San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Storefront cleanup revealed a retail treasure
I leased a storefront at 210 Navarro in about 1990. It was a massive cleanup job, with no evidence that anybody had been in there since the Depression. What I found was a box of enormous letterpress cuts used to advertise ladies’ fashions from the 1920s that managed to survive the scrap metal drives of World War II. They were ephemera back then, but are a treasure now. They are San Antonio history, and I want them to remain here, intact, and able to be appreciated. Do you have any idea who I could talk to? I had them printed shortly after I found them, and I can send you a picture. They were in a simple, sturdy wooden box with the Halff Bros. logo on it, created with a stencil. Halff Bros. distributed fashions.
— Blake Olson
Your finds are remnants of retail royalty. First known as M. Halff and Bros., this was the company founded by Alsatian immigrants Mayer and Solomon Halff, who opened a dry-goods store here in 1864 while maintaining their flourishing land and cattle business.
The store first was located at 139 Goliad St. and moved around the turn of the last century to 221 W. Commerce St., selling an impressive variety of wares: clothing for the whole family, home furnishings, pianos and other musical instruments, automobile parts and business machines such as typewriters and cash registers.
Mayer Halff ’s son, Alexander Hart “Alex” Halff, came into the business as a clerk at the original store and took over as president in the early 1900s. The business became known as a “manufacturing wholesaler,” pursuing a strategy of vertical integration by making ownbrand goods such as its Ranger line of work overalls and selling stock wholesale to stores in nearby towns, saving area merchants an expensive trip to markets in St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., and New York.
To accommodate all that merchandise, the business moved in 1912 to a new, four-story building at 330 E. Commerce St. at Rusk, often advertised as “just two blocks from Joske’s,” another department store on Alamo
Plaza at Commerce. Halff & Bros. “had far outgrown its present quarters,” A.H. Halff, president and treasurer, told the San Antonio Light, April 21, 1912. The new building was designed by noted courthouse architect Alfred
Giles, who said it would be “the most modern and up-to-date wholesale house in the state.”
Halff & Bros. became a large presence in the community as well, fielding an amateur baseball team, the Rangers; donating to historic preservation projects; and sponsoring parade floats. Its representatives went on Chamber of Commerce trips to promote San Antonio within the region, and the store took part in charity fashion shows.
The company also was a frequent advertiser in both local daily newspapers and probably in trade publications as well … and that’s where your discovery comes in.
Before the late 1910s, newspapers were nearly all type — no photographs and few illustrations. Ads tended to be all words and no pictures. As image processing techniques became more sophisticated, so did newspaper advertising — much more visually detailed and bigger.
Stores with a presence comparable to Halff ’s, such as Joske’s and Wolff & Marx, took half- or full-page ads to advertise sales or a new season’s stock, using illustrations to entice customers into their stores. More and bigger ads were good for the newspapers, allowing them to keep prices low for readers while deriving a greater share of income from advertisers.
Not too long after these ads were published to promote spring and fall 1928 lines, this cornerstone of San Antonio merchandising advertised its biggest sale ever: the company’s entire stock to another wellknown business.
“The great ‘House of Halff ’ sold out to A.B. Frank Co.,” proclaimed a headline in the San Antonio Express, Oct. 13, 1929. Reagan Houston, Frank’s president, announced that his company would take over Halff ’s “entire stock, trademarks and factories, and Mr. A.H. Halff (about 60 at the time) would retire.”
Such stock as could be absorbed by the acquiring company’s store would be sold there, and all the rest would go on deep discount in a liquidation sale to the public and to other stores.
Another retailer, the Fair, handled the liquidation sale for Frank, including new fall dresses — “the latest satins, cantons, flat crepe and lace combinations … tuck-in suits, jacket frocks, flare dresses, large-collar frocks and covert-cloth sport dresses” — as shown in slinky illustrations like the ones you have, probably supplied by Halff from those it already had on hand for fall advertising. (The decision to sell seems to have been sudden; the Express reported that Halff ’s traveling salesmen were “still on the road” when the announcement came.)
The address where you found the printing supplies for the fashion art was an auction house during the 1930s, so these items — pertaining to stock already sold — probably were unwanted by Frank and anyone else at the time. Later, the building became a rooming house catering to senior citizens; the mezzanine area where you found them may have been used for storage.
Remaining retailers, such as Joske’s, Frost Bros. and Wolff & Marx continued to use fashion illustrations in newspaper ads through the 1960s, although photography started replacing illustrations as early as the 1930s.
I’ve shared the photos of your finds with local museums and archives in hopes that a local repository will be able to keep these reminders of our mercantile past.