Remembering Long Island's candy stores, soda shoppes and confectioneries

Call them confectioneries or soda shoppes or luncheonettes. But whatever you called them, you were literally a kid in a candy store.

These were the places your parents took you when you had a good report card, or as a treat for accompanying Mom during Saturday shopping downtown. When you were older you stopped in after school, or after a football game. You had a milkshake or an egg cream at the counter, maybe bought some penny candy or a comic book, or ate a burger you probably remember as the best you ever had.

Today’s convenience stores aren’t the same thing, by far. And while a few institutions such as Hildebrandt's in Williston Park and Krisch’s in Massapequa remain, they’re no longer the kind of young people’s hangout spots we remember. And Long Islanders do remember these five stores:

WINDISCH’S

143 N. Wellwood Ave., Lindenhurst

It was the aroma of chocolate that former customers remember most about Windisch’s, which like several stores of its kind made it fresh in its kitchen.

“When you walked in there, the smell of it,” Jim Barbarino, 68, remembers wistfully. “I had three older sisters, so back in the '60s, until I was 12 or so, they took me there all the time,” says the Kings Park resident, who grew up in Lindenhurst. And for Easter, “My parents would bring me there and pick out chocolate bunnies.”

“It was a very popular place,” says Village of Lindenhurst historian Anna Jaeger, 81, who went there in her childhood and teen years. To this day, “I remember after my sixth grade promotional ceremony, my parents took me there for ice cream sodas.” At Eastertime, “They had homemade chocolate Easter rabbits and also something we don't find anymore: these sugar eggs that had a little plastic window where you could see a little Easter scene with little chicks and rabbits made out of paper.”

German immigrant Frederick Paul Windisch Sr., who went by his middle name, had founded the shop originally in Farmingdale in either 1930 or 1931 (sources differ). There, “Grumman founder Leroy Grumman and his cohorts would lunch on one side of the room,” Newsday once recalled of the aeronautics engineer and corporate chief, “while on the other, another aviation pioneer, Alexander de Seversky ... would be speaking Russian with his colleagues.”

In August 1939, Windisch sold that location to John Von Leesen, who renamed it after himself (see below). Windisch then opened his long-running Lindenhurst store, and as late as the 1950s was running it with his son William. Eventually another son, Paul Jr., took it over, and with wife Eleanor and ran it for more than two decades.

By mid-1981, Windisch’s was owned by John and Joanna Mueller, and by early 1985 was in other hands. The shop lasted through at least 1988. By September 1992 the site was that of Chef’s II South, the first of a half-dozen restaurants to occupy the space. It is currently Pino Wine Bar & Bistro.

VON LEESEN’S

282 Main St., Farmingdale

In August 1939, John Von Leesen and his wife, Emily, took over what had been the first site of the confectionery Windisch’s. They, too, made their own chocolates and become a local institution.

“We use only real pure chocolate,” the store announced in one ad. “No compound or artificial chocolate. Homemade, hand molded Easter bunnies” — including a 3-foot-tall giant it once offered in a raffle.

“There was a counter with stools, and there were tables,” recalls Keith Wilson, 61, of North Massapequa, who went there as a child with his mother — for whom the place evoked her own youth. “It reminded her of the old Brooklyn days of ice cream parlors,” he says, “so she'd take us there for lunch once in a while.” He can still picture “the soda fountain, and the chocolate milkshakes that were made in metal holders they’d put the glass into.”

The Von Leesens sold it to Fred Schumacher in 1963, according to the Lindenhurst Historical Society. He held it briefly, turning it over to Henry P. Muller the following year. Mike Wiebe then owned it from 1967-75, and Joseph Giuida for a year after that. Kord and Hanni Fick then helmed it for nearly two decades.

Andrea Donovan bought it from them in July 1994, but a fire that November gutted both it and two adjacent businesses. Donovan restored it with a ’50s motif, and Von Leesen’s soldiered on before closing on Feb. 22, 1998. Today Vespa Italian Kitchen occupies the space.

GRAMMAS

Various locations, Port Jefferson

The name wasn’t referencing anyone’s grandmother — it was that of Greek immigrant Gregory M. Grammas, who, like his brothers before him, shortened his original, much longer last name after coming to America in 1905, age 17.

After learning candy and ice cream making at his brother John’s confectionery in New York City, Gregory relocated to Port Jefferson in 1911 to open his first shop, at 116 East Main Street. The site had been that of what a historical marker calls a “bucket of blood ... gin mill” that served local shipbuilders.

By 1915 he had moved the business to 201 Main St., and then later to Jones Street. In 1919 he sold it to James Mallas, who continued it as the Paradise Confectionery. Grammas became a real estate broker but later, with his second wife, Rose, opened his best-known location, at 302 Main St.
“All of the candy and ice cream sold at the store was made by my grandparents by hand from the Grammas family recipes,” a granddaughter narrates in a 2016 video made in conjunction with Port Jefferson’s Heritage Festival that year, when the town recreated the shop as a pop-up. “My father ... worked there after serving in the Army during World War II. He used to tell me about how he installed all of the stools and how my older sister learned to walk holding on to the display cases.”

Grammas sold the store to the Karter family in the early 1950s, returned to real estate and died in 1964. The shop continued through 1996, when it was sold and for a time was an Indian restaurant that retained the Grammas name.

MAC’S

590 Seaman Ave., Baldwin

The quintessential corner store, at the intersection of Seaman Avenue and Pine Street, Mac’s was hard by Plaza Elementary, making it the informal clubhouse of the schoolkid set.

“All of us used to go there on our lunchtime,” recalls John McCarroll, 64, who attended Plaza and now lives in South Carolina. “Some kids would eat lunch there, and that's where kids bought their candy and baseball cards.”

He remembers it having “a lunch counter where you could buy egg creams and hamburgers and things of that nature, and they had pinball machines in the back. They had two of the old wooden phone booths in a back corner. They sold magazines and comic books and newspapers, they sold cigars and cigarettes and penny candy.”

The single-story building may have gone up in the 1920s or ’30s, he suggests, “because it had the fancy tin ceiling” common to that era. He’s more certain that “the McDonald family had it from sometime in the 1950s up until 1975, when they retired and moved to Florida.”

It continued to be called Mac’s under a couple of ownership changes, including to Peter Kleg, who lived with his family across the street, until becoming Ken’s Korner circa 1980, Casey’s by 1990 and United Deli since the mid-2000s, per Long Islanders’ memories. Sometime after mid-2018, it changed hands again and today is the MB Deli.

JERRY'S STATIONERY

376 Woodfield Rd.,Road, West Hempstead

Another one just down from an elementary school — the Chestnut Street School — Jerry’s had been Ettinger's Stationery in the 1930s. By September 1951 it had become Jerry’s, run by Jerry and Beatrice Schwimmer. Despite “stationery” in its name, it was a soda shoppe with all the usual egg creams and milkshakes. Jerry Schwimmer died in July 1966 and Beatrice Schwimmer in May 2003.

That building on the corner of Chestnut Street has since held many businesses, including Roto-Rooter Plumbing, Ruperto Masonry, E-Z Apartment Locators Publishing and, most recently, the barbershop JX Cuts.