Willets or Willet's was a longstanding department store in Colton, California.
In 1906, it was announced that Willet's Department Store opened, having bought out Steck Brothers Clothing Co. [1] However, in advertising, the store notes origins dating back to 1883. [2]
In 1918, the store was sold to Boadway Bros. [3] which after a few month definitively decided to liquidate the stock and close the store in late 1918. [4]
Willet's did reopen for business by February 1922, according to advertisements in the Colton newspapers, at 125–145 North Eighth Street. [2]
In 1951, construction was announced for a new store further north on Eighth Street, [5] as in 1953, a significant block of the historic downtown of Colton was bulldozed to make room for what is now the San Bernardino Freeway. This included the block on the west side of Eighth Street north of J, including the then 70-year-old Helman's Department Store building, originally housing the First National Bank of Colton, on the corner, and the Willet's Department Store building to its north. Helman's also moved to a new location further north. [6]
Colton is a city in San Bernardino County, California, United States. Nicknamed "Hub City", Colton is located in the Inland Empire region of the state and is a suburb of San Bernardino, approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) south of the city's downtown. The population of Colton is 52,154 according to the 2010 census, up from 47,662 at the 2000 census.
Hollywood Boulevard is a major east–west street in Los Angeles, California. It runs through the Hollywood, East Hollywood, Little Armenia, Thai Town, and Los Feliz districts. Its western terminus is at Sunset Plaza Drive in the Hollywood Hills and its eastern terminus is at Sunset Boulevard in Los Feliz. Hollywood Boulevard is famous for running through the tourist areas in central Hollywood, including attractions such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Ovation Hollywood shopping and entertainment complex.
The Harris Company was a retail corporation, based in San Bernardino, California, that operated a chain of department stores named Harris', all in Southern California. Philip, Arthur, and Herman Harris – nephews of founder Leopold Harris of what was once the large Los Angeles–based chain Harris & Frank – started the company with a small dry goods store in 1905, and the company eventually grew to nine large department stores, with stores in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Kern Counties.
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.
Stater Bros. Markets is a privately held supermarket chain, based in San Bernardino, California, consisting of 171 stores located throughout Southern California. It was founded in Yucaipa, California, on August 17, 1936, by twin brothers Cleo and Leo Stater when they purchased the market owned by Cleo's boss, W. A. Davis, with a $600 down payment. Cleo recalled to the Inland Empire Business Press in 1998, that the owner of the market across the street from Davis' gave him the other $300 to make the full down payment. Stater Bros. went public in 1964; Cleo, Leo, and their brother Lavoy sold their interests to the now-defunct Long Beach–based Petrolane Gas Service in 1968. The chain has been owned fully by Stater Bros. Holdings, a subsidiary of La Cadena Investments, owned by Stater's late chairman, president and CEO, Jack H. Brown, since 1986.
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.
Inland Center is a regional shopping mall owned and operated by Macerich, located in San Bernardino, California along the southwest border adjacent to Interstate 215 and the city of Colton. The mall is within one mile of three bordering cities on the southern end of San Bernardino. Inland Center is a single-level mall anchored by, JCPenney, Forever 21 and Macy's, plus 110 specialty shops and services.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) is a freely-available, archive of digitized California newspapers; it is accessible through the project's website. The collection contains over six million pages from over forty-two million articles. The project is part of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California Riverside.
The Broadway Hollywood Building is a building in Los Angeles' Hollywood district. The building is situated in the Hollywood Walk of Fame monument area on the southwest corner of the intersection referred to as Hollywood and Vine, marking the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. It was originally built as the B. H. Dyas Building in 1927. The Broadway Hollywood Building is referred to by both its main address of 6300 Hollywood Boulevard and its side address of 1645 Vine Street.
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.
Harris & Frank was a clothing retailer and major chain in the history of retail in Southern California, which at its peak had around 40 stores across Southern California and in neighboring states and regions. Its history dates back to a clothing store founded by Leopold Harris in Los Angeles in 1856 near the city's central plaza, only eight years after the city had passed from Mexican to American control. Herman W. Frank joined Harris in partnership 32 years later in 1888.
Nahas was a chain of department stores owned by A. S. Nahas, operating in Greater Los Angeles, carrying clothing, household goods and electronics. They also acquired Rathbun's department store at 5311 Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and cobranded it "Nahas Rathbuns" before the branch closed in 1980. The remaining Nahas stores were closed from 1981 to 1982.
The late-Victorian-era Downtown of Los Angeles in 1880 was centered at the southern end of the Los Angeles Plaza area, and over the next two decades, it extended south and west along Main Street, Spring Street, and Broadway towards Third Street. Most of the 19th-century buildings no longer exist, surviving only in the Plaza area or south of Second Street. The rest were demolished to make way for the Civic Center district with City Hall, numerous courthouses, and other municipal, county, state and federal buildings, and Times Mirror Square. This article covers that area, between the Plaza, 3rd St., Los Angeles St., and Broadway, during the period 1880 through the period of demolition (1920s–1950s).
B. H. Dyas Co. was a Los Angeles sporting goods retailer that turned into a department store and went out of business in the 1930s, owned by Bernal Hubert Dyas (1882–1959).
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.
Boadway Bros. or Boadway's was a chain of upscale department stores in Southern California and New Mexico during the 1910s and 1920s, which started with a single store in Pasadena carrying furniture.
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.
The San Bernardino–Riverside is a former Pacific Electric (PE) interurban railway line in the Inland Empire. Unlike most of the company's services, trains did not travel to Downtown Los Angeles and instead provided a suburban service between San Bernardino and Riverside.
The Colton Line was a local streetcar line, mostly known as being a service of the Pacific Electric. It operated between Colton and San Bernardino, one of two lines in service between the two cities.
Marti's, also known as the Hugh A. Marti Co., was a department store in Long Beach, California, US, opened in February 1923 at 411 Pine Avenue, taking over the Boadway Bros. Long Beach store.