Allen's or Allen's department store, a.k.a. George Allen, Inc., was a large store in

Center City, Philadelphia Center City includes the central business district and central neighborhoods of Philadelphia. It comprises the area that made up the City of Philadelphia prior to the Act of Consolidation, 1854, which extended the city borders to be coterminous wi ...

for women's clothing and accessories. It opened at 326 High Street in 1837 and moved to 1214 Chestnut Street in 1896. In 1927 it opened a full three-story, department store at Chelten Avenue and Greene Street in

Germantown Germantown or German Town may refer to: Places Australia * Germantown, Queensland, a locality in the Cassowary Coast Region United States * Germantown, California, the former name of Artois, a census-designated place in Glenn County * Ge ...

, an early suburban area within the city limits. The area around Germantown and Chelten avenues became a busy suburban shopping district attracting shoppers from the northwestern part of the city and from Montgomery County. This was one of the first suburban branches of a downtown department store in the United States, though it was not as early as B. Nugent & Brother of

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

which had done so in 1913. The Center City store closed in 1959 and the Germantown store closed in 1979.

References

{{reflist Defunct department stores based in Philadelphia Germantown, Philadelphia