Business: Pioneer Buildings

Last week there opened in Cleveland the vast annex to Halle Bros, department store.

Halle Bros, is one of perhaps a dozen stores known to department store men throughout the U. S. for excellency of merchandise and of service. It is to its selling region (which extends from western New York and Pennsylvania across northern Ohio to Indiana) what B. Altman & Co. and Lord & Taylor are to Manhattan; what Wanamaker’s is to Philadelphia; R. H. Stearns to Boston; Marshall Field’s to Chicago; White House to San Francisco; Bullock’s to Los Angeles; Maison Blanche to New Orleans.

Samuel H. Halle began the business with his now retired brother (Salmon P.) in Cleveland 36 years ago. They were furriers. Soon it became opportune to take on side lines—draperies, notions, men’s clothing. They became a department store. Fifty-seven-year-old Samuel H. Halle, employer of 2,000 people, still likes to meddle with furs, to run white goods through his fingers.

The significance of Halle Bros, to Cleveland has been the company’s pioneering. When no Cleveland merchant dared to try to open a store more than nine blocks from the Cleveland Public Square, Halle Bros, spent several million dollars for a pioneering building on Euclid Avenue at 13th St. This was in 1910 and not even Halle Bros, dared leave Euclid Ave., then as now the one and only Cleveland thoroughfare with a semblance of metropolitan smartness.

The Halle Annex, opened last week, is also a pioneering building. It faces two streets other than Euclid Ave., and connects to the main store by tunnel. Huron Road and Prospect Ave. in Cleveland have been streets of warehouses, Greek restaurants, hardware stores, down-payment jewelry shops, raggle-taggle merchandisers, etc. Samuel H. Halle will bring shoppers to these streets, will perhaps cause Cleveland to take on a more metropolitan aspect.