Santa at the Old Garden State Plaza

All it takes is a quick search of Google these days to bring up memories of days past. I was not astonished when I searched for the picture of Santa in the chimney, which used to adorn the old Garden State Plaza, and quickly found numerous mentions in blogs. As the story goes it cost about $20,000 each year to repair Santa and another $20,000 to get him set up in the chimney. I suppose for the number crunchers who work for these retailers with their razor thin margins this was an expense which was easy to eliminate.

Santa was in the same category of 1960s excess as The 200-by-50-foot work, created by the Polish-born artist Stefan Knapp. It dominated the intersection of Routes 17 and 4 from 1962 to 1995. Constructed of red, orange and blue porcelain panels attached to a steel structure, it was commissioned for $250,000 by George Farkas, a former owner of the store.

People generally liked seeing both of these landmarks but were not going to put up a fight when both were kicked to the curb to make way for new stores. They'll live forever, however, in our memories and on the Internet.

I guess that makes us luckier than our ancestors, who had only grainy photographs of landmarks torn down to make way for something newer and better.