The times keep changing - Part I By Hartley Neita The report this week that Times Store in Kingston is to be closed shortly sent me on a search through my memory to the time when King Street was the crossroads of Jamaica. And the world. It was where, sooner or later, you could meet a long lost friend or relative. There, too, that many a romance saw its first bud. King Street of the long ago yesterdays was the capital of commercial activity in Jamaica. In its stores were the finest goods produced in the world. There were watches from Switzerland, bracelets from the Middle East, silk scarves and jade from the Far East, shoes from Italy, cutlery from England, gowns from the designers of Paris, scented soap from Belgium, radios from Germany, and cigars from Cuba. It was likely you could be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood swashbuckling actors like Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks in The London Shop or Sports as they selected a tie for cocktails at the world-famous Myrtle Bank Hotel on Harbour Street later in the evening. We lesser mortals were there selecting a pair of cuff links for the father of the new girl we had fallen in love with - to impress him with our taste! Sweet street It was the street on which the most beautiful young women in the world walked their walk in the styles just seen on Fifth Avenue in New York, the Champs d'Elysees in Paris or in the fashionable shops of Knightsbridge in London. It was a weekly Saturday afternoon fashion parade. The audience was of young men who, if they whistled or just pursed their lips in approval, then those were the styles these ladies wore to the races at Knutsford Park or to the garden parties at Kings House. There they were photographed and published on the social pages of the following week's Sunday Gleaner. There were two King Streets in those yesterdays. One was north of North Parade and it went above North Street. The other flowed from South Parade and emptied itself into the harbour at the Victoria Pier. And this was the gateway through which the world entered Jamaica. Our present Queen, Elizabeth the First of independent Jamaica, has not, but Her Royal Matriarch, the Queen Mother and other members of the past and present Royal family, first stepped on Jamaica's soil at this pier. It was there too, that her Royal Aunt, the Princess Alice of Athlone, curtsied and bowed her head with regal respect as she took the hand of Her Royal Niece's representative, Governor-General Sir Clifford Campbell, demonstrating to our young nation that the Jamaican-born Head of State was as "Tallawah" as Her Royal Majesty! Close to the Victoria Pier then, was another Victorian symbol, the Victoria Crafts Market, a must for cruise ship visitors who came to Kingston in their hundreds during winter. We too, went there for souvenirs when we began to travel abroad. Expensive King Street was also the most expensive piece of real estate in Jamaica. So expensive it was that only a few men like the Issas and the Hannas, a few enterprising company lawyers, and a brash Montego Bay hotelier, John Pringle, sought property on the street. So it was that further up the road, and watching as financial sentinels over their property, were the Branch Managers of the four major commercial Banks, Barclays Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Nova Scotia. This too, was the street along which the contingents of Jamaican volunteers marched their good-byes to Jamaica to the ships waiting in the harbour to take them to England to fight for Our King and His country during the two World Wars of the 20th century. Some lived and remained in England and fathered new British families. Others died in the red, blood red poppy fields of Flanders. Few returned home to walk on King Street. (To be continued next week)
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