Enchanted Village
From the 1940s until 1972—and again in the early 1990s—the Jordan Marsh flagship store in Boston's Downtown Crossing was home to the Enchanted Village, a lavish Christmas display which at its height took over an entire floor of the department store and was also spotlighted in its display windows. The centerpiece of the display, besides Santa, was an eight-set Lionel electric train display. From what started as a marketing gimmick, the Enchanted Village quickly became a legendary Boston tradition and an annual mainstay of the city's holiday season. Macy's discontinued the Enchanted Village in 1998 when it was moved to City Hall Plaza. More recently it has been housed in the Hynes Convention Center.
On June 16, 2009, the Enchanted Village, including all props and figures was sold at auction, as the City of Boston could no longer afford to be a major sponsor of the annual event. It was sold to Jordan's Furniture (which is a unit of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and had no connection to the former Jordan Marsh), and is on display during the holiday season at the Avon, Massachusetts location.
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Famous quotes containing the words enchanted and/or village:
“Some enchanted evening,
You may see a stranger,
You may see a stranger,
Across a crowded room.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)