H.B. Claflin & Company was a Manhattan-based dry goods business which was incorporated in 1890. The company acted as wholesalers who were middlemen between manufacturers and retailers of dry goods. [1] The corporation became insolvent in June 1914, with a debt of $34,000,000. Judge Learned Hand of the United States District Court in New York appointed receivers for the firm on June 25, 1914. The trade of the wholesaler was negatively affected by the migration of the dry goods industry to uptown Manhattan [2] and a failure to adapt to the changing business landscape. [3]
H.B. Claflin & Company began operations in 1843, many years before its official incorporation. In 1868 the company retained the same principal leaders from its start, namely Horace Brigham Claflin, E.E. Eames, and E.W. Bancroft. The main building of the business fronted Church Street (Manhattan) for one hundred feet and extended along Worth Street for another four hundred feet. It continued along West Broadway (Manhattan) for one hundred feet. All of its buildings occupied an area encompassing 48,000 square feet (4,500 m2) in 1868. It employed 700 people full-time and up to 1,000 persons during the busiest seasons. The various departments of H.B. Claflin & Company dealt in lace goods, white goods, flannels, blankets, hosiery, shirts, underwear, shawls, hoods, scarves, and gloves. [4] The company also sold books, and for several years published books under its own imprint The International Book and Publishing Company.
In 1914 the Claflin stores in New York were C.G. Gunther's Sons, Lord & Taylor, James McCreery & Company, O'Neill Adams Company, H. Batterman Company, Brooklyn, and the Bedford Company, Brooklyn. Claflin interests controlled an additional thirty stores located in various parts of the United States. [2] [5] [6]
Stern's was a regional department store chain serving the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The chain was in business for more than 130 years.
Canal Street is a major east–west street of over 1 mile (1.6 km) in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States, running from East Broadway between Essex and Jefferson Streets in the east, to West Street between Watts and Spring Streets in the west. It runs through the neighborhood of Chinatown, and forms the southern boundaries of SoHo and Little Italy as well as the northern boundary of Tribeca. The street acts as a major connector between Jersey City, New Jersey, via the Holland Tunnel (I-78), and Brooklyn in New York City via the Manhattan Bridge. It is a two-way street for most of its length, with two unidirectional stretches between Forsyth Street and the Manhattan Bridge.
Rowland Hussey Macy Sr. was an American businessman who founded the department store chain Macy's.
Mercantile Stores Company Inc. until 1998, was a traditional department store retailer operating 102 fashion apparel stores and 16 home fashion stores in 17 states. The stores were operated under 13 different nameplates and varied in size, with the average store approximating 170,000 sq ft (16,000 m2). Store names included Bacon's, Castner Knott, deLendrecie's, Gayfers, Glass Block, Hennessy's, J. B. White, The Jones Store Company, Joslins, Lion Store, Maison Blanche, McAlpin's, and Root's.
Joslins was a chain of department stores that was based in Denver, Colorado, United States.
Horace Brigham Claflin was an American merchant.
Associated Dry Goods Corporation (ADG) was a chain of department stores that merged with May Department Stores in 1986. It was founded in 1916 as an association of independent stores called American Dry Goods, based in New York City.
Bacon's was a chain of department stores based in Louisville, Kentucky, United States.
Gristedes is a New York City–based chain of supermarkets. It serves a mostly urban customer base.
Macy's Herald Square is the flagship of Macy's department store, as well as the Macy's, Inc. corporate headquarters, on Herald Square in Manhattan, New York City. The building's 2.5 million square feet (230,000 m2), which includes 1.25 million square feet (116,000 m2) of retail space, makes it the largest department store in the United States and among the largest in the world. The store has an in-store jail, Room 140, where customers suspected of shoplifting are detained.
Lion Store was a Toledo, Ohio department store chain. Mercantile Stores operated the chain from 1914 until its 1998 acquisition by Dillard's, which retired the Lion nameplate in 1999.
Industry City is a historic intermodal shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing complex on the Upper New York Bay waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. The northern portion, commonly called "Industry City" on its own, hosts commercial light manufacturing tenants across 6,000,000 square feet (560,000 m2) of space between 32nd and 41st Streets, and is operated by a private consortium. The southern portion, known as "Bush Terminal", is located between 40th and 51st Streets and is operated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) as a garment manufacturing complex.
The Austin, Nichols and Company Warehouse, also known as 184 Kent Avenue and Austin Nichols House, is a historic warehouse building on the East River between North 3rd and North 4th Streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The structure, measuring 179 by 440 feet, is one of the city's few structures built in the Egyptian Revival style. The building was designed by architect Cass Gilbert and erected by general contractor Turner Construction with the help of structural engineer Gunvald Aus.
Arnold Constable & Company was a department store chain in the New York City metropolitan area. At one point it was the oldest department store in America, operating for over 150 years from its founding in 1825 to its closing in 1975. At the company's peak, its flagship "Palace of Trade" in Manhattan – located at 881-887 Broadway at East 19th Street, through to 115 Fifth Avenue – was acknowledged to be the store which took the largest portion of the "carriage trade", in New York, serving the rich and elite of the city, such as the wives of Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Samuel Adams Warner (1822–1897) was an American architect. He studied architecture in his father Cyrus Lazelle Warner (1789-1852)'s office and partnered with his younger brother Benjamin Warner from 1862 to 1868. He designed dry goods merchant buildings for the H.B. Claflin Company, S.B. Chittendon & Company, Charles St. John, and H.D. Aldrich. He also designed the Marble Collegiate Church and several buildings in the SoHo neighborhood of westside Lower Manhattan in New York City's now designated Soho-Cast iron Historic District with significant examples of Cast iron architecture from 1879 to 1895.
Archer & Pancoast Manufacturing Company was a US gas fixtures manufacturing company. It was located at No. 67 Greene Street, and Nos. 68 to 74 Wooster Street, in New York City, New York. Archer & Pancoast Manufacturing Company manufactured fixtures for gas and electric lights -- separately for gas or electricity, or combined for both. The fixtures were found in the residences of the Vanderbilts and Marquands of New York, as well as Potter Palmer's of Chicago. They also equipped Madison Square Garden, Manhattan Athletic Club, Equitable Life, and United States Trust. In San Francisco, their work appeared in the Palace Hotel; in Indianapolis, in the Indiana State Capitol; and in Hartford, in the Connecticut State Capitol.
Emma Beckwith was an American suffragette, bookkeeper, optician, and inventor.
The Offerman Building is a historic building at 503–513 Fulton Street in the Downtown Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City. Designed by Danish architect Peter J. Lauritzen in a Romanesque Revival style, the eight-story building was built between 1890 and 1892 as a commercial structure, housing the S. Wechsler & Brother department store. Although the lower stories remain in commercial use, the upper stories were converted into a 121-unit residential complex in the 2010s. The building is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Trinity Building, designed by Francis H. Kimball and built in 1905, with an addition of 1907, and Kimball's United States Realty Building of 1907, located respectively at 111 and 115 Broadway in Manhattan's Financial District, are among the first Gothic-inspired skyscrapers in New York, and both are New York City designated landmarks. The Trinity Building, adjacent to the churchyard of Richard Upjohn's neo-Gothic Trinity Church, replaced an 1853 Upjohn structure of the same name. Earlier, the Van Cortlandt sugar house stood on the west end of the plot – a notorious British prison where American soldiers were held during the Revolutionary War.
The International Book and Publishing Company was the publishing imprint of H.B. Claflin & Company of New York. They published limited editions of copyright novels by arrangement with various publishers, selling these books in paper bindings and at low cost. The company seems to have published only during the years 1899 and 1900.