In the thick of the Depression, I wonder how many lucky New York kids got one of these cool toys for Christmas.
That police car with the electric lights would be worth a lot more than $1.31 today. As for the cowboy suit, it comes with a gun and bullets. Can you even buy a slightly realistic looking toy gun these days?
This ad comes from a December 1934 edition of the Daily News. Gimbels was huge then, as anyone who has ever seen Miracle on 34th Street knows.
The department store giant started held on until the mid-1980s. A faded Gimbels ad on 30th Street is all that’s left.
Tags: back issues of the NY Daily News, Christmas 1934 NYC, defunct department stores in NYC, Gimbels, Gimbels ads from the 1930s, New York in 1934, vintage Christmas shopping ads
Ephemeral New York 
December 8, 2010 at 2:53 am |
Soon advertisements for Borders and Barnes & Noble will look just as quaint as this Gimbels ad. The present becomes the distant past so fast!
December 8, 2010 at 3:14 am |
I know! Plus, even in our social networking techy world, with newspaper readership in the pits, stores continue to buy newspaper ads like these.
October 29, 2012 at 1:56 am |
[…] Gimbel’s (10) and Sak’s 34th Street (9) are ghosts. The Hotel New Yorker (6) keeps packing them in, while the Hotel Martinique (3) endured a tortured history as a 1980s welfare hotel before reopening as a Radisson. […]
June 30, 2016 at 7:36 am |
[…] of course, was a retail giant during the city’s 20th century department store […]