[PRCo] Re: Boggs & Buhl train

[Richard Allman]

Philadelphia had a mix of ethnicity in its department store proprietors. 
Gimbels, Frank and Sedar, Snellenbergs', Lit Brothers owned by Jewish 
families. John Wanamaker was a Presbyterian merchant and philanthropist-very 
interested in the Sunday School movement. He was also the Postmaster General 
in the administration of President Benjamin Harrison, another Presbyterian. 
Strawbridge and Clothier old Philadelphia Quaker families.My home sits on a 
small fragment of the old Clothier estate.Some were heroic enterprises, 
arising from pushcarts.Sadly, all of the families have vanished from the 
local scene.
RICH: no prejudice. Presbyterian Elder and son of Jewish father!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 12:50 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: Boggs & Buhl train


> PLEASE GENTLEMAN ... BEFORE YOU READ THIS ... SOME THINGS IN HERE MAY
> SMELL OF A PREJUDICE.   I am only commenting on fact.   There is no
> prejudice involved in any way nor do I want there to be.
>
> They made money and they had prestiege.    Most were probably owned
> by local families or partnerships of local families.   I suspect that
> many of them were people willing, at least for the first 20 or more
> years, to work 60 to 80 hours a week.   Probably a fairly large
> number were Jewish.
>
> Here in Lancaster we had five major department stores when I moved
> here in 1949.   Hagers was owned by John C. Hager III at that time.
> He lived in a rather secluded home in the woods on the hill behind
> me.   It would be more correct to say he owned one end of the
> hill.    Watt and Shands Department Store was the upper end.   Peter
> Watt got out fairly early.   He owned a huge ornate Victorian mansion
> in the west end of town which still stands at Marietta and President
> Avenues with his name on the entrance pillars.  I'm not sure how
> wealthy the Shands were.   Milton T. Garvin owned the lower end
> department store ... he was a Unitarian Universalist and rather
> conservative.   The other two department stores were chains ... J. C.
> Penny and Sears Roebuck and Company.
>
> And there was one other local guy who built his very first store here
> and then moved on to bigger and better things. His name was Frank W.
> Woolworth.
>
> Derrick ...
>
> You should stop by the library at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on a
> Wednesday when the guys are working in the library and look for Dick
> Hutzler.   His family owned Hutzler's Department Store on Howard
> Street in downtown Baltimore.  My mother spent a fortune there on
> Saturdays in the 1950s and 1960s.   It was probably typical ...
> Jewish family as were most of the stores in Baltimore according to Dick.
>
> I think the money was there in retailing as long as the public wanted
> and was willing to pay for service.   Once they accepted the slob in
> the box concept of marketing, then all the purveyor of merchandise
> could do is cut his margin and increase the number of stores in order
> to make a living.   The family could no longer aspire to have a
> single store and live well off of it.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 11, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Derrick J Brashear wrote:
>
>> The Boggs mansion is a few blocks from Federal on North. It's a
>> bed&breakfast now. I was in the bar there one night a month or so ago
>> after a play nearby and had a hand in stopping a fire on their
>> porch. In
>> any case, the mansion's pretty nice. I guess being a department store
>> maven meant something then
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>