1970s

Click photo to enlarge. See detailed images below.

Kroger and Shainberg's are visible in the middle of the westernmost building in the shopping center. Can you identify the other shops in this photo?

The Woolco was clearly a major store, complete with its own pet department!

The round Union Planters Bank sits just below the Julius Lewis sign on the Eastgate Office Building. Can you identify the other shops in this photo?

On the north end of the shopping center was a Shoney's restaurant, which offered drive-in service under the row of white canopies along the railroad tracks. They later built their own out-building on Park, where Perkins Restaurant is now.
Next to Shoney's, with the large white marquee on top, was the Paramount Theater.
Next to that was Katz Drugs, which later became Skaggs Pharmacy, then a Super D, and is now Fresh Market.

Other original or early stores included:

• Morrison's Cafeteria

• Joy Young Chinese Restaurant

• The Local Gentry (men's clothier)

• Baskin-Robbins

• Adjacent to Eastgate was a Hi-Boy Restaurant.  It was on Mt. Moriah near Park, where the Easy Way is now.

When Eastgate Shopping Center was built in the 1960s, it hemmed in on two sides the low-income, predominantly African-American Truse neighborhood. With street access only via Mt. Moriah, the neighborhood sat incongruously in the center of the city's most vibrant commercial area until the homeowners were bought out in the late 1990s to make way for the new Home Depot and Seessel's (which changed to Albertson's and is now Schnuck's). Today the neighborhood is remembered only in the name of Truse Parkway, the new street that runs between Home Depot and Schnuck's from Mt. Moriah to Poplar (see Google Map below).