Bamberger's

Bamberger's was a department store chain with branches primarily in New Jersey and other locations in Delaware, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania. The chain was headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.

History

19th century

Newark was known for manufacturing in the last half of the 19th century. By 1892, Newark was the fourth largest American city and it manufactured products from leather to jewelry along with it being a rail hub. It also had a large Jewish population.

It was these factors that led Felix Fuld, Louis M. Frank, and Louis Bamberger to found the store on Dec 13, 1892 on Market Street on the corner of Halsey Street in Newark, New Jersey, taking over the location of a bankrupt store Hill & Craig. Fuld and Frank were Bamberger's brothers-in-law.

20th century

On October 16, 1912, the company opened its flagship store, designed by Jarvis Hunt, at 131 Market Street in downtown Newark. The historic building once ranked among the nation's largest department stores; after an expansion in 1929 it was the nation's sixth largest.

The massive building covered an entire city block, bounded by Market, Washington, Bank and Halsey Streets, encompassing 1.2 million square feet. The phone exchange, 565, was devoted solely to Bamberger's, with local direct-dial numbers for most of New Jersey's suburbs for telephone orders, known as "TeleService". The building's loading dock was located well below ground on the fourth-basement level. Two massive elevators carried fully loaded 33 ft trucks from Washington Street down to the loading docks.

The store had over 200 departments over 9 floors, and 2 basement floors. There was a restaurant on the 10th floor. Bamberger's had its own Newark Public Library branch and US Post Office branch. It sold customized linens, engraved jewelry, furs and other speciality items.

In June 1929, Bamberger's was purchased by R.H. Macy Co, but the name remained Bamberger's. In the years immediately following World War II, the store was reorganized to become more "mainstream". In 1955, the tenth-floor restaurant complex was leased to the private Downtown Club. Dining service for customers continued at The Dinette, a counter style room on the first basement level and snack bars on the first and fourth floors. Eventually the lower-level eatery was remodeled into a formal restaurant named the Garden State Tea Room.

The 1960s and 1970s saw expansion throughout the state of New Jersey and into the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and by the 1980s there were branches opened in the Baltimore, Maryland metropolitan area. On October 5, 1986, the Bamberger's stores adopted the name Macy's New Jersey, and in 1988 Macy's New Jersey was consolidated with sister division Macy's New York to form Macy's Northeast (now Macy's, Inc.).

As North Jersey's population grew, Bamberger's followed the suburban population aggressively. Suburban branch stores of L. Bamberger & Co. were built in other New Jersey locations: downtown Morristown, Plainfield, and at Princeton, New Jersey. According to Greg Hatala, for nj.com, "With the post-World War II population shift towards the suburbs of major cities, Bamberger's built additional stores in locations such as East Brunswick, Garden State Plaza, Livingston Mall, Monmouth Mall, Nanuet Mall, Ocean County Mall, and Menlo Park Mall

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases