Gimbels Has It! (6 page)

A listing of all Gimbels and Saks Fifth Avenue locations from 1967, including “Plam Beach, Florida.”
Collection of the author
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Bergdorf Goodman opened its new store in March 1928 on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street and gave Saks Fifth Avenue its first stiff competition. Although the stores were competitors, Barbara Gimbel says, “We were good friends with the Goodmans.” Bergdorf Goodman came with a couture salon, but it didn’t come with Sophie Gimbel. Plus, Saks was a larger store and had more variety.

Adam Gimbel helped lead Saks Fifth Avenue throughout the country. He continued to open branches in important locations such as Beverly Hills, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Andrew Saks’s dream of a prominent American specialty store had come true, thanks to Bernard Gimbel’s savvy retail foresight.

“S
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USINESS

I grew up with Gimbels. It was a mainstay. It was a little more reasonably priced than the other stores so I shopped there exclusively
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—Sophie Masloff, mayor of Pittsburgh, 1988–1994
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Kaufmann’s was “the Big Store” in Pittsburgh. Founded in 1871 on Pittsburgh’s South Side, Kaufmann’s moved downtown in 1877 and continued to grow in size and popularity. The store and its signature clock were synonymous with Pittsburgh. It was a true family business, and many members of the Kaufmann family actively worked in its operation. In 1885, the store assumed the name Kaufmann Brothers and was run by four Kaufmann siblings: Jacob, Isaac, Morris and Henry. Morris Kaufmann’s son, Edgar, joined the firm in 1909 at the age of twenty-four, and within a year, he had become the store’s manager. In 1913, Morris and Edgar purchased the interests of the other Kaufmann family investors, incorporated the business and took charge of Pittsburgh’s largest store, leaving other family members free to pursue other opportunities.

Isaac, Ludwig and Nathan Kaufmann, along with Morris Baer and Julius Baer, decided to go into business and start their own department store. They chose a site at Sixth Avenue at Smithfield Street in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. The partners built a thirteen-story, 700,000-square-foot department store complete with a 1,200-seat auditorium with an “orchestral organ,” a 600-seat restaurant and an area for employees to relax and play outdoor sports on the store’s roof. Capitalizing on its competition, the men named their store Kaufmann & Baer Co. But they also advertised that there was “no connection with any other store.” Kaufmann & Baer proudly called the business “the store for all the people and all for the people.”

A postcard view of Pittsburgh’s Kaufmann & Baer department store, the forerunner of the Pittsburgh Gimbels store.
Collection of the author
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Kaufmann & Baer opened for business on March 18, 1914. It drew large crowds and became a “Pittsburgh institution founded by and operated by Pittsburgh. “Kaufmann & Baer employed two thousand workers and opened distinctly, “without previously having been in existence as a department store.” But as the years went by, the crowds became smaller, and the store suffered from intense retail competition.

Gimbels had always dreamed of becoming a nationwide retail organization, and the company hoped to eventually open department stores in the West. The city of Pittsburgh seemed to be a perfect strategic location that would link Gimbel Brothers stores in the East with Gimbel Brothers in the West. The company went shopping and found a then-struggling Kaufmann & Baer store as an ideal opportunity.

On December 2, 1925, Gimbel Brothers purchased Pittsburgh’s Kaufmann & Baer Co. Gimbels stated that “Pittsburgh did not offer the best that the market afforded,” and now under Gimbels ownership, the store could provide “any resident of Pittsburgh what the shopping centers of the world had at their disposal, if they wished it.” Gimbels intensively studied the Pittsburgh market and the building itself. The company did not want to merely operate another department store; it wanted to operate “an institution such as Pittsburgh had never enjoyed.”
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The store publicized its success in other cities and promised the same success in Pittsburgh. Kaufmann & Baer assumed the name Gimbel Brothers on January 3, 1928. Once the name was formally changed, Gimbels proclaimed:

Gimbels also acquired the store’s WCAE radio station, which first aired in May 1922. All four Gimbels stores housed their own radio stations.

Boasting four large department stores located in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York and Pittsburgh, along with New York’s prestigious Saks Fifth Avenue store and the more moderately priced Saks–Herald Square specialty store, the company touted itself as the largest retail organization in the world.

With its cosmopolitan image and its Paris buying office, the new Gimbels store in Pittsburgh intended to bring fashions from Paris to the “Smoky City,” home to America’s important steel industry. However, as the Depression era approached, Gimbels changed its marketing focus and reached out to those with less income. The store told its customers to “trust Gimbels to keep prices low in Pittsburgh!” and promoted a “daring epoch-making stroke of merchandising. “For a July 1931 “Daring Sale,” Gimbels announced:

A nighttime view of the Sixth Avenue and Smithfield Street entrance of the Pittsburgh Gimbels in 1972, featuring Pittsburgh’s “other” famous clock.
Courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society
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Gimbels had found its niche as a “working man’s store.” It earned its place and respect within Pittsburgh’s business community. Gimbels was generally accepted as Pittsburgh’s own and not just an outsider. Former employee and Pittsburgh actress Audrey Roth says, “When I was young, I didn’t even know that there was a Gimbels outside of Pittsburgh. It was as much a part of Pittsburgh as it was New York.”
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Gimbels Pittsburgh special events director Kay Cushing Neuhausen does believe there were people in Pittsburgh who associated Gimbels with New York, but they were the people “that had been around and traveled a little bit.” Neuhausen feels that Gimbels in Pittsburgh had a sense of independence from the rest of the Gimbels divisions because “we did things that the other stores didn’t do and we did it with sort of a swagger.”

An early view of the main floor of the Gimbels in Pittsburgh, before the balcony was added and the fountain was removed.
Courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society
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Gimbels was moderately priced. You didn’t expect to find anything unique there. It didn’t have the quality and it didn’t have the reputation that Strawbridge’s had
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—Mercia Grassi, retired professor, Drexel University, Philadelphia

In 1925, Gimbels decided to upgrade and expand its store in Center City Philadelphia, modernizing the cluster of rambling storefronts along Market Street that made up the store. Land and buildings were purchased all the way from Ninth and Market Street to Ninth and Chestnut Street. Gimbels wanted to build the world’s largest department store right in the heart of Philadelphia.

In record time, Gimbels built a twelve-story addition to the Market Street store. The store redefined the company’s image with its classic ornamental columns and its Chestnut Street entrance. The new structure opened in grand style. On November 22, 1926, Wyoming governor Nellie Ross, the country’s first female governor, dedicated the new Philadelphia store. She saw the building as a “tribute to womankind that emphasizes the increasing recognition that is being given everywhere to women as a determining factor in molding the affairs of mankind.” Ellis Gimbel supported Governor Ross’s comments, saying, “In the Gimbel stores, women have equal rights and equal pay with men.” W. Freeland Kendrick, the mayor of Philadelphia, declared that the Gimbel business in Philadelphia is “one of the things the city can be proud of, founded, as it is, on confidence, built on progressive lines and bound to be an influence in the future upbringing of this community.” Joining the festivities was twelve-year-old Bruce Gimbel, a “sturdy, freckle-faced and earnest boy who had the honor of helping [Governor Ross] chisel the date ‘1926’ in the cornerstone of the building.” Governor Ross also stated that the new Philadelphia store was “the triumph of the department store system.”
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The Ninth and Chestnut Streets entrance of the Philadelphia store in 1956.
Courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society
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Newspapers reported that “thousands viewed with ecstasy the beautiful interior of the first floor” of the expanded store. At the time, the Philadelphia operation was the largest department store building in the world. It contained about fifty acres of floor space, the city’s largest fur vault, a 1,200-seat auditorium, a bank, 2,100 windows, ten escalators and thirty-two passenger elevators. The entire cost of the new addition was over $10 million. However, only the first seven floors of the Chestnut Street building were open for selling space. The upper floors were leased for office space. Gimbels heavily promoted the store. It proclaimed that “no retail organization has as long a reach or as wide a scope in buying as Gimbels” and “this new store unit is an outgrowth of the Gimbel policy of right goods at right prices.”