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![]() Meier & Frank's flagship store in 1982 | |
Type | Department store |
---|---|
Industry | Retail |
Founded | 1857 |
Defunct | September 8, 2006[1] |
Fate | Acquired by Macy's |
Headquarters | Portland, Oregon |
Products | Clothing, footwear, bedding, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, and housewares. |
Revenue | $284 million (1990) [2] |
Parent | 1966–2005: May Department Stores 2005–2006: Federated Retail Holdings |
Website | Archived official website at the Wayback Machine (archive index) |
Meier & Frank was a prominent chain of department stores founded in Portland, Oregon, United States, and later bought by The May Department Stores Company. Meier & Frank operated in the Pacific Northwest from 1857 to 2006. [1]
Meier & Frank was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1857, and acquired in 1966 by May Department Stores. May operated it as a separate division for nearly forty years, expanding the chain to Utah in 2001, as a result of a conversion of May Company's Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) stores purchased in 1999. In 2002, May consolidated its operation with North Hollywood, California-based Robinsons-May, but retained the historic Meier & Frank name in the Oregon, Utah, and Washington markets.
Federated Department Stores, the parent company of Macy's, acquired May on August 30, 2005. Federated dissolved the former May Company divisions and merged operational control of the Meier & Frank stores with Macy's Northwest. Federated decided to rename the store chains that it had acquired through its takeover of May – including Meier & Frank – as Macy's, and the change took effect about a year later. [1] [3] The final day of operation under the Meier & Frank name was September 8, 2006. [4] (The following year, Federated also changed its own name to Macy's, Inc.)
The company's flagship store was the historic Meier & Frank Building. This location later became Macy's at Meier & Frank Square and closed in May 2017. The building was restored with little attention to historical accuracy paid to the interior. The lower five floors and basement were occupied by Macy's, following the completion of the renovation of that part of the building in October 2007. [5] The nine upper floors were converted in 2007–08 to a luxury hotel, The Nines (the name coming from a play on words combining the number of stories the hotel occupies with the idea of spiffy dress).
In 1857, Aaron Meier (1831–1889) arrived in the Oregon Territory at the age of 26 and opened a 35-by-50-foot (11 m × 15 m) mercantile store at 137 Front Street in Portland, which had a population of 1,300. He had come to California from Bavaria during the Gold Rush, spending time as an itinerant peddler in Southern Oregon. He formed a partnership with a Mr. Mariholtz and began selling merchandise that arrived by steamer from San Francisco and in the covered wagons rolling along the Oregon Trail. Ten years later, Meier returned to Ellerstadt (in today's Rhineland-Palatinate) after his father died, leaving Mariholtz to run the business. During his extended stay in Ellerstadt, Meier married a local woman, Jeanette Hirsch (1843–1925), and returned with her to Portland. Meanwhile, back in Portland the dry goods store had collapsed financially, bringing the partnership to an end. Aaron Meier started a new store with his $14,000 inheritance, in larger quarters of 25 by 100 feet (7.6 m × 30.5 m), at 136 Front Street. He hired Emil Frank (1845–1898) in 1870 and Emil's younger brother Sigmund Frank (1850–1910) in 1872. A year later, Emil Frank became Meier's partner, and the store became known as "Meier & Frank".
In 1878, the great Portland fire destroyed 20 downtown blocks, including the store, which was immediately rebuilt. Sigmund Frank became a partner in the store in 1884, and a year later married Aaron's only daughter, Fannie Meier (1865–1930). In 1885, Meier & Frank built its own two-story masonry building, 100 by 200 feet (30 m × 61 m), on Taylor Street between 1st and 2nd. Two years later the store held the first "Friday Surprise" sale on April 29.
In 1888, Emil Frank left the partnership after years of simmering management differences, and Sigmund Frank became Meier's sole partner just before Meier died in 1889. The name of the store thus remained "Meier & Frank". Sigmund became the president and Aaron Meier's widow, Jeannette Hirsch Meier, ran the store behind the scenes, having brought several half-brothers and nephews from Bavaria to work in the store.
In the great flood of 1894, the street level of Meier & Frank was three feet deep in water. Customers were brought into the store in rowboats and stepped onto raised walkways to do their shopping.
Meier & Frank emerged as "One of America’s Great Stores" as it moved uptown into its elegant five-story building, 200 by 100 feet (61 m × 30 m), on 5th Street (now 5th Avenue) between Alder and Morrison in 1898. The building had two elevators and many mechanical innovations new to the Pacific Coast. The opening of the building marked the transition from the old "country store" type of operation to a modern department store. The "new look" represented 120,000 square feet (11,000 m2) of floor space, 68 times more than when Aaron Meier began 40 years earlier. Meier & Frank pioneered the concept of a "money-back guarantee", until then unheard-of in merchandising.[ citation needed ]
Ten years later, the store erected an adjacent annex of 130 by 100 feet (40 m × 30 m), ten stories above the street, with two basements, making it the tallest store in the Pacific Northwest and Portland's lone skyscraper. Designed by architect A. E. Doyle, its white terra-cotta exterior set a design trend in downtown Portland, leading to the famed "wall of white" on S.W. Alder Street. Upon Sigmund Frank's death, Aaron Meier's elder son Abe Meier (1868–1930) became president, serving as the store's greeter, while his younger son, Julius (1874–1937), became vice president and general manager—running the store. The store's green delivery wagons (later its delivery trucks) were ubiquitous in Portland, with the company willing to deliver purchases of any size—even a spool of thread.
The company provided the furnishings for the Fairmount Hotel, constructed to serve out-of-town visitors to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. [6]
In 1913, the five-story building on 5th Street was demolished, and construction began on a new sixteen-story building, which opened in 1915, giving the store 11 acres (45,000 m2) of retail space. Early on, Meier & Frank was one of the few stores to maintain a buying office in New York. Sales representatives there would joke that there were four major markets on the West Coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Meier & Frank. In 1920, a full square-block garage and stockroom facility, four stories high, opened on N.W. 14th and 15th between Everett and Flanders. The Retail Reserve Building, eight stories high, opened at N.W. Irving Street between 14th and 15th in 1923. A year earlier, Meier & Frank's radio station KFEC, with its antenna atop the 16-story building, began broadcasting from its studio on the fifth floor. The station's slogan was "KFEC--The Meier & Frank Station". Meanwhile, Clark Gable worked at Meier & Frank selling neckties.
The president of Meier & Frank, Julius L. Meier, was elected governor of Oregon as an independent, and served from 1931 to 1935.
Combining the 1909 and 1915 buildings with construction on the final quarter-block and topping the consolidated building off at 17 stories, Meier & Frank now filled the entire block bounded by S.W. Alder, Morrison, 5th, and 6th. Locals jocularly referred to the store as "Murphy & Finnigan's".[ citation needed ] For a time, Meier & Frank reigned as the largest retail outlet west of the Mississippi and one of the largest stores in the nation in the early 1930s. When President Roosevelt closed banks country-wide, Meier & Frank took out a full-page newspaper ad with a single word: "Confidence". Hundreds of people brought their savings to the store for safekeeping. The store canceled interest charges on all customers' credit accounts.
When Julius Meier died in 1937, his nephew, Aaron (Bud) Meier Frank (1891–1968) became president of the store, a position he would hold for nearly 40 years, becoming the most important businessman in Portland for decades.
During World War II, Meier & Frank supported the Allied forces: Federal officials cited the store's efforts in support of the war 1941 to 1945 as the most outstanding of any department store in the United States. Meier & Frank devoted all of its newspaper advertising space to bond sales; for 1,207 continuous days the back page of the first section of The Oregonian ran ads—not to sell merchandise but to support the war effort. The store conducted the largest single sale of war bonds in the nation, a $32-million sale that lasted two weeks in the store's auditorium.
After the war, the company completed the installation of the longest continuous up/down escalator system in the world, serving all selling floors of the store and costing $1.5 million. Two years later, Meier & Frank demolished the Portland Hotel and built a two-level parking facility on a full block southwest of the store, between S.W. 6th, Broadway, Morrison, and Yamhill. In the late 1960s, Meier & Frank proposed an 11-story parking garage on the block, which the city denied after a series of heated public hearings. This proposal helped prompt the downtown business community and the city to undertake a comprehensive downtown planning program. The lot became Pioneer Courthouse Square in 1984.
Meier & Frank's first branch store, with 185,000 square feet (17,200 m2), opened in Salem, Oregon, under the direction and management of Aaron Frank's son Gerry Frank (1923-2022) in 1955. It had store-side parking for 1,000 cars. Five years later Meier & Frank opened Oregon's second-largest department store (exceeded only by its own downtown store) in Northeast Portland in the new Lloyd Center, at the time the world's largest shopping center. The crown prince of Japan (later Emperor Akihito) joined the dignitaries attending the opening festivities.
From 1964 to 1966, a bitter intra-family battle erupted as stockholders considered two potential buyout offers for the store—one, supported by Aaron Frank, to sell to Carter Hawley Hale Stores for cash, and the other, supported by Jack Meier (Julius Meier's son) (1912–1988), to sell to May Department Stores for stock. Members of the Meier, Frank, and Hirsch families owned most company stock. After a lengthy and acrimonious struggle, the families eventually chose to sell to May in 1966 and Jack Meier became the store's president. Aaron Frank retired, and Gerry Frank became chief of staff to newly elected U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield, eventually earning the nickname "Oregon's Third Senator".
From 1969 to 2004, Meier & Frank opened stores at Valley River Center in Eugene (1969), Washington Square in Progress (now part of Tigard) (1973), Vancouver Mall in Vancouver, Washington (1977), Clackamas Town Center just outside Portland (1980 and 2002), Medford (1986), and Tanasbourne in Hillsboro (2004).
For 1990, the company recorded net retail sales of $284 million (equivalent to $636 million in 2022 [7] ), and its figure for average sales per square foot was $149. [2] Measuring by store units, Meier & Frank was roughly four times smaller than its closest rival within the May Department Stores family, but its average sales per square foot was the third-highest, an enviable $225 per square foot during the late 1990s.[ citation needed ]
In 2001, May rebranded its Utah-based Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) stores with the Meier & Frank name. A year later, Meier & Frank's operations merged with the Robinsons-May division in Los Angeles, while retaining its name. In 2005, Federated Department Stores, the parent company of Macy's, purchased May Department Stores and announced that the store (and many other venerable department store names owned by Federated) would be renamed "Macy’s". In 2001, Federated assumed the name of its largest division to become Macy's, Inc. [3] At the close of business on September 8, 2006, use of the name Meier & Frank was officially discontinued, all remaining stores becoming Macy's the following day. [4]
Meier & Frank also operated several restaurants in or near its stores, all of which have now been closed. The square footage that in-store restaurants required was more profitably used to sell or store merchandise. By the late 1990s, competing against the increasing number of dining options and against mall and food court marketing efforts did not make financial sense.
The May Department Stores Company was an American department store holding company, formerly headquartered in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. It was founded in Leadville, Colorado, by David May in 1877, moving to St. Louis in 1905. After many changes in the retail industry, the company merged with Federated Department Stores in 2005.
Macy's, Inc. is an American holding company of department stores. Upon its establishment in 1929, Federated held ownership of the regional department store chains Abraham & Straus, Lazarus, Filene's, and Shillito's. Bloomingdale's joined Federated Department Stores the next year. Throughout its early history, frequent acquisitions and divestitures saw the company operate a number of nameplates. In 1994, Federated took over the department store chain Macy's. Despite a long history of preserving regional nameplates, with the acquisition of The May Department Stores Company in 2005, they were retired and replaced by the Macy's and Bloomingdale's brands nationwide by 2006. Ultimately, Federated itself was renamed Macy's, Inc. in 2007.
Macy's is an American department store chain founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It has been a sister brand to the Bloomingdale's department store chain since being acquired by holding company Federated Department Stores in 1994, which renamed itself Macy's, Inc. in 2007. It is the largest department store company by retail sales in the United States as of 2015.
Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution was an American department store chain. It was founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 9, 1868, by Brigham Young. For many years it used the slogan, "America's First Department Store."
Kaufmann's was a department store that originated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Foley's was a regional chain of department stores owned by Federated Department Stores, later owned by May Department Stores (1988–2005) and headquartered in Downtown Houston, Texas. On August 30, 2005, the division was dissolved and operation of the stores was assumed by Federated's Macy's West and Macy's South divisions. Foley's operated stores in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana. On September 9, 2006 Foley's and all the regional May Co. stores names were phased out and rebranded as Macy's.
Frederick & Nelson was a department store chain in the northwestern United States, based in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1891 as a furniture store, it later expanded to sell other types of merchandise. The company was acquired by Marshall Field & Company in 1929. By 1980, the Frederick & Nelson chain had expanded to 10 stores in two states. The company went out of business in 1992. Its former Seattle flagship store building is now occupied by the flagship Nordstrom store.
Rich's was a department store retail chain, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, which operated in the southern U.S. from 1867 until March 6, 2005 when the nameplate was eliminated and replaced by Macy's. Many of the former Rich's stores today form the core of Macy's Central, an Atlanta-based division of Macy's, Inc., which formerly operated as Federated Department Stores, Inc.
Washington Square is a shopping mall in the city of Tigard, Oregon, United States. Located in the Portland metropolitan area along Oregon Route 217, the shopping complex is one of the top grossing malls per square foot in the United States, with sales of $716/ft². Opened in 1973, the mall is currently managed and co-owned by The Macerich Company, a real estate investment trust, and is anchored by Macy's, Nordstrom, JCPenney, Apple Store, and Dick's Sporting Goods.
Lloyd Center is a shopping mall in the Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon, United States, just northeast of downtown. It is owned by Arrow Retail of Dallas. The mall features three floors of shopping, with the third level serving mostly as professional office spaces, a food court, and U.S. Education Corporation's Carrington College. Lloyd Center also includes the Lloyd Center Ice Skating Rink, which has become the main draw for the mall. There are currently no anchors in the mall. There are vacant anchor spaces left by Macy's, Marshalls, Nordstrom, and Sears. Junior anchors include Barnes & Noble and Ross Dress for Less.
The Meier & Frank Building is a fifteen-story, glazed terra cotta building located in downtown Portland, Oregon, across from the northeast corner of Pioneer Courthouse Square. The building is the former flagship store and headquarters building for the Meier & Frank department store chain, which was taken over by Macy's in 2006. In 2006–2007, the building's lower five floors were remodeled as a Macy's, while the upper eleven floors were renovated in 2008 into a luxury hotel known as The Nines. Macy's closed in April 2017 and the lower levels were rebuilt as office space.
Lipman's was an American department store chain based in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1850 in Sacramento, California, the company was originally known as the Lipman–Wolfe & Company, named after the two founding partners: Adolphe Wolfe and his uncle, Soloman Lipman. It eventually grew to six stores in Oregon before they were rebranded to Frederick & Nelson in 1979. The 1912 building in downtown Portland that was the company's flagship store is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as the Lipman–Wolfe and Company Building.
Abraham & Straus, commonly shortened to A&S, was a major New York City department store, based in Brooklyn. Founded in 1865, it became part of Federated Department Stores in 1929. Shortly after Federated's 1994 acquisition of R.H. Macy & Company, it eliminated the A&S brand. Most A&S stores took the Macy's name, although a few became part of Stern's, another Federated division, but one that offered lower-end goods than Macy's or A&S did.
I. Magnin & Company was a San Francisco, California-based high fashion and specialty goods luxury department store. Over the course of its existence, it expanded across the West into Southern California and the adjoining states of Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. In the 1970s, under Federated Department Stores ownership, the chain entered the Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, DC, metropolitan areas. Mary Ann Magnin founded the company in 1876 and named the chain after her husband Isaac.
The Shops at Rivercenter is a shopping mall located in Downtown San Antonio, Texas, United States along the city's River Walk. The anchor stores are H&M, Macy's and AMC Theatres. It also includes a 38-story, 1,001-room Marriott hotel. It was purchased in 2005 by Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation.
Julius L. Meier was an American businessman, civic leader, and politician in the state of Oregon. The son of the Meier & Frank department store founder, he would become a lawyer before entering the family business in Portland. Politically an independent, Meier served a single term as the 20th Governor of Oregon from 1931 to 1935. He is the only independent to be elected Governor of Oregon.
Lasalle & Koch Co. or Lasalle's was a department store in Toledo, Ohio, with branches in some nearby communities.
Salem Center is a multi-building, enclosed shopping center in downtown Salem, Oregon, United States. Located on both sides of Center Street between High and Liberty streets, the mall has 80 stores and a food court. Opened in 1979, the mall has three anchor stores with 650,000 square feet (60,000 m2) of gross leasable space located on and two floors. The anchors are: Kohl's, Ross Dress for Less, and Macy's with two vacant anchors last occupied by JCPenney and Nordstrom. The mall also features five sky bridges, one of which connects Macy's to the mall, another connects the mall to an adjacent city-owned parking garage, with another connecting the former JCPenney to the mall, in addition to connecting the two mall buildings across Center Street. Salem Center is managed by Jones Lang Lasalle.
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