Newspapers.com has been running for about two years now, a spin-off and under ownership of Ancestry.com and has been adding to their holdings pretty steadily. They still lack giant chunks of very large papers, but there's enough available now to jump in and try the free week to search around and see if it's worth a subscription.
The primary drawback of their offerings are that the newspapers have been archived via microfilm, which means the photos are usually too dark to yield much detail. This is part of the reason why I started dialing back the time I spent at the Houston Public Library after exhausting the hard copy clippings.
I still managed to find a few fun things, especially another shot of the Foley's shoe ship (below in July 1978)
In one day, here's what I dug out regarding Almeda Mall advertising, listed chronologically:
Galveston Daily News 09/15/68
Galveston Daily News 1/25/68
Galveston Daily News 11/28/68
Galveston Daily News 12/12/69
Galveston Daily News 12/16/70
Galveston Daily News 12/16/70
Deer Park Progress, 8/28/71
Deer Park Progress 6/17/72
Deer Park Progress, 8/10/72
Deer Park Progress 11/30/72
Galveston Daily News 1/11/73
Deer Park Progress 11/14/74
Galveston Daily News 6/19/75
The NEWS 10/16/75
The NEWS 7/8/77
Galveston Daily News 7/3/78
Galveston Daily News 7/23/78
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end Galveston Daily News 7/23/78
Galveston Daily News 8/17/78
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end Galveston Daily News 8/17/78
Galveston Daily News 9/10/78
Galveston Daily News 9/8/78
Galveston Daily News 9/21/78
Meet Joe Namath
Baytown Sun 8/17/78
Baytown Sun 11/23/84
On the same day I was pulling these out, my friend Michelle texted me this picture:
Almeda is currently undergoing a big renovation. During the process, they've removed layers from the walls exposing what appears to be the original zigzag dark brick pattern original to 1968. (I'm hoping they aren't planning to pull it down.)
I've heard of the Almeda Foley's (or was it Northwest? Probably both) "boat" before, as well as some sort of Aztec "sun" that hung over the escalator, but hadn't seen any pictures before. The Piccadilly Cafeteria ad actually made me chuckle, too.
ReplyDeleteThe boat was the impetus for the beginning of this blog because I was convinced there had to be a photo in existence of my childhood memory. This is the better of the two I've found so far. The first one was buried in a high school yearbook (on this post: http://southbelthouston.blogspot.com/2014/03/almeda-mall.html). But I've not yet located the Aztec sun in a photograph . . . yet!
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