Buffumsīuffums - which also once had and lost an apostrophe - was a Long Beach-based store that set itself up in business in 1904 and in time opened more than a dozen branches from San Diego to Glendale. The Petersen Automotive Museum stands on the site now. It closed two years later because, an executive VP explained, to keep going, it had to “carry merchandise that weakened the identity” of its Japanese brand. As for the “Fifth Avenue of the West,” it was for a time so promising that in 1962, the Japanese department store Seibu opened a branch at Wilshire and Fairfax. The store’s true entrance wasn’t on Wilshire but through the drive-up porte-cochere behind the store, its ceiling ornamented with a mural called “The Spirit of Transportation.” And future First Lady Pat Nixon, as a college student, was a Bullocks Wilshire assistant buyer (phone number Fitzroy 5212). The vendeuses, as chic as their Parisian counterparts, once included young Angela Lansbury. It carried the most opulent lines of clothing and luxury goods in the world, and even the impoverished hoi polloi like me could walk around its vitrines with the appreciation you’d give to a museum, which is how carefully the objects were displayed. Magnin, made off with fixtures from the historically significant 1929 building, and had to bring 166 of them back. It was the most sublimely elegant and beautiful department store in California, as proved when, years in the future, the new owner, Northern California Macy’s/I. The most spectacular was Bullocks Wilshire, an Art Deco masterpiece and the surviving anchor building for the pre-World War II glamorous Miracle Mile shopping district - its developer longed for it to become the “Fifth Avenue of the West.”Īt some point in the 1970s, its name lost the apostrophe used by its lesser sisters. Perhaps the department store name most associated with L.A., the first store opened in 1907 downtown, and in time Bullock’s had about a score of stores across Southern California, including the Pasadena and Westwood stores, which crafted their own clothing labels. The back of this postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection says that Bullock’s Wilshire is “where the elite of Hollywood and Beverly go to shop.” One new librarian, according to the city library’s own history, “was shocked to hear the elevator operators call out the library floors between the women’s wear and the furniture.” The library moved in 1913 to another rented space, but not before a young medical student who came in through the Hamburger’s entrance managed to smuggle an entire set of medical encyclopedias out of the library. Those same aristocrats were at that point evidently too cheap to promote a purpose-built, publicly owned library building, so L.A.’s public library opened on the third floor of Hamburger’s in 1908. It reminds me of Marshall Fields in Chicago or Wanamaker’s in N.Y.” - music to the ears of L.A.’s commercial aristocrats. On an undated and unsent vintage postcard of the store, someone wrote in fine script, “This is our largest Department Store. Hamburger and Sons, originally “The People’s Store.” What was founded in 1881 as a modest general store on Main Street, with the novelty of no-haggling prices, soon had a stupendous five-story, half-block footprint. The immense, and immensely popular Hamburger’s, and A. eventually published the Washington Post - as did his daughter, Katharine Graham. His son, Eugene Meyer Jr., was born here, and Meyer Jr. His bookkeeper/clerk and future partner, Eugene Meyer Sr., had come here from France and later took over the firm, renamed it the City of Paris, and sold it around 1883. The City of Paris department store, begun in the rough-and-ready 1850s as S. And if you think we are “over-stored” now, to use a market analysis phrase from the 1980s, consider the downtown shopping-scape of the 1880s and beyond, most of them clustered in the few blocks around 7th Street and Broadway. With the boom of the 1880s that inflated the city’s profile and standard of living, Los Angeles’ muckety-mucks wanted all that big, sophisticated cities had on offer too, and the great department store era was on. Dry goods stores, the forerunner of department stores, flourished too. Food and drink stores naturally came first the earliest Ralphs grocery opened in 1873 in downtown, and Albert Cohn operated several branches of his fancy food shops.
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