Kings Department Store On 18th Avenue Closes

The Kings family department store on 18th Avenue is no more. Photo credit: Brian Hedden

This week, I noticed that the Kings department store on 18th Avenue (between 65th and 66th Streets) had closed up. I asked one of the guys at DaVinci’s about it, and he said it has been closed for at least a couple of weeks. It’s a little embarrassing, since I’m in DaVinci’s more times a week than I care to admit, and I hadn’t noticed that the largest store across the street – one of the largest on 18th Avenue – had closed.

While I have mixed feelings about this, I’m not going to miss this place to be perfectly honest with you. It’s always a little unsettling when one of the larger places close up shop – no telling when this empty storefront will reopen, and no telling what it will be. And of course, there are jobs at stake – again, no telling when they will come back, if ever. That’s too bad.

But I shopped there a few times earlier in my Bensonhurst residency, and I was never really happy with the experience. I could never find what I was looking for – which was usually an assortment of clothing for toddlers, so it shouldn’t have been that difficult. For department store type stuff, I always found Telco – two blocks down the street – much more useful.