The Emporium
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The Emporium was a mid-to-high end department store chain headquartered in San Francisco, California.
History
Beginning
The Emporium was the first department store in the state of California, and was founded in 1896 by Frederick W. Dohrmann, a German immigrant who arrived in California in the 1860's and had made a reputation in the general merchandise and flour milling industries in the Bay Area.The Emporium operated for its first year as a group of individually-owned shops in a building owned by the Parrott estate; in 1897, due to difficulties ensuing from the lack of centralized management, the Emporium merged with the Golden Rule Bazaar, becoming the Emporium and Golden Rule Bazaar.
In 1898, Mr. Dohrmann's son, A. B. C. Dohrman became officially involved in day-to-day affairs and along with others, was instrumental in the reorganization of the new Emporium and was president of the company at the time of of the elder Dorhmann's death in 1914. In 1927, the Emporium merged with the Oakland-based department store, H.C. Capwell.
The ornate, majestic flagship location at 835 Market Street, between 4th and 5th Streets, was a destination for generations of northern California shoppers. It was designed by San Francisco architect Albert Pissis, one of the first Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. It withstood the 1906 earthquake, but was destroyed by the subsequent fire and rebuilt in 1908. Many additions and renovations were added in the decades following.
In the years after World War II, several suburban branches were opened in newly developed shopping malls, mainly in San Mateo, Marin and Santa Clara counties.
H.C. Capwell's flagship location, now a Sears store, was located at Broadway and 20th Streets in downtown Oakland and opened in 1927. Capwell's focused its postwar suburban expansion closer to Oakland, opening branch stores in southern Alameda County and Contra Costa County.
The Emporium and Capwell's, although under common ownership, continued to operate largely independent of one another until the early 1980's when they became known as Emporium-Capwell.
After a series of mergers and acquisitions spanning 40 years, the chain is now a part of the Federated Department Stores family in the Macy's West division; most of the surviving locations (which were not spun off to other retailers) now carry either the Macy's or Bloomingdale's brand as a result.
1980
In the late 1980's, the flagship Market Street store was connected to the new San Francisco Centre, a seven-story indoor mall anchored by a flagship Nordstrom location. The Emporium location closed permanently in 1996 and after some controversy regarding the historical preservation of the building's facade and other elements, is currently being redeveloped as a mall with a West Coast flagship location of New York-based Bloomingdale's, scheduled for opening in the fall of 2006. The combined two downtown malls will have a total area of 1.5 million square feet.External links
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