" to "Sullivan's Department Store," or "Sullivan's" for short. It seemed worth including the image, so here it is:

Sullivan's store name is, of course, a reference to the fact that the store (in Liberty, the original of the two stores) was located in Sullivan County, New York:

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