 Illustration from 1905 article in the Los Angeles Herald announcing the opening of the "Fifth Street Store" | |
| Company type | Privately-held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Clothing |
| Founded | 1905 in Los Angeles, USA |
| Defunct | 1978 |
| Fate | Locations merged into Ohrbach's, Milliron's Westchester, or Walker Scott |
Area served | California, USA |
The Fifth Street Store was a major department store in Los Angeles opened in 1905.
The official name of the company and store changed many times:
It was located at the southwest corner of Fifth and Broadway.
The company replaced the building with a new eight-story store completed in 1924. From 1925 the store began to advertise as Walkers — co-founder Ralf (R. M.) Walker would later found what would be San Diego's largest department store chain, Walker Scott. In 1946 it changed its name to Milliron's. The Broadway Department Store purchased the store in 1950 and closed it in 1956, when Ohrbach's bought it in August 1953. The store underwent a $1,000,000 remodel by Welton Becket, architect, and reopened in November 1953 as Ohrbach's-Downtown. [4] Ohrbach's closed its branch and sold the building in 1959. [5] The building still exists and consists of loft condominium (Shybary Grand Lofts, 312 W. Fifth St.) with retail on the ground floor. [6]
Milliron's Westchester opened on March 17, 1949, [7] designed by prominent retail architect Victor Gruen and cost $3,000,000 to build. [7] The grand opening was a large event and the architecture - with its straight lines combined with large curves at the angles; its triangular window displays jutting out from the store; and the deck to its rooftop parking deck – was considered a landmark in retail architecture. [8] [9] [10] The store was sold shortly afterwards, in June 1950, to The Broadway. [11]
Walkers/Walker's opened their first branch store in Downtown Long Beach at 4th and Pine - Pine being the main shopping artery - in 1933. Meyer and Holler designed the 1928 art deco building. [12] In 1952, they spent $300,000 to expand to 132,000 sq ft (12,300 m2), adding 5 escalators, more than the total number of escalators in Long Beach at the time. Walker's Long Beach opened a second Long Beach store at Los Altos Center in 1954 which it sold to The Broadway shortly thereafter in 1956. [13] [14] Walker's sold its Downtown Long Beach store in 1960, but it continued to operate as Walker's until 1978.
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Walker's opened a branch store in Downtown San Diego in 1935, which separated in the early 1950s and became Walker Scott. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29]
Broadway Stores, Inc., was an American retailer based in Southern California. Known through its history as Carter Hawley Hale Stores and Broadway Hale Stores over time, it acquired other retail store chains in regions outside its California home base and became in certain retail sectors a regional and national retailer in the 1970s and 1980s. The company was able to survive takeover attempts in 1984 and 1986, and also a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 1991 by selling off most of its assets until August 1995 when its banks refused to advance enough additional credit in order for the company to be able to pay off suppliers. At that point, the company sold itself to Federated Department Stores for $1.6 billion with the acquisition being completed on October 12, 1995.
Ohrbach's was a moderate-priced department store with a merchandising focus primarily on clothing and accessories. From its modest start in 1923 until the chain's demise in 1987, Ohrbach's expanded dramatically after World War II, and opened numerous branch locations in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Its original flagship store was located on Union Square in New York City. It maintained administrative offices in Newark and in Los Angeles. The retailer closed the Newark offices in the 1970s. Paul László designed the Union Square store as well as many of their other stores.
Broadway, until 1890 Fort Street, is a thoroughfare in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The portion of Broadway from 3rd to 9th streets, in the Historic Core of Downtown Los Angeles, was the city's main commercial street from the 1910s until World War II, and is the location of the Broadway Theater and Commercial District, the first and largest historic theater district listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). With twelve movie palaces located along a six-block stretch of Broadway, it is the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the United States.
Thrifty PayLess Holdings, Inc. was a pharmacy holding company that owned the Thrifty Drugs and PayLess Drug Stores chains in the western United States. The combined company was formed in April 1994 when Los Angeles–based TCH Corporation, the parent company of Thrifty Corporation and Thrifty Drug Stores, Inc., acquired the Kmart subsidiary PayLess Drug Stores Northwest, Inc. At the time of the merger, TCH Corporation was renamed Thrifty PayLess Holdings, Inc. and Thrifty operated 495 stores, PayLess operated 543 stores.
Bullock's was a chain of full-line department stores from 1907 through 1995, headquartered in Los Angeles, growing to operate across California, Arizona and Nevada. Bullock's also operated as many as seven more upscale Bullocks Wilshire specialty department stores across Southern California. Many former Bullock's locations continue to operate today as Macy's.
The Broadway was a mid-level department store chain headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1896 by English-born Arthur Letts Sr., and named after what was once the city's main shopping street, the Broadway became a dominant retailer in Southern California and the Southwest. Its fortunes eventually declined, and Federated Department Stores bought the chain in 1995. In 1996, Broadway stores were either closed or converted into Macy's and Bloomingdales.
May Company California was an American chain of department stores operating in Southern California and Nevada, with headquarters in North Hollywood, California. It was a subsidiary of May Department Stores and merged with May's other Southern California subsidiary, J. W. Robinson's, in 1993 to form Robinsons-May.
Buffums, originally written as Buffums' with an apostrophe, was a chain of upscale department stores, headquartered in Long Beach, California. The Buffums chain began in 1904, when two brothers from Illinois, Charles A. and Edwin E. Buffum, together with other partners, bought the Schilling Bros., the largest dry goods store in Long Beach, and renamed it The Mercantile Co. The store grew to a large downtown department store, and starting in the 1950s, grew slowly over the years to be a small regional chain of 16 speciality department stores across Southern California at the time of its closure in 1990.
Hill Street is a major north–south thoroughfare in Los Angeles, measuring 4.8 miles (7.7 km) in length. It starts on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard near the campus of USC, and passes north through Downtown Los Angeles, past such landmarks as Pershing Square, the Subway Terminal Building, Angels Flight, Fort Moore and Chinatown. Hill Street merges with the Arroyo Seco Parkway near Dodger Stadium.
The May Company Building on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, a.k.a. Hamburgers/May Company Department Store and the May Department Store Building, later known as the California Broadway Trade Center, was the flagship store of the May Company California department store chain. It is a contributing property to the NRHP-listed Broadway Theater and Commercial District.
Akron Stores or The Akron was a Southern California–based imported goods and home decorating department store retail chain established in 1947 and was known to carry unusual merchandise, mostly imports. The chain had over 24 stores throughout Southern California from San Diego to San Francisco before it was forced to close in 1985.
Desmond's was a Los Angeles–based department store, during its existence second only to Harris & Frank as the oldest Los Angeles retail chain, founded in 1862 as a hat shop by Daniel Desmond near the Los Angeles Plaza. The chain as a whole went out of business in 1981 but Desmond's, Inc. continued as a company that went in to other chains to liquidate them. Desmond's stores in Northridge and West Covina were liquidated only in 1986 and survived in Palm Springs into the first years of the 21st century.
Los Altos Center is a regional shopping mall in the Los Altos area of northeastern Long Beach, California along Bellflower Boulevard, 4 miles south of Lakewood Center Mall and 5 miles east of Downtown Long Beach.
7th Street is a street in Los Angeles, California running from S. Norton Ave in Mid-Wilshire through Downtown Los Angeles. It goes all the way to the eastern city limits at Indiana Ave., and the border between Boyle Heights, Los Angeles and East Los Angeles.
Milliron's Westchester, later The Broadway-Westchester, was a department store at 8739 S. Sepulveda Blvd., in Westchester, Los Angeles, designed by architect Victor Gruen. Its original design was considered a landmark in exterior architecture of retail stores, although much of the original design is no longer present. The building now houses a Kohl's.
Retail in Southern California dates back to its first dry goods store that Jonathan Temple opened in 1827 on Calle Principal, when Los Angeles was still a Mexican village. After the American conquest, as the pueblo grew into a small town surpassing 4,000 population in 1860, dry goods stores continued to open, including the forerunners of what would be local chains. Larger retailers moved progressively further south to the 1880s-1890s Central Business District, which was later razed to become the Civic Center. Starting in the mid-1890s, major stores moved ever southward, first onto Broadway around 3rd, then starting in 1905 to Broadway between 4th and 9th, then starting in 1915 westward onto West Seventh Street up to Figueroa. For half a century Broadway and Seventh streets together formed one of America's largest and busiest downtown shopping districts.
Holzwasser's was a large department store that operated from 1911 to 1933 in the Downtown San Diego shopping district along Broadway and Fifth and Sixth avenues.
Asher Hamburger (1821–1897) was the founder of the A. Hamburger & Sons department store, at the beginning of the 20th century the largest department store in the Western United States, which would in 1923 became May Company California.