Friday Morning at the Junction and Downtown Brooklyn: More Black Friday Shopping at Triangle Junction, Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center

After getting off the B41 bus from our Kings Plaza Black Friday expedition, we went to Starbucks on Hillel Place, where our venti black iced tea was waiting for us by the time we reached the register. Then we stopped off at the Triangle Junction Mall's Target and new AJ Wright stores before heading home.

It did seem more crowded at the Junction's Target than it did Black Friday last year, but as in Kings Plaza, nobody was in a frenzy.

Again, lots of people seemed to be buying stuff, but it was clear that a good proportion of them were there for specific items they'd seen as specials.

And some people looked as if they were doing their regular grocery shopping placidly amid the holiday sales, like this young man picking out some gourmet coffee.

At the AJ Wright store, which took over the space vacated by the bankrupt Circuit City, things were about the same. We were ready to go back home to Williamsburg so we got on the 5 train to Atlantic Avenue, where we get out and change for the G train at Fulton Street by Lafayette, but first we checked the Atlantic Terminal shopping.

The Target here was more jam-packed the Target at the Junction, but it usually draws a bigger crowd. We've heard that this Target is one of the most profitable in the whole chain.

It was like the subway at rush hour when we attempted to leave the store via the bridge over Fort Greene Place to get to the Atlantic Center sister mall of the Atlantic Terminal.

There we found truly large crowds at all the big-box national and regional chains.

It was a little too much for us, and longing for the open air, we didn't stay long.

On our way to the G train back to Williamsburg, we figured we saved a ton of money on this Black Friday at three Brooklyn shopping malls. That's because we didn't buy a single item. Let's hope, for the sake of the U.S. economy, there are fewer penny-pinchers like us.

Friday Morning in Mill Basin: Black Friday Sales at the Kings Plaza Shopping Center

We left Williamsburg before dawn and when we arrived around 7:45 a.m. at the Kings Plaza Shopping Center, the mall was crowded with Black Friday shoppers eagerly snapping up doorbusters and other bargain sales.

We have nothing to compare it with, but it appeared that a lot of Brooklynites were spending a lot of money on a lot of items at Macy's, Sears, H&M, Old Navy and the other stores.

Having no idea what this means for the economic future - is the Great Recession finally ending? - we did notice that the shoppers seemed deliberate and determined but not frenzied, and everyone appeared to be pretty much in a good mood.

All of this, like most Black Friday reporting, is of course merely anecdotal. The sales figures which will reported eventually will tell the story. Black Friday store reporting almost always seems to exaggerate the size of the day's cash register take and the intensity of the bargain hunters.

We don't go to Kings Plaza several times a week, as we did in the years after it first opened in September 1970, when we were 18 and our father owned a store here. In Summer in Brooklyn, a book which records our diary entries from the period 1969-1975, we seem to have spent more time in this indoor mall - New York City's first - than anywhere but the house, four blocks from here, where our family lived, and the campus of Brooklyn College, where we were a student.

Anyway, no longer a regular in this mall, we don't know how to compare today's crowds to, say, a "typical" busy Saturday of shopping. Of course, on a normal day, no stores are open before 8 a.m. and only elderly mall-walkers may be present. When we worked in the menswear department of the late and generally unlamented Alexander's, we got on the floor at 9:45 a.m. for a 10 a.m. opening that was standard in 1974. Before we hit 25, the only reason we'd ever take public transportation at 6:20 a.m. as we did today was a notice to appear at our draft physical at Fort Hamilton. (And Uncle Sam would reimburse us the 35-cent fare.)

The first worker we spotted inside the mall when we walked in was the Salvation Army lady and her homophobic kettle. Much later we'd see a group of them setting up at the Atlantic Center. Today's their first day of work for the season. Today that annoying bell went, thankfully, unheard in the general din.

We took a pic of us being monitored by the Kings Plaza security office. Hey, guys, maybe you could have had this in the 1970s when our brother Marc's Camaro got stolen out of your parking lot? (Of course, our '73 Mercury Comet got stolen from in front of our house on East 56th Street.)

One of the first things shoppers come across when they come in the main entrance on Flatbush just north of Avenue U is the bank of ATMs from Chase, formerly Washington Mutual, formerly Dime Savings Bank of New York, formerly Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn, where we had a little blue passbook with never more than $200 in it back in the day when we made $2 an hour at Alexander's (take home for 20 hours a week was about $32). Anyway, better get out that cash first, kids, and skip the credit cards that got us all into this fine mess.

To those "first time visitors," as StatCounter refers to you, we humbly but insincerely apologize in advance for the blurriness of the crappy cell phone pics we've made our ouevre.

Lots of folks were carrying these big, puffy bags from Macy's. We suspect their bulk is deceptive and that Macy's was having a blowout on pillows, or perhaps quilts. They looked more quilty (like Humbert's nemesis Claire, come to think of it) than pillowy.

These little kiosks, like the T-shirt guy, were either doing great business or nada nada nada. Their overhead isn't nada, like you might nada, but then their profit nada can be nada too. Take it from someone whose brothers ran a business called Only Shirts in the South's Biggest Flea Market, Fort Lauderdale's Sunrise Swap Shop.

A surprising number of people were lined up for food at this cookie place - we're sure that addictive smell must be made by Monsanto - and at other food outlets, even Sbarro. Pizza at 8 a.m.? Sbarro was next door to the store our dad owned with our uncle Matty (Slack Bar, Fulton Street downtown), Syd Siegel (Sid's Pants, numerous), Jack Lubel (Jack's Slacks on 86th and Bay Parkway) and Jimmy Saracino (Jay's Men's Wear on Roosevelt near Main in Flushing). Our favorite long-gone Kings Plaza food places were Cooky's, Bun 'n' Burger (two great chains) and the crepe place - not so much Zum Zum, Eddie Arcaro or Nathan's.

Santa was AWOL, but if he had been there, cell phone pics of his fatness couldn't have been taken beyond a certain point. Our favorite mall Santa story was when we were walking with a friend in the late 1980s in the Aventura Mall in what was then North Miami Beach. We passed Santa Claus walking in the opposite direction, and he waved and said, "Hi, Mr. Grayson!" Our friend gasped and said, "He does know if you've been bad or good." Only if you're a teacher at Broward Community College, we assumed.

Macy's used to have an entrance on the Avenue U side of the mall by East 55th Street. That's how we always walked here from our house and so we'd usually come into Kings Plaza there when we weren't so lazy we'd drive the four blocks. We got chicken pox at age 21 in our last semester at Brooklyn College and when we started feeling better on the first nice spring break, we escaped the house and came here - despite our next door Evie Wagman's warning that we'd be spreading the disease. Since we got it from our brother who'd gotten it from her 10-year-old son, we ignored that advice. An hour in the mall can fix anything, even varicella, when you're young.

Of course, when you're of a certain age, you can conk out at 9 a.m. after a hard morning of shop-till-you-drop.

People had some good hauls, even by that relatively early hour, and started heading out.

We don't remember Black Fridays in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s and our ethnic heritage is 100% Garmento. Every one of the 581 pre-1981 instances of the term "Black Friday" in the New York Times refer almost exclusively to specific financial panics, crashes or scandals or some non-shopping-related event, usually one in which someone got fleeced.

The first article that referred to the traditional start of the Xmas shopping season we found was in 1987, a mood piece on Garden State Plaza on the day after Thanksgiving, and it seemed to take it for granted that everyone knew what the term meant:

Today, after all, is Black Friday, believed to be among the most hectic shopping days - if not the most hectic - of the year. Although Santa made his annual debut here last week, for many this marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season.

In the next four weeks, many retailers expect to pull in one quarter to half of their yearly revenues.

This year they are more concerned than usual. Retail analysts have forecast a bleak holiday season, largely because Black Friday comes only six weeks after Black Monday, the day the stock market plunged.

Ah yes, we remember it well. Something about Dubai World debt, right? Whatever, just keep shopping and maybe the real unemployment rate will fall below 17%.

The lone empty-handed passenger, we caught the B41 bus to the Junction with a lot of bargain hunters with shopping bags,

along with one guy who had to bring in his giant flat-screen TV through the back door and needed our help to get it out.

Friday Morning at The Junction & Downtown Brooklyn: (Not So Much) Black Friday Shopping at the Triangle Junction & Atlantic Terminal Malls

Getting to the Triangle Junction Mall at 8 a.m., this morning we saved hundreds of dollars on this day after Thanksgiving. A few hours later, we saved even more a few miles up Flatbush Avenue at the Atlantic Terminal Mall. How did we save this much money? We didn't buy anything on Black Friday, merely watched others doing so.

And from the look of things, this recession/ depression is severely crimping sales as strapped consumers behave more like us than they do normal people.

At 7:10 a.m. we caught a southbound B48 bus on our corner of Lorimer Street, took it through various enclaves of Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to Eastern Parkway, where we hopped on a 2 train to Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College.

As a pre-teen in the Kennedy administration, "going to the Junction" was a big treat for us, though it usually meant getting glazed donuts and comic books and window-shopping around what was the closest thing to a shopping area we could get to from Flatlands on the B41 bus.

By the end of the 1960s, we were jaded by our every-weekday trips as a student at Midwood High School and Brooklyn College, and these days we make the trip twice a week from Williamsburg to teach classes in creative writing and the short story, not to shop.

Passing a dozen or so Jehovah's Witnesses ladies at the train station, we made our way to the new Triangle Junction Mall between Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues on what used to be municipal and private parking lots where we kept our gold '73 Mercury Comet when we couldn't find a meter or a legal space anywhere else.

The mall's main store is Target, the fourth in Brooklyn, opened just last spring. Of course, the Circuit City in the same mall, which opened later, is already closing as that company, bankrupt, is forced to liquidate. Three people with big signs announcing the end of Circuit City, if not the world, are strategically placed on different corners, including in front of the elevator to the subway station.

Target usually opens when we get there at 8 a.m. but today it opened at 6 a.m. for the Black Friday rush. Except when we take the escalator up, the store looks pretty empty for such a big sales day.

Where are the frantic mobs that traumatized us eight years ago - the only other time we went to a store on Black Friday - at the now-shuttered Mesa, Arizona, K Mart on Dobson and Broadway? We got to that store at 7 a.m. and were swept in with the huge crowd and found all the "doorbuster" bargains sold off before we came to them.

Today, at Target, it turned out there was no rush. Indeed, most of the big sale items will still be on sale on Saturday. There's almost no one at the checkout counters except a little Orthodox Jewish boy whose mom is buying an Elmo's World Record-and-Play Center and a Muslim lady in a head scarf with a huge box containing something called a "Storm Rocker" with some kind of wireless POD or something for $44. We looked at the boxes of it piled high and still aren't sure what it does.

There are a lot of other big boxes of stuff practically being given away that few people want, although we are tempted by a $29 Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. The aisle to the escalator up is clear, and the Menswear section looks more like Ghosttown, with one young Caribbean-American couple and two gay teenage boys languidly looking at bargains they don't seem to be all that interested in.

Passing sales items we have no use for - stacks of $69 pink Disney Princess bikes and $79 blue Marvel Spider-Man bikes; a Hamilton Beach Classic Hand/Stand Mixer for $25, an 8-bottle wine cooler - we see the electronics section has more action. Electronic keyboards, wide-screen TVs, and other stuff are getting sold, but the crowds aren't nearly as large as we expected.

If we were seven years old, on our wish list would be one item on special sale at Target: the $19.99 Easy Bake Oven and Snack Center so we could, as the sign said, "Discover the excitement of REAL BAKING!"

But the first light-bulb-powered version of the Easy Bake Oven appeared when we were 12, too old for it.

So for Xmas/Chanukah 1959 we had to settle for this huge realistic-looking car dashboard - which no doubt led at age 16 to our sneaking illegal drives around Mill Basin in our mom's fire-engine red Valiant and relying on girls to bake Alice B. Toklas brownies a couple of years later.

Circuit City was just sad. Most of the good stuff in the mammoth store is already gone, since those going-out-of-business signs have been around for weeks.

It reminds us of the sad day in the summer of 1997, when we we were traveling from Manhasset to Williamsburg when we stopped off at Main Street in Flushing and got to experience the last day of the fabled five-and-dime Woolworth chain. (One of the main hangouts of the Sultans - the not-so-bad-boys gang, um, club - we belonged to circa "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" - was the Woolworth's at the strip shopping mall on Ralph Avenue near Flatlands Avenue.) That Flushing store looked forlorn, and so did everyone in it.

Ditto this doomed Circuit City, and seeing a pre-teen girl holding a give-it-away T-Pain CD and a videotape of the complete first season of One Tree Hill is truly depressing.

There were pretty long lines for the B41 bus going to Kings Plaza, the mall that opened in September 1970 three blocks from our old house - and where our dad and uncle had a store and where we often went with our college friends for lunches at Cooky's or The Crepe and the Pancake or to movies on Friday night and where we worked in Alexander's Department Store in the menswear department, near our friend Marilyn Citron at the cash register, as we kept straightening out the tables of puckery polyester pants and the racks of powder blue leisure suits.

So perhaps New York City's first indoor shopping mall was busier. The B41 Flatbush Avenue bus - and the Q35, which stops across from Kings Plaza on its way to Rockaway - were too crowded for us to want to travel down that particular retail memory lane, so we opt for a road closer and less traveled by.

We retreat to the Hillel Place Starbucks - a long time ago the site of the legendary Campus Sugar Bowl greasy spoon where Andreas and the Cypriot Greek guys behind the counter would call us "Blondie Boy" when we ordered our chizburger and lime rickey. (Their lime rickeys were the best.) We read the day's Times, with a front-page article headlined "Retailers Offer Big Discounts, and Then Pray" and the big op-ed piece, "Dying of Consumption," saying:

There is a deeper, potentially positive, meaning to the decline in consumer spending: Americans are now moving back to more prudent income-based lifestyles.

We look across to the McDonald's and remember a group of us going there to try it the day it opened in 1971. Shocked to see Brooklyn College President John Kneller there, we asked him what he was doing with a double cheeseburger in his hands. "Why not?" the French scholar said. "It's nutritious and inexpensive."

A few years later we'd go there regularly as an MFA student with our mentor, the BC fiction writing program director Jonathan Baumbach, who always spent less than we did because he had his Big Mac Attack Pack booklet of discount coupons - which, being legendarily cheap (yes, that part of Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is based on reality), he never shared with us, when we were earning the minimum wage of $2 an hour.

Going back to the Junction, we pass a bunch of stores replacing the long-gone places we loved: the Campus Corner restaurant, the Barron's and Barchas bookstores, the Campus Closet menswear store where our friend Brian McNeela worked and whose owner was a customer of our dad's Art Pants - and so we got this wonderful white wool crew-neck sweater with occasional colorful threads in the weave for almost nothing. Having our whole family in the garment business meant that we didn't buy retail until we were in our forties.

We take the 2 train to Franklin Avenue, spot a 4 and take it one stop to skip Eastern Parkway- Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza and Bergen Street, and get to Atlantic Avenue two minutes faster. The Atlantic Terminal mall is indeed crowded, and we go upstairs to check out the Target.

Reportedly the number-one store in sales in the entire Target chain, this one is more bustling than its sister at the Junction, but given the highly-trafficked, high-population area, it's not a Black Friday madhouse by any means. A few years ago, this would have been a typical Saturday afternoon.

At 11 a.m. now, we walk around and notice that not one of the 25 or so checkout counters has more than three people waiting to have their purchases rung up. A Target employee is directing those with fewer purchases to express lines on the Atlantic Avenue side of the store, but they don't seem much faster. It's all pretty quick. We've waited on longer lines here in the summer of 2006.

Anyway - did we tell you we hate shopping? - we left the busy-but-not-superbusy mall and walked our oft-trod route around the Williamsburg Savings Bank Building (One Hanson Place, for those who don't miss the dentists), BAM, and that little triangle park that no one seems to have to the key to, and entered the G train station at Fulton and Lafayette for our ride back to Williamsburg and the end of our Black Friday no-shopping free.

Total amount spent: $2.34 on the venti black iced tea at Starbucks. It would have been $2.60 but we have the new 10% discount card that Starbucks started giving out when it began closing its stores and losing customers due to the bad economy.

We're spending the rest of the day reading one of our favorite authors who tried to tried to sue us: E.L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times.