WESTWOOD—Who here remembers shopping at Woolworth’s at the corner of Westwood and Center avenues? The store was there for 40 years, from the 1930s until the 1970s.
The Westwood Woolworth’s opened 90 years ago, on Oct. 25, 1935. Officials at the time said it was a sign that Westwood was an up-and-coming town.
“A beautiful new store will be opened in Westwood Friday, October 25, by the F. W. Woolworth company. This will mark a milestone in the progress of Westwood, inasmuch as recognition is being given to the town by a nationwide concern,” wrote the weekly Westwood Chronicle.
In the 1920s this corner had been the Tassini Brothers’ fruit and vegetable market with a Chinese-American restaurant called the Westwood Tea Garden on the second floor.
F. W. Woolworth was one of the nation’s original five-and-dime stores, having been founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth in 1878.
Woolworth was also among the first American retailers to put merchandise out for the shopping public to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk. One of the store’s most popular features was the addition of a lunch counter and seltzer fountain.
The retailer saw success across the globe during nearly all of the 20th century, but was in decline by the 1980s due to a proliferation of similar discount stores, such as Kmart, Target, and Walmart. In the 1990s, the company began to focus mainly on sporting goods and reinvented itself under the name Foot Locker, which had been the company’s top performing specialty line.
After the Westwood Woolworth closed in the 1970s, CVS moved into the Westwood Avenue storefront — and spent 30 years there before moving to a new building at the corner of Broadway and Jefferson Avenue, the former site of the Seville Diner.
In summer 2015, the over-80-year-old building at Westwood and Center was stripped to its beams, revealing a portion of the old Woolworth’s brickwork.
The building was reconstructed to a contemporary aesthetic. The Westwood Avenue storefront is now Goldberg Bagels and Valley Bank.
