The American department store era started in the late 1800s with many-storied buildings large enough to display furnishings, clothing, toiletries and gifts. This mode of store downtown thrived in every large city from 1900 to the 1980s, when it succumbed to the suburban mall. In Harrisburg, the Pomeroy’s department store included something even more special: a tea room, a lunch place for employees, neighbors and foot-weary shoppers.
Patterning themselves after English tea rooms, many department stores had tea rooms of a more palatial nature, high-ceilinged rooms apart from the business traffic. Instead, Pomeroy’s installed its tea room on the mezzanine level, hovering above the busy main floor. The room was narrow with windows adjacent to each booth, so one could gaze over the heads of unsuspecting shoppers, a welcome amusement for the antsy child or adult awaiting lunch.
I was about six years old when I went with Mom and my sister up the stairway to have lunch in the tea room. The line for a booth was often crowded at noon, but this didn’t worry us. We were ready for a rare treat—plus, fast food wasn’t yet known. It wasn’t so much the homemade soup, which the wise cook had loaded with corn and potatoes, or the toasted cheese with the crust cut off, or the orange ice sherbet served in a silver pedestal cup. Pomeroy’s was special because the hideaway was a world apart and a respite from the usual.
A waitress in a starchy gray dress welcomed us, offering my mother a cup of coffee while I looked at the purple-typed menu sheathed in plastic. Accompanied by some unidentifiable instrumental serenade overhead, she took our orders and then filled every coffee cup at the next table. I was reminded to keep my elbows off the table and to chew my food: “If you don’t do it, who will?”
We talked about our errands, then, looking out the window, we saw a hand truck unloading boxes, ladies in stylish hats, a man surveying the tie counter while his wife tried on rhinestone clip style earrings…so much to see from our vantage point.
The hostess recognized Mom and stopped by to say hello in the midst of the bustling lunch traffic. Of course, this was the era before burger chains, before talk of cholesterol, when shopping was often the highlight of the month, and there was a sugar bowl on every table.
The disappearance of Pomeroy’s and other “ladies’ lunch” establishments apparently encouraged tea mavens to open up separate, standalone tea rooms offering an atmosphere I would describe as destinations for “afternoon ritual.” These places, with their many varieties of tea and accompaniments like beautiful sandwiches and desserts, today serve as a fuel station for the adult soul. However, they could never spark the imagination of a child, wowed by a view of the busy world of grown-ups, that Pomeroy’s once did.
Florence Ditlow, a Harrisburg native, is author of “The Bakery Girls,” a novel based on the lives of unique women and their adventures in Harrisburg. Contact the author to share memories at www.thebakerygirls.net.
