Department Store Building of ... Uniontown

My relative Larry Stratton has been getting acclimated to his new home in southwestern Pennsylvania, and has even been taking the local paper from Washington, Pa. We'll get to Washington in a bit, but first here's a surviving store building in Uniontown, which for a coal-mining capital had two very sophisticated stores.

Most people probably remember this store at 22 E. Main St. just as Metzler's, but it was linked to a large regional operation. The genesis of the chain was the Wright-Metzler Co., which started in Connellsville with two Wright brothers and Sankey Metzler.  Metzler was a West Virginian who took over the Uniontown operation. After his death in 1939, his son William took over, and then it went into the hands of daughter Martha and her husband, Daniel MacDonald.

As noted here before, the Metzler stores were interconnected with stores Warren and Latrobe, as well as, briefly, Washington, Pa., all of which eventually went in other directions. What I haven't been able to track down is if there was any connection between the Metzlers and the Kaufmans, who owned Uniontown's other big store, N. Kaufman's Inc. Nathan Kaufman, a merchant from Brownsville, Pa., bought what had been Rosenbaum Bros. in Uniontown in the wake of the Depression. Day-to-day operations went into the hands of Bailey Greenwald in the late 1950s, although Kaufman's son William was still the owner. The interesting question is: When I was in Uniontown a few years ago, a house on the same street that Bailey Greenwald had lived in was owned by one Sankey Greenwald. The chance of "Sankey" being coincidental would seem minuscule. So did the Greenwald and Metzler families intermarry? Nothing exists online to show such a connection; indeed, many of the references to Sankey Metzler in Uniontown are to this blog. But if anyone reading this in Uniontown knows whether its two department store families finally became one, let me know.

NOTE: IT'S ONLY WEEKS AWAY: The release of Michael Lisicky's newest department store history, this one profiling Gimbel Bros. Start storing away your money now to buy it!

Department Store Building of ... Happy Valley

It's been far too long since I posted a department store building photo. This is one I know well -- the former Danks & Co. store in State College, Pa., address 148 S. Allen St.

Danks & Co. was based in Lewistown, about a half-hour south of State College. Lewistown was the shopping center for a large range of industrial small towns. Its iconic store was E.E. McMeen & Co., which became a branch of the Bon Ton chain from York, Pa., during its second expansion in the 1950s. Danks was founded by George Danks of Burnham, Pa., one of those towns, in 1924. It operated various branches, one of which opened in State College in 1942 in a moderne-designed building rare for a department store, let alone one in a small town.

Although Penn State made State College a reasonably sized city, college towns were rarely draws for regional business. To serve the students and the professors, they often had to have a different mix of merchandise than was wanted by the residents of surrounding towns and farms. Thus, the Danks store in State College was not large.

The Danks chain closed in 1995, including the Lewistown store -- which, along with the Bon Ton, had been rebuilt in suburban strip-mall style, though still downtown, in an urban renewal effort. To me, Danks in State College remains the building where I first had lunch at a Panera Bread location with Brad Thompson, who then taught at Penn State and now is at Linfield College in Oregon. The building's main use is to house the Penn State Theater Center. Now, that's adaptive reuse -- bread and circuses, so to speak.

Department Store Buildings of the... Vale of Anthracite

I was just talking with my former colleague Jim Remsen, who hails from Clarks Summit, Pa. -- the upscale and up-the-mountain suburb of Scranton. So here's a look at what were Scranton's two big department stores, whose buildings thankfully have lasted until now.

At the upper middle (with the large light roof, and extending to the next building to the right as well) is what generations of Scrantonians knew as the Globe Store. Its official name was the Cleland-Simpson Co. at 119 Wyoming Ave., but it was known initially as the Globe Warehouse, then the Globe Store.  John Cleland, John Simpson, and a Taylor established the Globe in 1878. The company established many branches, among them Trenton and Allentown. Around 1900, John Taylor, son of David, withdrew from the partnership and went his own way in Allentown. By 1910 the Globe was totally under the direction of the Simpson family and its heirs, one of whom was the wonderfully named Urbane Noble.  The other Globes -- there were Globe Warehouses across northeastern Pennsylvania, in towns such as Danville and Carbondale -- gradually withered away, although the Taylor store in Allentown continued until the Depression. The Scranton Globe prospered, however. It expanded downtown in the 1950s, as did so many department stores that 20 or 30 years later were gone, and purchased the Isaac Long Store in Wilkes-Barre.

In the 1970s it was briefly a division of John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, then was spun off in one of the Wanamaker sales (to Carter Hawley Hale or to Woodward & Lothrop) and operated as an independent store until the mid-1990s.Even though it was attached to a downtown mall with a Boscov's store, it could not last and closed in 1994.

Here, I'd like to make a point about historical accuracy. Very few department stores, other than the largest, had books written about their histories, such as happened with Strawbridge & Clothier, Belk Bros., or Marshall Field & Co. Newspapers tended to cover the deaths of department store owners lavishly (thank you for the advertising) and the sale of their companies miserly (are you going to continue to advertise?). Occasionally one will find a treasure trove like the historical records of P. Wiest's Sons at the York County Historical Society. More often, though, one is left with memories, occasional clips, and records that may or may not be reliable.

The Globe Store creates a couple of problems for researchers online. This story from the Scranton Times-Tribune says the Cleland-Simpson Co. was founded by Cleland, Simpson, and William Taylor in 1878. That indeed may be, but by the 1880 city directory David E. Taylor was listed as a partner and the firm was called Cleland, Simpson & Taylor for two decades. (The Times-Tribune story becomes suspect by calling Taylor  "Williams" on second reference.) It also says Cleland bought Taylor's share of the business shortly thereafter. That also may be, but David Taylor was still listed as a partner in the firm in not only the Scranton directory of 1900, but in the Allentown directory as well. So it depends on the definition of "shortly."  Most suspect is the phrase "the Globe and its warehouse." The store was called the Globe Warehouse to emphasize that it sold at lower prices. As it became more established and upscale, it became the Globe Store. But there was never a difference between the store and its warehouse.

The Wikipedia entry on the Globe offers more confusion. It correctly notes that the Danville Globe was operated by Charles Hancock, and notes that he had worked with Cleland, Simpson, and Taylor in Danville and that they then moved to Scranton. This again may well be, as it is taken from an old county history. But that book confuses the issue for modern readers by referring to Hancock's moving back to Danville "where his former employers were located." I assume that it uses "were" to mean "had been." But they had moved on to Scranton and taken Hancock with them, and he then went back home. Hancock opened his Globe in 1883 and may have been an independent operator, but even in those days, it was usual that a store of the same name would either have been started as a branch or the owner would have been "staked" by the original partners. The Wikipedia writer, confused by all this, has Hancock's Danville Globe moving to Scranton, which is inaccurate, because the Globe Store had been in Scranton for five years before the Danville Globe opened.

But on the other hand, in an earlier post I said John Taylor was an original partner in the firm. John Taylor was the son of David Taylor, who either was an original partner or became one in place of the mysterious William Taylor. John Taylor did become a partner with Cleland and Simpson in the Allentown operation briefly, but was never a partner in Scranton. So I guess none of this is completely trustworthy.

The other big store in the photo, on the corner at bottom with a canopy over the sidewalk,  was known to Scrantonians as the "Scranton Dry" or the "Dry Goods," and about this store the Times-Tribune article appears absolutely correct. The Scranton Dry Goods Co. was founded by Isaac E. Oppenheim on Washington Avenue in Scranton in 1912  and quickly moved to occupy a giant store at 401 Lackawanna Ave. that had been built as a branch of Jonas Long's Sons, another Wilkes-Barre store. Isaac and Jonas Long were brothers.   (The Jonas Long firm apparently fell on hard times, because the original store in Wilkes-Barre also was sold around the same era.) The Dry Goods also greatly expanded over the years, including into the much taller building behind it. In the 1970s, in an attempt not to sound archaic, it rebranded itself "Oppenheim's." But it closed in 1980, apparently still run by Ellis and Richard Oppenheim, sons of the founder. The building is used for offices; here's an appreciation.

Department Store Building of ...PottsVILLE (not town)

Busy times at work and in life... but here's another old department store building, the flat-faced brick one in the center. This one, in Pottsville, Pa., has been reused as a hotel -- as a number have across the nation (for example, the old Maison Blanche Co. store in New Orleans). A Ramada (previously a Treadway, a Travelodge, and a Quality) occupies this property at 100 S. Centre St., the site of a longtime branch of Dives, Pomeroy & Stewart.

Pomeroy's located here around 1900 after the closure of the firm of H. Royer and Son at the same address. The building that's here appears more modern. From the conventions of city directories -- where a change in address from "100-04" to "100-06" means some sort of expansion or rebuilding -- I'd assume this took place in the early 1920s. But I have nothing that actually says that, and the brickfacing on the building seems even more modern than that. Anyone know?

With both the main stores of Pomeroy's, in Harrisburg and Reading, now destroyed, there remain this store, the one on Public Square in Wilkes-Barre, and the former Laubach's store in Easton from the era when Pomeroy's, as the eastern Pennsylvania outpost of Allied Stores, was a name known from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna.

Beer aficionados make pilgrimages to Pottsville to visit Yuengling's. Some fans of nearly forgotten authors may still trek there to remember John O'Hara. Both sites are along Mahantongo Street, which in addition to being nearly unpronounceable offers a short history of Pennsylvania architecture in two miles. Beginning with an old hotel and passing a former coal company office building, a walk up Mahantongo passes typical Pennsylvania two- or three-bay attached houses with single dormers, Philadelphia-style rowhouses with flat roofs, at least one freestanding manor of the late 18th or early 19th centuries, Victorian turrets, bay-window duplexes that wouldn't be out of place in Boston, mansions of the Robber Baron era, 1920s Colonial Revivals, 1950s ranchers, 1960s two-story tract houses, even a 1950s garden apartment complex. before finally coming to an end a half-block beyond that staple of mid-20th-century development, a rounded-end cul-de-sac. Someone who knows far more about architecture than myself could do worse that doing a book on Mahantongo Street, which O'Hara renamed for his fiction as Lantenengo Street, and how it shows in one short walk the progress of residential architecture in the United States, from house styles that would have been familiar to the Founding Fathers to those baby boomers grew up with.

Department Store Building of the ... Pottstown, Part II

Thanks to the two people in western Montgomery County who liked seeing Pottstown's old New York Store mentioned. Although Pottstown had a branch of Pomeroy's, the big Reading-based store, into the 1920s, the other store most people would associate with the city is Ellis Mills of Pottstown Inc., 223 High St., shown here as the white-brick five-bay building at center.

Ellis Mills first appears in Pottstown directories as a dry goods and department store around 1900, although the Montgomery County Historical Society indicates that it was in business far before that. Boston's Jordan Marsh Co. was named for the last names of two men, but Ellis Mills was named for a man named Ellis Mills, a British immigrant.  He had two sons, Charles and William, who took over the business, which also had a location in Reading at 647 Penn St., just east of Pomeroy's main store. (He also had two daughters.) William ran things in Pottstown, and Charles was in charge in Reading. Although Pottstown is officially in suburban Philadelphia, it is closer to Reading and has long been in its orbit. (The tyranny of county boundaries.) The Reading store, separately organized as Ellis Mills of Reading Inc., petered out in the Depression.

Pottstown's Ellis Mills continued on as the upscale department store in town, and became financially associated with Harry F. Armstrong, a now-obscure department store investor based in Schenectady, N.Y. In the 1920s and 1930s there were capitalists -- Earl Knox in Detroit is another -- who backed fledgling department store owners through an interest in their stores, without actually moving to a new city to take charge of them. Armstrong also reorganized a store in Oil City, Pa., into Armstrong-Collier Inc., and was involved at one point in the large network of western Pennsylvania stores in which Sankey Metzler of Uniontown, Pa., had an interest. (It appears his descendants still live in the Capital District. Perhaps one will read this and tell more about this man.) But it remained in the hands of the Mills family -- Roberta Mills was its president for many years -- and closed in 1980.

Department Store Building of the... Let's go to Pottstown

It's rare to find a store that closed a couple of decades ago but still has most of its sign on the building.  One example is the New York Store at 244 High St. in Pottstown, Pa. The store was founded in the early 1920s by Samuel Hoffman and in many of its early years was formally known as the New York Cut Price Department Store. When discounters started to eat department stores' lunch and they tried to react by moving more upscale, it went back to being the New York Store and adjusted its advertising accordingly.

Like a number of Pennsylvania stores -- Leh's in Allentown being the largest -- the store was run as a partnership of the descendants of the founder rather than being organized into a stock corporation. Nathan, Jack, Morris, Pincus, Edward, Harry and Estelle all were involved at one time or another, as was the widow, Rose. The store closed in 1986 and was redeveloped into the New York Plaza, which accounts for the sign's remaining in place with the word "Plaza" replacing "Store." As of this writing, the building appears to be for sale. Only $1.3 million and a former downtown department store can be yours!

You can tell from this photo -- including the false-front aspect of the "modern" storefront at right -- the number of buildings and additions this not-very-large store meandered through. I'm sure modern store executives found the sort of odd layouts most old department stores had -- alleys running through the first floor, steps and ramps to even off the floors in different buildings, strange corridors and passageways leading to obscure departments -- as something to get rid of with pleasure in their new mall stores. I always found them part of the fascination, such as at Pogue's in Cincinnati, with its two buildings connected by a bridge going through the vaulted lobby of an art deco office tower. But then, most shoppers looked at department stores simply as stores and not for aesthetics.

Department Store Building of the ... Golden Triangle (2)

I couldn't get a good screen shot of the former Gimbel Brothers store in downtown Pittsburgh, and this shot of the Joseph Horne Co. store is not all that satisfactory. Horne's in the 1960s had among the most stylish ads in the country, and part of that was that the store name was placed almost as an afterthought: instead of dominating the ad -- the dress or coat or table and the copy would be used surrounded by white space, and down in a corner would appear in sans-serif type, not very large, as if "it would be in poor taste to draw attention to ourselves," a simple

JOSEPH HORNE CO.

Downtown Pittsburgh is oddly sited, and it was always hard for me to understand how it developed with Horne's at 501 Penn Avenue blocks away from Gimbels and Kaufmann's on Smithfield Street. The answer is in Pittsburgh's peculiar geography and where the stores drew their trade from. Unless you're from Pittsburgh or have a map this will probably make no sense, but: downtown Pittsburgh was originally centered on Market Square, at Diamond Street (now Forbes Avenue) and Market Street. Stores spread up and down Market, and then onto Fifth Avenue a half-block north as well as Diamond. Kaufmann's was originally a South Side store, serving the working class, and the Smithfield Street bridge was a main entrance to downtown from the South Side, so when Kaufmann's came downtown it built on Smithfield where it encountered downtown traffic reaching out along Diamond (Forbes) and Fifth.

Horne's, however, was the carriage-trade store, and in the late 19th century much of the carriage trade -- not the super-rich, who lived out past East Liberty, but the upper middle class -- lived on the North Side, in what then was the separate suburb of Allegheny. Allegheny had its own department stores -- one, Boggs & Buhl Co., lasted into the 1950s -- along its main street, Federal Street, which when it crossed the Allegheny River entered Pittsburgh as Sixth Street and eventually turned into Market.  Horne's started out near Sixth Street on Penn, and then moved a block west. Eventually, Market Square, which had been the center of downtown Pittsburgh, lost its prominence. The railroad that ran down Liberty Street and other commuting trails also enter into this, but the strange disconnectedness of Pittsburgh's major department stores in the 1960s came from their placement to dominate the streetcar lines coming across the bridges from very different parts of town.

Department Store Building of the ... Golden Triangle (1)

I prefer to post about obscure stores in smaller cities, but my wife's cousin Larry Stratton, visiting Stover Constitution fellow at Waynesburg College, told me about a recent visit to the Macy's in downtown Pittsburgh, he having just moved to Western Pennsylvania. Before the Great Macyization, of course, this was Kaufmann's Department Store, Fifth Avenue at Smithfield Street, one of America's largest department stores.

Kaufmann's is probably more known for the architectural leadership of Edgar J. Kaufmann, who hired Frank Lloyd Wright for Fallingwater and Richard Neutra for his summer house in Palm Springs, and his son Edgar Jr. In "Merchant Princes," one of the essential department store books, Leon Harris makes clear that Edgar J. was a man much like John F. Kennedy -- terribly handsome, incredibly charming, a connoisseur of the finer things, and randy as a rabbit.

Edgar Kaufmann took control of the family store through both force of personality and marrying his first cousin. This did not sit well with all the Kaufmanns, though. Two, Ludwig and Theodore, decamped to start Kaufmann & Baer Company a block away, which in the mid-1920s was sold to Gimbel Brothers. The Gimbels liked the Kaufmanns, making one manager of their Philadelphia store and keeping another involved in Pittsburgh, but it appears they did not like Ludwig, who went over to Penn Avenue, near Horne's, and opened the Kaufmann-Looby Company.

The vice president of this was Frances Looby, who may have been the Philadelphia woman whose case against her bigamist artist husband drew attention two decades earlier. Frances Looby had been a buyer for Kaufmann & Baer, but nothing seems to indicate that Ludwig's tastes were as wide-ranging as Edgar's.

In an earlier post I wrongly stated that Kaufmann-Looby was sold to Gimbels instead of Kaufmann & Baer. Also, earlier I stated that the Bon-Ton in Lebanon, Pa., seemed to have no connection to the Bon-Ton chain out of York, Pa. Corporately, that is correct; the Lebanon store, formally known as Louis Samler Inc., had no connection to S. Grumbacher & Sons, the York firm. The Lebanon Bon-Ton passed into the hands of Allied Stores very early; the Grumbachers have the Bon-Ton stores even today. And at the time I thought it was so.

But a story published in 2010 in the Lebanon Daily News makes the connection: Samler's wife was a Grumbacher. Still to be determined by me is whether Samler invented the Bon-Ton name, or Max Grumbacher -- or had the father, Samuel Grumbacher, used it in his store in Trenton, N.J.? Anyone know?

Department Store Building of the ... Book

One of the greatest (and most self-conscious) department stores ever, and still operating as a Macy's -- John Wanamaker Philadelphia, at 13th and Market Streets, in the center of this photo. I could tell you about it, but I'd rather you buy Michael J. Lisicky's second department-store book, "Wanamaker's -- Meet Me at the Eagle."

I had the pleasure of listening to Michael on Saturday at one of his Philadelphia appearances and he is as knowledgeable a person on department stores as you will find. His day job? He's a symphony musician. Part of the tale of his first book, on Hutzler Brothers Company in Baltimore, is how he got from point A to point B. Plus he is the designated "answer man" on Jan Whitaker's department store blog, which is linked to over at the left.

If you're interested in department store history, buy his books.

-- Just as an aside: It may be that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is completely happy with WikiLeaks and its release of State Department memos. It may be that he's not. Just in terms of the name, though, it shows again what happens when you create a shiny new car and don't think of what happens when Mayhem jumps up and down above it yelling "Shaky, shaky." The fact that Ward Cunningham used a Hawaiian word for "fast" to create a software program allowing for easy universal updating of text is probably not going to mean much to John Q. Public, who could be perhaps not forgiven but possibly understood if he assumed that Wikipedia somehow was involved in a cabal to bring down world diplomacy and attack America's presumed interests. That doesn't make it more correct or more right than any other stereotyping. (Wonder what people would think today of the old Hollywood hotspot the Garden of Allah?) It is, though, why utopianism never succeeds, although it does have successes along the way while also causing damage. John Q. is not a utopian. John Q. is suspicious, not terribly well informed, and interested in self-preservation above all else.

I haven't forgiven Editor and Publisher for firing Mark Fitzgerald and his staff, but I will support its editorial in the December issue while acknowledging it shows the divide. When the Duncan McIntosh Co. bought E&P after its brief closure, it said it wanted a magazine devoted to the business side of newspapers as opposed to being another editorial review. Its editorial is consistent with that, attacking "self-absorbed 'experts' who most likely have never sold advertising in a depressed economy, negotiated contracts with labor unions, kept pace with evolving technology, or planned for fluctuating newsprint prices -- all the while meeting payroll..." But that is the journalistic dream of the Internet -- where journalism would exist without people worrying about selling advertising, negotiating contracts, etc. Where journalism would be a profession without the barnacles of the newspaper and magazine businesses. Where the individual journalism would never have to compromise because of press deadlines or length restrictions or presumed audience interest. Where we could have a world where nothing would ever be behind the curtain. Where the individual journalist would be as free as WikiLeaks to determine what was in the public good, and present it for the edification of the public.

Fine. But when that curtain comes down, watch out for John Q's reaction.

More About Strawbridge

As noted two posts ago, Philadelphia's Strawbridge & Clothier was one of America's most successful, innovative, and responsive department stores, and remained so under family ownership for more than 130 years. But eventually the cost of staying competitive in the field -- and in the discount field as well with its Clover division -- got too big, and the family sold out. (Beyond my expertise is how the cost of keeping up with vast national chains like Federated and May requires more capital than smaller companies could access based on their lesser cash flow.)

Like any mature business, Strawbridge faced challenges to its continuance every year. A couple are similar to the challenges newspapers have faced and are facing. Strawbridge's responses worked for a while, and while the company disappeared, many of its locations still are successful department stores under the Macy's name, so it's not that the business model of the store was bad, just the business model of the company.

As Alfred Lief notes in "Family Business," after World War II price competition increased, "resulting from improved production in many lines. Theoretically, lower levels were good for business because they were good for the public, ushering in better values; and from a financial standpoint it could mean lower capital requirements." This isn't quite the disruptive change of the Internet, but it touches on the same issue. Cheaper costs should be good for business because they allow you to lower your price and spend less on capital, so for a newspaper the need to not buy presses or paper should be good for it and its customers. "But too much of a good thing was always unhealthy." Get to a point where there's too much competition with too little capital investment needed, and established business founders. It can do nothing else. It can't make the past go away.

More important was that sales volume at the giant downtown store -- which had been expanded in the 1930s to handle its tremendous and growing business -- was now falling off. (Read: The massive pressrooms built during the height of classified and insert growth in the 1990s.) Disruptive change -- the postwar suburban push -- had made people less inclined to take a longer drive or train trip to go shopping. Yes, Strawbridge and Wanamakers might have better merchandise than was found at E.J. Korvette or Shoppers Fair -- but was it that much better to make the trip worthwhile, except for special occasions such as Christmas shopping or buying a party dress? Sort of like only buying a newspaper when your team wins the World Series. But while you can run a bridal shop on special occasions, you can't run a department store.

So Strawbridge went to the suburbs, opening stores throughout the Philadelphia area. This is somewhat the same as metro newspapers' response to suburbanization -- creating Neighbors sections. It was different in that Neighbors was more of a boutique than a branch. But the point was usually the same -- to try to follow one's customers' out to the suburbs and keep them from going to suburban rivals there.

Because department stores were department stores, those rivals were seen as -- other department stores. While department stores recognized that their customers increasingly were going to Kmart, they apparently thought it was only because a major department store wasn't close enough. Thus, when Strawbridge's was the motive force behind opening Cherry Hill Mall in 1962 as the prototype (Correction: Off by one -- see comments) for all of today's enclosed malls, the aim was to not re-create downtown Philadelphia with its (now down to) four department stores. As Lied writes, Strawbridge "proposed Bambergers of Newark as an acceptable neighbor... This development prompted Wanamakers and Gimbels to make a defensive move. They paired off the next year in a shopping center at Moorestown, New Jersey, about five miles east."

In the short run, this was fine, and Cherry Hill -- which eventually grew to include a Penney's as well -- was one of the marvels of the age and remains one of the East Coast's most important shopping destinations, with a Crate & Barrel, a Nordstrom, and a Container Store joining Macy's and Penney's. While it and similar stores in Springfield, King of Prussia, and elsewhere kept Strawbridge's going, they didn't address the discounter problem. This Strawbridge did, of course, with the Clover division, just as the Dayton Co. of Minneapolis did with Target. Eventually, of course, Dayton Hudson sold off its department stores and just kept Target. Would Strawbridge's have eventually just become Clover? Probably not, because it didn't have the resources to compete with national companies in either venue.

Strawbridge's recognized what was happening, as noted by these sentences bringing to mind the multiplatform moves (internal and external) of newspapers: "The future business of Strawbridge & Clothier would be carried on and directed in mutiple locations. In order to be able to run a multi-store operation, the organization would have to be restructured." In the short run, Strawbridge's did well. In the long run, though, its days were numbered.

What did Strawbridge's in was that it was competing with national chains (May Co., Federated, and Macy's at the end in department stores, Walmart and Target in discounters) that could outdo it when size and breadth were the issue, and competing with an incredible multiplicity of small stores that could outdo it in the personal service it once offered but could no longer afford because it was having to cut costs to compete with the national chains.

But could it have transformed itself into a surviving boutique organization? Doubtful. The "Strawbridge" name stood for a classy department store, just as the same of, say, the Omaha World-Herald stands for a newspaper. To make it stand for a small jewelry boutique -- doubtful. Loyalists would be miffed, and jewelry buyers would not care. They might still totally go to Jared.

So the problem for newspapers may be that in the end, there's not much you can do if your world falls apart. That's less hopeful than I usually try to be, but it wasn't bad management or resisting the customers that put an end to Strawbridge & Clothier. Strawbridge just didn't fit into the world anymore. That doesn't mean that there still aren't department stores, just as changes in communication don't mean that there won't be newspapers. But perhaps they will be print editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for those who are willing to pay for them -- produced in ways that spread the overhead around nationally -- and a bunch of weeklies or local replacements as news boutiques, with the Internet as Walmart. The thing is that in the end, that doesn't matter that much for the consumer, who may even be happier with the arrangement. Whom it matters for, other than the people who lose their jobs, is those who remember how great it was to shop at a store like Strawbridge & Clothier, and feel a loss in their lives.

Department Store Building of the ...

History gives us enough lessons of how you can do most things right and still disappear. Here in Philadelphia, we had such a department store, and it's not the one people who just know stores by reputation might think of.

Strawbridge & Clothier did not have the national panache of John Wanamaker for a number of reasons: 1) Wanamaker helped create the modern department store in terms of size and advertising, while also serving as postmaster; 2) the S&C main store didn't have the Eagle and the pipe organ and wasn't dedicated by a sitting president of the United States; 3) the Strawbridge main store was located at Eighth and Market Streets, where two of the city's mass-market department stores, Gimbels and Lits, also were; 4) Strawbridge throughout its life was a Quaker-run company, not prone to the Grand Gesture.

But as the history of Strawbridge (as recounted in "Family Business" by Alfred Lief, one of the essential histories of department stores) from the 1920s onward is one of constantly seeing the horizon and trying to reach it. Early moves such as the Clover Days sales and establishing a book department by buying the retail store of publisher J.B. Lippincott were just part of it.

Before the Depression, department stores may have operated in more than one downtown (such as Pomeroy's in Pennsylvania), but branch stores, outside of operations in resort hotels, were basically confined to some of the New York stores, Marshall Field's in Chicago, and Bullock's in Los Angeles. Strawbridge decided to join this group in 1929 by opening a store at Suburban Square, one of the first suburban shopping developments, on the Main Line. It followed up immediately with a store just north of Jenkintown, which -- like Bullock's Wilshire -- recognized that future customers would largely be arriving by car and provided, for the time, adequate parking.

After World War II, Strawbridge saw the downtown store's sales volume declining as 15 years of depression and war shifted into the suburban boom of modern houses for new families. It reacted aggressively, locating branches wherever it saw a combination of an established middle-class hub and new development nearby. After opening freestanding branches, it moved into South Jersey with the first truly "enclosed mall" shopping center, the prototype for a genre that has taken over the world. It saw the growth of discounters and established the Clover division. Recognizing the drain its massive downtown store was becoming, it worked with city officials to try to revitalize Market Street and made sure the store was attached to the new downtown mall. It continually tried to find the line between being a fashion store and a store for everyone.

And yet, after the company fought off a hostile takeover bid in 1986 and incurred a loss in 1995 after a failed bid to buy Wanamakers, the Strawbridge and Clothier families -- which still ran the business after 145 years -- decided it was in the best interest of the shareholders to get out, selling to May Company. The business was no longer profitable, and it was time to fold before the value of the goodwill started to evaporate. May Company kept the name Strawbridge's until the Great Macyization.

A second post will look at, as before, the parallels between the department store and newspaper businesses. Let one quote suffice for now. In 1941 business had been bad for years and the family was split about what to do. J. Clayton Strawbridge opposed the recapitalization plan presented by president Herbert Tily. In response, Frederick Strawbridge, son of cofounder Justus Strawbridge, said to Clayton, as Lief quotes:

"It is a very healthy thing to bring this out in the open, but rather presumptive for thee to tell older men about the goodwill of the business."

Thus sayeth the aged Quaker, his hand still on the tiller in a business that was ahead of nearly all of its rivals locally and nationally in recognizing changes in consumer behavior, but saying, await thy turn, what knowest thou? More to come soon.

In the picture above, the main Strawbridge store is both the large building and the smaller one to its left. Strawbridge downtown, which was completely rebuilt in the 1930s, may have been the last downtown department store built in the old style (with windows); or that might have been Loveman's in Birmingham or some store I've never seen, but those that followed or were contemporaneous, such as Cain-Sloan in Nashville or Herpolsheimer's in Grand Rapids, were clearly from the modern playbook. The little building to the left was part of the old Strawbridge store and was briefly the entire main store while the old building at Eighth and Market was torn down and replaced with what's seen above.

Old Department Store Building of the (Week), New Series Vol. 2

New Castle, Pa., is one of those places that clearly was once a Big Deal and has become less of one as industry has moved elsewhere. The main floor of the New Castle News building, for example, reflects not only the onetime grandeur of the newspaper business but the economic prowess of New Castle. If you're ever there, walk in and check it out.

Before the depression, New Castle had many department stores -- Brown & Hamilton, Clendenin's, Stritmater Bros., and the entertainingly named J.N. Euwer's Sons' Sons. None of these made it out of the Depression. John Stillman, creator of the Interstate Department Stores chain of lower-end department stores from central Pennsylvania into Indiana and Michigan, had his first department store in New Castle before relocating to Fort Wayne. After the Depression, the Strouss-Hirshberg Co. of Youngstown, Ohio, moved into an old furniture store for a department-store branch, and New Castle also was home to the Fisher Bros. Dry Goods chain, a low-end operation that had many stores in western Pennsylvania from the 1940s through the 1970s.

But the longest-lived department store in downtown New Castle was the New Castle Dry Goods Co., at 253 E. Washington St., which was operated by the Boston Store in Erie. What made the survival of what was known as the New Castle Store even more interesting was that it was by itself across a river from the main part of downtown. The store grew out of R.S. McCulloch & Co. and took its place in the mid-1910s. When the Boston Store became part of the Allied Stores operations, the New Castle store eventually was made part of Allied's Troutman division based in Greensburg.

Return to: Old Department Store Building of the (Week)

When times got overwhelming last year I stopped doing looks at old department stores -- stopping, I believe, in Lancaster, Pa., with Watt & Shand. In recent weeks I've encountered people who were fans of that feature, so I'm going to bring it back. I wanted to do so with Lebanon, Pa., home of what I believe is the first Bon-Ton store in Pennsylvania -- and one that had nothing to do with the long-lived chain still operating out of York, Pa. -- but alas, both it and the competing Haak Bros. appear to have been torn down.

So here's a look at Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, Pa. To the immediate left of what clearly was a big store, occuping about five buildings, is a much littler red-brick store. (Yes, the really little one.) This store, at 519 Fifth, was Helmstadter Bros., the last surviving locally owned downtown department store in this city best known for steel tubing. Helmstadter's was in a larger store two blocks west of this until the late Depression years.

McKeesport had a very strung-out downtown. It was four blocks west from here to what was its largest store, the Famous Store, and the main hotel was even farther west of that. The Famous Store was owned by a group of Pittsburgh merchants named Weil, Goldsmith, and Katz. When they retired, they sold it to a local discount chain called Misco, under whose operation it quickly closed. The much smaller Helmstadter's kept going into a second generation of family ownership.

McKeesport is a very odd place in terms of its physical layout. The downtown was adjacent to the tube works, and then a good bit away, up a hill, was the library and some large churches -- it almost felt like a different city. Neighborhoods changed from blue-collar to managerial almost in mid-block. Also, it has a long street named Jenny Lind Avenue. It's hard to get a sense of McKeesport as a whole.

Notice now the larger store in the photo above. This was the main store of the G.C. Murphy Co., one of the largest dime-store chains. Murphy's, like Grant's, aimed to be one step above Woolworth's and Kresge's, but was probably still one step below Newberry's.

For me, growing up, going to the dime store meant Murphy's, as they had stores in downtown Indianapolis, in Broad Ripple and at Glendale Center. My grandmother would buy chicken parts for frying there. I remember the Double K nut stands as well, with their revolving trays and heat lights, and the birds and hamsters on sale. Other than chicken, AMF and Revell car model sets, and things like needles, I can't remember if we actually bought anything at Murphy's, but even though there were a Grant's, a Kresge's, and two Woolworth's downtown, along with a local chain called Danner's all around town, we only traded with Murphy's in the dime-store category. (We didn't have Kress, or Green's, but how much of the decline of downtowns was related to the vast amount of space vacated by dime stores as they moved to strip centers and then fell before discounters?)

Not that this matters to anyone else, but it was exciting for me to walk by this building and see that, even though vacant, it still bore signs saying it was the headquarters of the G.C. Murphy Co. I suddenly wanted fried chicken and cashews.

Department Store Building of the...

I do like to post pictures and buildings of more obscure stores, because their histories are often unheralded, but my wife's cousin Larry Stratton, visiting Stover Constitutional fellow at Waynesburg College and thus a new resident of western Pennsylvania, mentioned that he had been at Macy's in downtown Pittsburgh recently. That survivor of the Great Macyization, of course, is the former Kaufmann's Department Store, below, at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, famous as much for the architectural patronage of Edgar Kaufmann and his son Edgar Jr. at Fallingwater and in Palm Springs as for its own prominence on the department store scene and its building, one of America's largest department stores.

One of the essential books on department stores is "Merchant Princes" by Leon Harris, scion of A. Harris & Co. in Dallas, which goes into great detail on Edgar Kaufmann, who reads as somewhat of a Jack Kennedy type figure -- incredibly handsome, terrifically ambitious, a connoisseur of the fine things in life, and incurably horny, sort of a type-AAA personality. Kaufmann drove out of the store those relatives who didn't support him, partly by marrying his first cousin, which gave him a controlling interest. Unlike in most families, they all didn't go quietly. Ludwig and Theodore Kaufmann showed their displeasure by opening a competing department store,  Kaufmann & Baer Co., a block away on Smithfield. In 1926, Kaufmann & Baer was sold to Gimbel Brothers, which liked not only the store but the Kaufmann family -- one member was installed as manager of Gimbels in Philadelphia, another stayed with Gimbels in Pittsburgh. It appears, though, that the Gimbels did not like Ludwig Kaufmann, who, undaunted, moved over to Penn Avenue and brought forth yet another department store, Kaufmann-Looby Company. (A much earlier post had Kaufmann-Looby becoming Gimbels, and has been corrected.)

Frances Looby had been a buyer for Kaufmann & Baer, and may have been a Philadelphia native betrayed in 1907 by her bigamist husband, a painter named Eugene Jones. Or she may not have -- the wonders of the Internet do not include obscure officials of long-ago department stores. Ludwig Kaufmann, who ends up being part of the interrelationship of the Gimbel and Guggenheim families, died in 1957 in Pittsburgh without any reference to any relationship other than professional with Frances Looby. But Ludwig's timing was off this time; the Depression hit, Kaufmann-Looby disappeared, and Ludwig built no more.

--

Another correction. An earlier post mentioned the Bon-Ton in Lebanon, Pa., and noted it was separate from the Bon-Ton stores owned by the Grumbacher family out of York, Pa. This is true. What I did not know at the time was that Louis Samler, owner of the Lebanon Bon-Ton, was married to a Grumbacher. This article from March 2010 in the Lebanon Daily News makes the connection clear. There was no business connection -- the Lebanon store early passed into the hands of Allied Stores and eventually became a Pomeroy's -- and I still do not know which was the first to use the name "Bon-Ton."

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 30

Wood, Morrell & Co. was the "company store" for the steelworks in Johnstown, Pa. The building basically survived the great flood, which Daniel Morrell had had intimations of happening. If you've never read David McCullough's "The Johnstown Flood," it's entertaining and blessedly short, and also goes into great detail about a department store owner named Quinn.

After the flood, the store was gradually separated from its company-store relationship and established as a publicly held company in 1903. But earlier, its name had been changed to Penn Traffic Co. for reasons that, as near as I can tell, have never been explained. I once spent time in the Johnstown library going through newspapers for the weeks before and after the name change, hoping that an ad or a news story would explain the name "Penn Traffic." None did. One day it was Wood, Morrell & Co.; the next, it was Penn Traffic, and that was that. It may have been the oddest name of any traditional U.S. department store, although Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution in Salt Lake City and the City of Paris Dry Goods Co. in San Francisco would give it a run for its money.

Penn Traffic never moved from its company-store location, though, on Washington Street a few blocks from Johnstown's Main Street. In this it also was singular; Kline's, Thomas' and Nathan's were on Main, Glosser's a short distance away. The isolation of the store is clear from the photo above. Not many cities had outlier department stores, ones that clearly were downtown but just as clearly were not and had never been on a main shopping street; Alms & Doepke in Cincinnati comes most prominently to mind, and Jordan Marsh's main Miami store. (Another category was big department stores that were based in neighborhoods, such as Schuster's in Milwaukee and Sattler's in Buffalo.)

Johnstown recovered from the flood but never really went anywhere after that; Penn Traffic had the same sort of career until it went into the grocery business, where it had great success. It eventually sold its department stores to Hess's, but kept its headquarters in the old downtown store until moving to Syracuse. A 1994 biography of the company is here.

Penn Traffic early went into branches outside the city, its earliest ones being in DuBois and Indiana, Pa. If memory serves, the Bon-Ton store in State College was opened as a Penn Traffic.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 29

Bowman's Department Store, at 314 Market St., was one of Harrisburg's two downtown department stores. It and Pomeroy's, the larger store, were located nearly adjacent to each other on Market Street, up which commerce had moved when it outgrew all being on Market Square on Second Street. You can't see it in this photo, but there is a large "B" on the front of the building.

Pomeroy's building is gone (it was where the new tall building is at the top of the photo), as is the main Pomeroy store in Reading, but the Bowman building still is there. There originally were Bowman brothers. One, Samuel, split off and kept the branch store in Carlisle, which also was known as Bowman's but for most of its career was run by Albert Watson, who was not a Bowman but bought the store and kept the name. John Bowman ended up with the Harrisburg store, which went down through his family -- sons William and Harry (yes, perhaps the Bowmans inspired Prince Charles), and descendants Russell Charles and John Delaney.

Bowman's from the 1950s opened suburban stores, such as one at the east end of Harrisburg near the end of Market Street, as well as expanding to other cities. In the mid-1950s it purchased Bittner's Department Store in Sunbury, Pa., and created a division called Bowman's Sunbury Inc., which not only ran a small department store in Danville, Pa., but also had a suburban branch in Sunbury -- impressive in a town of about 15,000 people. The branch bore the wonderful 1950s name "Bowman's Fashionalia." In the late 1960s, the chain picked up the S.S. Weiss Inc. store in Pottsville as well. But like most independent department stores, it became noncompetitive when the enclosed malls opened -- Harrisburg became a target of the large Philadelphia stores, such as Wanamakers and Gimbels, and while the Allied Stores-owned Pomeroy's could soldier on, the writing was on the wall for Bowman's.

In some ways, stores such as Bowman's, Wasson's in Indianapolis, and the Interstate chain of myriad Grand Leaders and Stillman's paid the price for being too quick with suburban stores -- they opened branches long before their rivals, in an effort to compete with discount stores in a car-oriented America, but then were already committed to locations and strategy before it became apparent that enclosed regional megamalls were the shopping location of choice in the 1970s and 1980s. In Indianapolis, Wasson's Eastgate-Eagledale-Meadows branch system looked OK even with there not being a Wasson's store at upscale Glendale, but when Lafayette Square, the city's first enclosed mall, opened a mile from Eagledale, it was over. (Newspapers, of course, were, despite the rap, early and enthusiastic in their attempts to make use of the Internet -- but their portal-based strategy did not adapt well to links and search. You can get to the party too early.)

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 28

The Bon-Ton is still an active department store chain today and is still run by the Grumbacher family. The store began in Trenton, N.J., under its longtime corporate name, S. Grumbacher & Son. The son -- Max -- quickly relocated to York, Pa. (there was some connection between Trenton and York, as the Hydeman family owned Yard's in Trenton and Wiest's in York). Max named his store "The Bon Ton," which means both "the smart thing to do" and "the social elite." This was actually the name Louis Samler was already using for his store in Lebanon, Pa., but no matter. Research!

The Bon Ton initially expanded in the 19teens, but those branch stores either closed or were sold to their managers -- the longest-lived lasted in Hazleton, Pa., into the 1960s. Thereafter the Grumbacher empire consisted of the York store and Eyerly's in Hagerstown, Md., until in the late 1940s Max Grumbacher, Jr., started looking for new opportunities. There was no strong local department store in Hanover, a city in the same county known for its shoes; all the stores that had been there had closed. Grumbacher came into the market, but he didn't use a former department store building, he went in at a new site right at the heart of Center Square. This success led to a Eyerly's in downtown Chambersburg, Pa., and a Bon Ton in downtown Carlisle, Pa., in the 1960s, as well as the purchase of the McMeen store in Lewistown, Pa. And then came the mall boom, and Bon Tons started opening up across Pennsylvania, Maryland and beyond. But this store was the first in the Bon Ton's second wave of expansion.

Hanover offers a clear link between department stores and newspapers. Until the Depression, one of its leading stores was J.W. Gitt Co., founded before the Civil War by Josiah W. Gitt. The Battle of Gettysburg was not kind to him, but he prospered and sold his business to his sons. His grandson, also Josiah W., went into the newspaper business. Although he always lived in Hanover, he published the York Gazette & Daily, which during the McCarthy era became known as possibly the most left-wing daily in the country short of the Daily Worker.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 25

A post on Butler mentioned the history of the Troutman Co.; for anyone who grew up in western Pennsylvania, this is the main store of the Troutman's they would have known, at 202 S. Main St. in Greensburg.

Two things of note. One, Greensburg never got above 20,000 population, so this is a very large store for a town of that size (it's the five-story building on the corner, the two-or-three story addition behind it, and the five-story yellow-brick windowless structure leading off to the right behind the red-brick buildings). Greensburg was the shopping center for a large region east of Pittsburgh -- Jeannette, Irwin, Ligonier, a bunch of resort and coal towns -- and it had a similarly oversize newspaper, the Tribune-Review, progenitor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. But even so, this was a large department store for a city of 20,000 people; a store of this size typically would be located in a city of 50,000 to 100,000.

Second, note how much of the store is the later addition, and the style of those buildings shows them to have been added long after the original, classic store was built in 1923; the building to the south on Main Street clearly is post-World War II vintage, the part toward the back, known as the "Troutman Annex," was built in the 1960s. Obviously business needs demanded it; yet a decade later, malls had taken over and downtown department stores were trying to desperately cut back space. I'm thinking of an analogy to the massive printing and inserting facilities newspapers built in the 1990s and early 2000s, plants that look like white elephants today for many publications.

Many downtown department stores such as Troutman's built expansion wings into the 1960s -- one was even built in downtown Gary, Ind., a concept ("downtown Gary") that barely existed in the 1970s, for H. Gordon & Sons, which also had ceased to exist. Business was expanding, but just as important, the amount of merchandise was rapidly expanding as a result of postwar prosperity, cheaper imports and new production methods; instead of having a counter with 10 wallet styles, one now had to have a hundred.

The department stores tried to keep up, but as noted earlier, specialty retailers in appliances and young people's clothing started to chip away, leaving the department stores with a still-substantial clientele but not one that was large enough to cover their fixed costs; as they cut back, they gave people less and less reason to come in. Add to that the lack of free parking and lessened use of buses, the customer's increasing unwillingness to search out a department on the fifth floor when a similar store could be driven to, and in many places an increased fear of crime, and the store expansion that had been a sure bet a decade earlier now was just dead weight. It's not a revolutionary change that gets you; it's two or three together that mean that any response you make to one simply hurts you in another area. (Downtown department stores still exist in New York, Boston, Philadelphia -- albeit much lessened -- because people still live downtown there and, more important, take mass transit, meaning that their first concern when going shopping is not where to put the car.)

Similarly, those mammoth newspaper production plants were absolutely needed to handle the volume of business in the 1990s; but once that is your production process, and the volume of business is not there, you're just paying for dead space, like the upper floors of department stores that were no longer used for selling but still had to be heated, maintained, guarded against fire.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 24

As noted in a previous post on Bethlehem, Orr's Department Store was the other main downtown department store in Easton, Pa. As the photo shows, Orr's -- the front of the store is the red-brick building in the center, 306 Northampton St. -- meandered through a number of buildings (the two buildings behind it and slightly to the right). I always liked stores that clearly had been cobbled together. Shopping on the upper floors H.& S. Pogue Co. in Cincinnati involved circuituous paths and the occasional step or ramp where the buildings did not line up well. I am sure Pogue's saw this as a negative, but it was certainly unique. I remember that when one went into Orr's, it seemed incredibly small, because of the narrowness of the original store and the small space in front of the elevators (it was, what, maybe 10 feet wide at that point?). Gilmore Bros. in Kalamazoo was similar in having a small street frontage that expanded as you went further back.

Orr's was started by Matthew Orr and passed into the hands of his widow, who sold it to the Bixler family, which continued to operate it into the late 20th century. Orr's also had a shopping-center store across the river from Easton in Phillipsburg, N.J., but the main store never moved from its original site. I know there was an entrance off Center Square (seen at the left of the photo) as well, but that seems to have been taken down in redevelopment.

Here's a postcard view of Northampton Street in its heyday. All you can see of Orr's, of course, is the sign. In those days Easton was the shopping center not only for the Slate Belt towns around Bangor, Pa., but also for small towns in rural Hunterdon and Warren counties in New Jersey. It is best known today for two products -- the boxer Larry Holmes and Crayola. The Route 22 expressway made all three of the Lehigh Valley towns (Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton) into one connected metro area, and so it is seen by many today as sort of an appendage to Allentown, although Easton has tried to establish itself as the western edge of metropolitan New York from time to time.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 23

William Laubach & Sons was the large department store in Easton, Pa., and for a long-lived department store it had a very placid life. Founded in 1860, it remained in the 300 block of Northampton Street for nearly its entire life, and remained in the hands of the Laubach family until 1947, when it was sold to Allied Stores. Allied operated it as a separate division up until the early 1960s, when it was merged into the Pomeroy's chain Allied operated throughout Eastern Pennsylvania.

A fuller biography of the Laubach store is here. Laubach's was the sort of successful community institution no one ever thought would just go away -- five or six generations shopped there.

Similarly, its building is representative of 19th-century commercial structures. The one oddity to note is the four-story tower at the back of the building -- was it warehousing, or does it date from the time when department stores made their own ready-to-wear clothing in house?