Photos around Cape Archives

December 12, 2014December 12, 2014

Bill’s and Hirsch’s Midtown

We’re dipping into Terry Hopkins‘ dad’s General Sign box again. This time I ran across two signs that shared a bunch of elements.

Bill’s Courtesy Cleaners was located at 1107 Broadway, more or less across from Houck Stadium. The cleaners were housed in one of two buildings built by Eddie Erlbacher shortly after World War II. I photographed the school board moving a big safe out of the second floor of the twin building to the east.

The property had an interesting past, detailed in a Fred Lynch blog in April 6, 2010.

Hirsch’s Midtown

The Hirsch’s sign’s has the same arrow and basic shape. I wonder how many other businesses in the area shared those pieces / parts?

I did a post on Hirsch’s Midtown in 2012, and it generated quite a few comments. So many, in fact, I followed up with another story about the Hirsch Bros. No. 2, otherwise known as Hirsch’s Northtown.

It was better known to later generations as the Mule Lip or Margarita Mama’s. It’s a casualty of the Casino, but the Midtown store is still standing.

Mystery sign

If you look closely at the bottom right of the Hirsch’s sign, there are some tiny red letters faintly visible. Blowing them up just makes them blurrier. The appear to spell COFERS. I looked at the 1968 City Directory and didn’t see any business in the 200 block of South Sprigg that came close to that.

Ideas?

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

I usually post the blog at about 2 a.m., and after I’m done I check to see if Fred Lynch has updated his f/8 and Be There blog. I didn’t check it before going to bed, so I was stunned this morning to see his topic was “Cofer’s Men’s Store.”

I emailed him to ask if he had seen my topic and decided to piggyback it (we exchange links, which builds traffic for both of us, and it helps readers fill in the gaps).

His response: “Are you kidding? I’m in bed by 10 pm. You retired folks amaze me with your sleeping habits. Anyway, I am two weeks or more ahead with finished blogs so yes, quite a coincidence.”

Working people can be SO organized. I usually don’t start thinking about the next days’ post until around 9 p.m. the night before.

December 11, 2014

Fire Station No. 4 Missing

When I looked at this old Polaroid photo of Mother, I thought there was something odd about it. Then it dawned on me: it was taken before Fire Station No. 4 was built at the corner of Kingsway Drive and Kurre Lane.

(If you wonder how I knew it was a Polaroid, look at the brown, irregular stain at the bottom right of the photo. This was one of the early generation cameras where you had to peel the photo off the roll, then coat it with a sticky, sharp-smelling chemical which would, invariably, get all over your fingers. The fix or whatever it was never applied evenly, so the picture had streaks, and if you missed a place, you’d get this brown stain.

Neighborhood from the air

Here’s an aerial photo taken at about this same time. I published it and some other pictures back in 2010, and it got lots of comments that are worth reading. There’s a more recent aerial here.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

December 10, 2014

Shakspere on Kent Library

Son Adam brought Grandkidlets Graham and Elliot over this evening to give their mother a few hours of piece and quiet.

That left me scrambling for something to post this morning. I came up with a long-forgotten (and poorly composed) shot of the front of Kent Library before a wraparound covered the names of seventeen writers chosen by English professor Dr. Harold Grauel and Dr. W.W. Parker, then president of the university.

Fred Lynch’s February 22, 2010, blog lists the names as “Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Virgil, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene Field, Victor Hugo, Homer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Kent Library in 2010

Here’s what the library looked like in 2010. One-Shot Frony took a picture from almost this same angle in the late 1940s if you’d like to make a comparison.

By the way, Wife Lila questioned the spelling in my headline. Fred’s blog talks about that:

Grauel recalled that the stone mason wanted to alter the spelling of Shakespeare. Grauel suggested “Shakespere,” one of several ways that the famous playwright spelled his name.

That spelling was used on the frieze. Soon after, letters arrived at the school from people critical of what they felt was the “misspelling” of the name.

“When the enlargement of Kent Library was undertaken in the ’60s, I saw to it that the name of Shakespeare appeared on the new facade as SHAKESPEARE,” Grauel wrote.

Earlier stories about Kent Library

December 9, 2014

Garber’s Men’s Store

Terry Hopkins’ box of his dad’s General Sign Company photos produced this Garber’s Men’s Store sign. Peeking out from the bottom is “Gladish,” which would have to be Gladish-Walker Furniture Company. I was trying to figure out where the store was located, but more about that later.

Garber’s founded in 1954

The Missourian’s A Century of Commerce had these business notes for 1954:

Lester Rhodes bought Orpheum Theater Building on Good Hope Street to convert it to business use.
Rigdon Laundry’s equipment was sold to Tipton’s Whiteline Laundry Inc.
Sunset Motel on Highway 61 North was sold to St. Louis investors.
Charles Garber founded Garber’s men’s store.
Star Vue Drive-In Theater, large enough for 600 parked automobiles, opened.
Pletcher & Haynes Sinclair Service Station opened on Highway 61West.
Hobb’s Grill No. 3 on Broadway, formerly Wilson’s Cafeteria, opened.
Cape Manufacturing Co., North Main Street, handling Maxine equipment, was incorporated.

Moved to Town Plaza in 1960

There was a lot of activity in 1960:

Charles N. Harris founded Atlas Plastics.
B & J Refrigeration opened as partnership between Marshall Bailey and Leon Jansen; later became Jaymac Equipment Co.
Montgomery Mobile Home Sales opened.
Pop’s A & W Drive-In opened.
Professional Business Systems was founded by Lloyd Lorberg.
Charles Garber moved Garber’s, men’s clothing store, to Town Plaza.
The old Joseph Sciortino Grocery Store building in 600 block of Good Hope Street was razed.
Making room for parking lot, 103-year-old brick mill building on Water Street was razed.
Model Grocery closed, after serving Girardeans 39 years. The last location was at 521 Broadway.
Ruh’s Market, in operation 53 years, closed.
Victor L. Klarsfeld, owner of Rialto Theater, purchased Broadway Theater building.
New 17,000-foot tower of KFVS-TV went into operation.
B.I. Howard purchased Wulfers’s building on Broadway. It housed Howard Athletic Goods Co.

Gladish-Walker Furniture formed in 1932

I found some ads for Gladish-Walker Furniture that said it was located at 633 Good Hope. That means that Garber’s was located a couple of doors to the east in a building that was constructed at about the same time, 1880 or so based on information in the National Register of Historic Places.

I thought 633 Good Hope sounded familiar. It’s because I did a story about the building collapsing this summer. Garber’s would have been in the building to the left. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Garber’s sold to Rodney and Dimple Bridges

When Charles Garber retired in the early 1970s, the business was sold to Frank Hamra, who had Hamra’s Men’s Store in Anna, Ill. He hired Rodney Bridges, 20 and a newlywed, to manage it. A year later, Bridges and his wife, Dimple, bought the store. For more detail, you can read an interview with Bridges in the March 14, 2011, Missourian.

When Garber’s was founded, Bridges pointed out, Cape had nine men’s stores in town; today Garber’s is the only one left. The store used to carry all the big name brands, but the chains and outlet stores have taken over that business. To survive, he said, he has to bring in lines that aren’t shown everywhere. In the last 40-plus years, the store has been expanded twice and remodeled four times, increasing from 1,500 square feet to 4,300.

Garber’s has a clean-looking website, showing that the store has been around for awhile, but it keeps up with the times. The shopping center photo above was taken in 2011. That space was occupied by something called Arcade in a photo in a 1962 Girardot advertisement.

I have to confess that I usually counted on Wayne Golliher at Al’s Shops to put clothes on my frame.