Long before so many people did their shopping online, Los Angeles' department stores -- Bullock's, Robinson's, May Company, Hamburger's and more -- were the place to be.
“Shop till you drop” did not always mean “shop till your phone drops from your trembling, bargain-hunting hand.”in Los Angeles, especially for the holidays, meant putting on real clothes and shoes unsuited to a shower stall, and taking a ride — an adventure, really — to the showplaces of mercantile Los Angeles.
Food and drink stores naturally came first; the earliest Ralphs grocery opened in 1873 in downtown, and Albert Cohn operated several branches of his fancy food shops. Dry goods stores, the forerunner of department stores, flourished too.With the boom of the 1880s that inflated the city’s profile and standard of living, Los Angeles’wanted all that big, sophisticated cities had on offer too, and the great department store era was on.
Those same aristocrats were at that point evidently too cheap to promote a purpose-built, publicly owned library building, so L.A.’s public library opened on the third floor of Hamburger’s in 1908. One new librarian, according to the city library’s own history, “was shocked to hear the elevator operators call out the library floors between the women’s wear and the furniture.
Opened in 1883 at the corner of Spring and Temple streets as the Boston Dry Goods store, the renamed, grander store took the name of its founder, J.W. Robinson’s, moved to the fabulous, prosperous precincts of 7th Street in 1915, and in time became a powerhouse chain of branch stores.A postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection with a 1908 postmark shows the restaurant at the Broadway Department Store in Los Angeles.
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