From The Long Island Advance

The Remains of Swezey's

By Michael Depp

The obituary for Swezey’s, a department store edging toward its 110th anniversary, was not entirely unexpected. Reading it some thousand miles and a decade away from the time I knew it (and left it), it strikes me like the death of some well-loved relative who had nonetheless long since slipped to the family periphery: We cared for him still, paid the occasional visit, but our lives had moved on while he remained infirm but defiant.

A few years ago, Swezey’s up and surprised us all with what would turn out to be its last shout. Like some panicked husband in a late life crisis, it left its original sprawling 1894 digs at Patchogue’s Four Corners, the heart of town. It took up residence in a new, streamlined big-box down the road at the old Lace Mill site, a sudden facelift and a fresh marriage for its dotage. I can only assume that the new wife, now a widowed building, will get the inheritance – probably some upstart national chain will come courting before long. The old wife remains where she was left; no one has called on her since.

I had my first job at Swezey’s – clerical and stock help to the management of men’s clothing – where I stayed throughout high school and into my first vacations home from college. Even then, more than 10 years ago, people spoke of its imminent demise, familiar threats of shopping malls and national chain stores. The merchandise wasn’t really my style – so many racks of dark pants with stretch waistbands, beige trenchcoats and garish ties – but to me, the goods weren’t the draw at Swezey’s. (For a retailer, of course, this can be a fatal problem.)

Swezey’s heart, it seemed to me, was in its deep-seated sense of place. It had such a distinct sense of identity, of ineluctable ties to Patchogue itself that I couldn’t help but be drawn to it. Having grown up nearby amid the historyless and anonymous split-level ranches of Medford, Patchogue’s comparative sense of itself was enviable, and Swezey’s embodied this more than any place left standing at the time.

I loved walking the long expanses of its flagship store; old buildings connected in improvised ways, each a reminder of more successful, viable decades with bright promises of expansion. Underneath the store, a dark network of stockrooms and storerooms was even more alluring to me, untouched by fresh facades or sunlight and full of creaky staircases and exposed light bulbs, the hidden recesses of the town’s memory, I thought then.

When I think now of what will be lost, it seems at first, frankly, not so much. A family-owned department store, such an antiquated thing these days, is meeting up with the inevitable. Shoppers will not feel the loss so terribly; they found what they were looking for at the mall long ago.

But the harder question for Patchogue, I think, was asked by another Long Islander, Walt Whitman, back in the 19th century as he watched the country swell with industry and progress: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains?”

In Patchogue, even Swezey’s made its move away from the center in its last years. In its stead remains a tract of historic buildings that still have found no tenant. In those buildings I once met people who had spent their entire lives in Patchogue and could tell you what that meant. I borrowed a little of it from them; people ask where I’m from and I’ll answer them with Patchogue, not Medford. Such people might not know either place; it’s a meaningless distinction to them. But now Swezey’s will shutter up its shop, so I think about how it has helped to color my answer. And I wonder: What remains of the Patchogue that I met and attached myself to in that old shop now that Swezey’s is finally, irrevocably gone?