Reader Comments
Ms. Zajac,
Thank you for a very interesting / informative article. I also enjoyed the factual Baltimore department store timeline from another feature article. I live far from Baltimore now but have many memories of tagging along with my mom or aunts through the various (mainly northern) suburban department stores from the late ‘50s to early ‘70s. Each location had special points of interest for me (the c. 1966 central escalators in Hutzler’s Towson, the Roof-top Restaurant in Hecht’s Northwood, the book department at Hochshild’s Eastpoint, etc.). Retail - and America in general, have certainly changed.
In case you are interested, the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company photography department took many large format (i.e., high quality) photographs of store interiors and exteriors over the years. Some of these illustrate department stores, and some of the images are now available on-line at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. I had access to the BG&E;collection before it went to the BMI as part of the ill-fated deregulation of the electrical industry in the early 1990s. I can assure you that there are *many* more images in the collection that are not on-line, so if you are interested in possible interior views of Baltimore’s grand old department stores, you might want to check out that site (for example, see image #29032 at http://baltmusindustry.pastperfect-online.com/35171cgi/mweb.exe?request=keyword;keyword=stewarts).
Regarding the Hecht’s closing article, I noted just a couple minor errors: Stewarts closed its stores in 1983, not 1985...and Hochschild Belvedere closed sometime in late 1982 or 1983, not 1979.
Thanks again,
Steve Corfidi
