Joseph Bernard Bloomingdale (December 22, 1842 – November 21, 1904) was an American businessman who in April 1872, with his brother
Lyman, founded department store
Bloomingdales Inc. on 59th Street in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
.
[Jewish Virtual Library: NEW YORK CITY]
retrieved April 21, 2012
Biography
Bloomingdale was the son of
Bavaria
Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...
n-born,
German Jewish
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
immigrant Benjamin Bloomingdale
and Hannah Weil,
[Jewish Yearbook Entry on Joseph B. Bloomingdale]
/ref> Joseph and his brother Lyman were trained in the retailing of ladies' clothing at their father's store. Going into business for themselves, the Bloomingdale brothers' new store sold a wide variety of European fashions, anchored by their own buying office in Paris. Their success resulted in the business outgrowing its premises and in 1886 they relocated operations to its famous present-day location at 59th Street and Third Avenue where Bloomingdale's became one of the most widely recognized brand names in the world.
Bloomingdale retired from the business on New Year's Day 1896. He was married to Clara Coffman. They had two children: Rosalie Stanton Bloomingdale Sperry (1876–1958) and Lewis Morgan Bloomingdale (1878–1939). He died in 1904 and was buried in the Linden Hill Jewish Cemetery in Ridgewood, New York.
References
External links
*
Official history of Bloomingdales
1842 births
1904 deaths
American businesspeople in retailing
American people of German-Jewish descent
American retail chief executives
Businesspeople from New York City
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
19th-century American businesspeople
Bloomingdale family
{{US-business-bio-1840s-stub