The merchant king of blue-collar neighborhoods
Goldblatt’s brought Christmas in January to our Chicago apartment
My earliest memories of Christmas are associated with the month of January. That is when my father got an employee’s discount on presents returned to the Goldblatt’s department store at Lincoln and Belmont. Being Jewish, there wasn’t a Christmas tree in our apartment to mark the countdown to my belated gift.
One year I got an electric-train set. Its cardboard box had been ripped open, presumably by a youngster eager to get at it on Christmas morning but who quickly bored with it. Another January, my father brought me football shoulder pads — not the cheap paper-thin kind, but suitable for a Chicago Bears lineman. A schoolyard buddy recently reminded me that I was the smallest kid on our team but had the biggest shoulder pads.
I was a child of the Great Depression. Even when it eased, my parents remained faithful to a lesson of the 1930s: Be frugal; the hard times could return.
The Goldblatt brothers became rich by recognizing that many Chicagoans shared that ever-cautious mentality. While Marshall Field’s State Street store dispensed gracious living to a lakefront clientele, the Goldblatt brothers were the merchant kings of the blue-collar neighborhoods.
My father used to say, with a hint of a salesman’s pride: “In Goldblatt’s, our top-of-the-line stuff would be bargain-basement junk elsewhere.”
The Goldblatt’s stores are gone, but the buildings survive. They frame my memories when I drive along 47th Street in Back of the Yards, Commercial Avenue in South Chicago or Broadway in Uptown.
Baron Rothschild, the famed Jewish philanthropist, never showed up in Albany Park, where we lived. Nor the West Side, where Nathan and Maurice Goldblatt grew up sleeping in the same bed. Born in Poland, they came to Chicago with their parents in 1904. Two younger brothers, Joel and Louis, were American-born.
In 1914, they began selling dry goods in a rented storefront at Division and Milwaukee, the epicenter of the “Polish Downtown,” as it was known. The business prospered, and in 1922, they built their first department store. Others followed until, at the peak of Goldblatt’s in the 1970s, the brothers had 47 stores in and
beyond Chicago.
Customers were drawn by Tribune ads touting a cornucopia of products and rock-bottom prices. One ad featured canaries guaranteed to sing.
Louis Goldblatt recalled the brothers’ formula in a 1999 autobiography, “Life Is a Game, Play to Win.”
“Goldblatt’s was about the only store in the country that tied a pair of shoes together with its own laces and dumped them on a table, inviting the customer to find the right style and size,” he wrote. “Goldblatt’s was a beehive of excitement and fun; it was not intended to be fancy or even comfortable.”
Customers rummaged a store’s tables looking for the prize they felt was hidden in piles of every sort of merchandise. When two thrifty housewives grabbed the same overalls or mittens, their high-decibel disputes added to the circuslike atmosphere.
My father worked in the floor-covering department. He would fold a 9-by-12-foot carpet half back over the pile, then the next, and the next, lauding each carpet’s virtues.
If they were Oriental rugs, he’d praise them as if he’d sat in a tent in Central Asia, sipping tea while an artisan wove 36 knots to the square inch. If the customer said the rug looked machine made, he’d switch to a salute to modern industry: “See how it’s made luxuries once reserved for the rich available to the average American.”
Customers’ children were lured by the kind of treats circus barkers hawked. Mary Karlhiem made a sentimental visit to the half-empty State Street store when it was about to close. In a 1981 Tribune op-ed, she recalled:
“I could smell popcorn, see children hanging on to their mothers, whining for a taste of the good smell.”
The Goldblatt brothers opened that store on March 13, 1937, in the depths of the Great Depression that was forcing other business to close. Nonetheless, a crowd 5,000 to 10,000 came downtown for its dedication. Searchlights arced over State Street. Dignitaries spoke.
“After the ceremony, thousands of persons crowded into the store,” the Tribune reported. “Because of the throng doors were closed for thirty minutes beginning at 11:30 a.m.”
Despite the joy my father took from his job, he wanted a different life for me. He believed the American Dream had a final chapter. His father was a pack peddler carrying his wares through Polish villages and Chicago neighborhoods. As a salesman, my father took a step up the social ladder. Early on he gave me a subliminal message that I was going to college, that I would go to work dressed in a suit and tie.
Actually he did, too, in later years. He left Goldblatt’s as its empire was folding, a victim of competition from Korvettes and other discount merchants. He became a traveling salesman for Carson’s wholesale division. The money was good, but he was essentially an order-filler, jotting down the holes in a store’s inventory. There wasn’t any repartee with the owner, and thus no fun.
I like to remember him in his glory days. When passing the site on Lincoln Avenue, my mind’s eye sees him standing at Goldblatt’s big windows. The week before Christmas, a crowd outside is waiting for the doors to open. When they get in, my father gets the same adrenaline rush as athletes do before a big game. He spots a customer heading for a toy that, should it be returned, would be a great January present for me.