By Paul DiSclafani
If you lived in the Massapequas in the 1960s and ‘70s, you knew what “The Pit” was. Located on the very Eastern edge of Massapequa, it was a huge wooded area that contained a giant, well, pit. I always thought that it was formed from a giant meteor, but I guess that was just an urban legend.
As a kid growing up on Park Lane, you knew The Pit was there, but unless you were adventurous, a teenager, or just cool, you never ventured into The Pit. It was some mysterious land where all the hoodlums hung out. As a matter of fact, “the Pit Boys” did hang out there. And although you didn’t really have to choose sides, if you were a tough guy, you were either a Pit Boy or a “Park Lane Boy.” Not exactly the Bloods and the Crips, but you get the idea.
That all changed at the end of the summer of 1973, when Long Island’s first two-level mall opened in Massapequa (take that, Roosevelt Field), right over the heart of The Pit, The Sunrise Mall.
The mall opened on Aug. 30, before all the stores were even completed. We had a Gertz and a Macy’s anchoring the north and south ends of the rectangular mall. There was a Korvette’s and a Woolworth’s and a JC Penney in the middle. We had a movie theatre and many shoe stores for some reason. And still to this day, there is that strange black cube outside the main entrance.
On the day that it opened, there were just a handful of stores that were ready, including Friendly’s Ice Cream. And I was working there that morning. I worked in three different places in that mall: Friendly’s, The Gap and Pants Place Plus.
Every one of my friends secured jobs in the mall. As a matter of fact, I understand that the Town of Oyster Bay eventually passed a law that all high school students in Massapequa and Berner must work in the mall for at least a year before graduating. Both of my kids worked there.
Many of us had our first experience with real-life responsibilities, like showing up for work on time, vacuuming the rugs in the clothing stores, cleaning the counters in the food stores or balancing the register before you could go home. We learned firsthand what it was like to deal with the general public day in and day out. We learned the art of smiling at the customers even though we wanted to kick them in the shins. We learned about the back doors and the hallways that led to the trash compactors that most people never saw.
More importantly, we learned about something called a pay check. We learned that when you work, you get paid. And when you got paid, you had money. And when you had money, well, you had to find things to waste it on. Some even found their way to the Dime Savings bank and instead of just cashing that paycheck, opened a bank account and made a deposit (sometimes). They even gave you a little book to keep track of how much money you had saved.
The mall changed the lives of kids all over Massapequa in both good and bad ways. Some may have found careers working there while others just passed through on the way to different jobs and careers.
I never found out what happened to the Pit Boys after the summer of 1973. I wonder if they formed a super group with the Park Lane Boys.
