A Tale of Four Brothers

I'd like to conclude my tour of the Back of the Yards shopping haunts on South Ashland with a story that starts all the way on Broadway. Not the NYC famous hot spot but the Chicago street. North Broadway to be exact. It was 1989 and the dead of winter. We had just moved to Lake View. I was barely eight years old and wasn't used to a world with bumper to bumper parked cars and towering apartment buildings. Coming from a dying city in the Midwest to a more livlier one didin't prepare us for the lack of space and all the punks with wild hair screaming on Belmont Avenue in the middle of the night. My parents were retail fiends. Coming from Ohio, they were carnivores of Zayre, Kmart, Uncle Bill's, Spartan-Atlantic, Value City, Gold Circle etc. Some like the Target of its day were fancy while others catered to the immigrant community my parents were proud to be apart of. Upon our new arrival my mother needed a new set of cooking pots. What better way to get a set than to catch one on sale. Goldblatt's with its salepaper made out of the most unshimmering basic paper material (for lack of a better description) had a set on sale. But, wait, just what the hell was Goldblatt's? Oh, my friends, my parents and I would soon find out.

It was a cold and very windy night. Flurries were in the air, or maybe it was snow or maybe after almost twenty years my mind is eluding me. My mittens were on, my hood over my head and cold still chilled me to shivers but my mummy dearest was still determined to get her pots and pans. Maybe she was on pot, who knows. Usually my father never had trouble saying no, but this was a man who relished going to a grand opening of a Kmart in the cold, he wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to drive to Uptown on the corner of Broadway and Lawrence (Coincidentally, that location had once been a department store called Loren Miller which Goldblatt's bought in 1931) and marvel at a store he'd never been in. Yet it wasn't the grand spectacle they were expecting. Oh, there was a spectacle. Mobs of people touching, grabbing and feeling piles of what my parents would later label eloquently as junk. They were no where near impressed and neither was my eight year old self. Never mind I was trapped in a department store time warp. Change the model of our car and it could have easily been right after the Great Depression which the chain had actually survived. Hell, it was the Great Depression since the store hadn't looked like it had been updated since its Loren Miller days. We couldn't imagine why anyone would want to spend money coming to the most uncool place anyone could ever shop in. After walking around and gasping for air, we decided to leave. I think my mother later found her set of pots at Montgomery Ward or Sears or something with slightly more "class."

As an adult, I look back at the rich history of Goldblatt's Department Store. It had strong ties with family and a hard work ethic, just like my parents who had no clue of the store's rich history. Started by four brothers who's parents imigrated from Poland, its customer base was largely immigrants with the same hopes and dreams while also not fighting for elegant chadeliers and Egyptian mummies..Their goal was "to appeal to customers from the welfare level to just under the middle class." And that they did.

Goldblatt's was a largely successful enterprise that suffered from its own lack of direction, failed ventures and tepid management. It could have been successful, it should have been successful, but somewhere along the lines, it died just like most of the earlier chains I mentioned. Family squabbles seemed to be prevalent as well as spending that would have rivaled Woolworth heiress Baraba Hutton which I am sure did not help matters. I have never seen a department store die and come alive as much as Goldblatt's did. It is amazing it even came into earlier this decade.

Here it is, I bring you the one located at 4700 S Ashland. I am especially proud of the Goldblatt Bros. inscription as even with the tales of family woe, it brings together a bond that can never be erased when one thinks of the determination behind it all. Okay, so some faker with a counterfeit credit card bilked this location out of $1400 in the late 1950s but it was still everyone's neighborhood store. There are many people who fondly recall the life and times of Goldblatt's as well as the bygone era of urban shopping districts before surburan areas and shopping plazas became trendy. I have shared my fond memories and now don't be shy to share yours as well.