It’s been some time now that newspapers have been trying to promote city downtowns, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the Schenectady Union-Star, before it abandoned Schenectady entirely, sponsored a big shopping promotion called “Suburban Day,” which they described as “A united endeavor on the part of the Union-Star and the leading retailers of Schenectady to emphasize the advantages of Schenectady as a Shopping Center to every shopper within reasonable trading radius of Schenectady.”
The story about it in Editor & Publisher was subtitled, “Great Newspaper Shows the Way in Boosting Business and Permanently Benefiting Merchants of the City.” It was a huge deal. They got all the downtown merchants to put on their own promotions, “values that would be instantly recognized by the most indifferent shopper as GENUINE bargains.” There were cash prizes for an essay contest on the unsurprising theme of “Why Schenectady is the Best Shopping Center in Eastern New York.” The newspaper released balloons into the skies with special rewards for their return to certain merchants. There were special sections of the paper and signs on the trolleys.
“Did this campaign produce results? The word results hardly does it justice. Nothing short of an avalanche was produced.”
And when was it that the Union-Star felt it necessary to trumpet the virtues of downtown shopping, to convince people from “more than fifty-five centers of population” to come into the city? One could be forgiven for surmising it was from the start of the decline, sometime in the 1960s, when much of the populace had moved out of the city, the stores were collapsing, and the newspaper itself was about to head off to Albany to be subsumed into the Knickerbocker News.
But in fact, Suburban Day was June 23, 1921.