Business: Gimbels Go West

Adam Gimbel wanted to be an architect, but Gimbels have been storekeepers ever since 1842 when an earlier Gimbel started a trading post for fur trappers in Vincennes, Indiana. Adam went to YaleArchitectural School for two years but he did not go into architecture. Instead, in 1915, he started to help keep the family stores. Storekeeper Horace Saks died in 1925, just after opening a store on Fifth Avenue and selling out to Gimbel Bros. Adam Gimbel’s cousin Bernard made him president of Saks-Fifth Avenue. But after 17 years of storekeeping, handsome Storekeeper Adam Gimbel still has a hankering after architecture. Saks-Fifth Avenue announced last week that it is building a $500,000 branch store in Beverly Hills, Calif., partlydesigned by Mr. Gimbel.

The newest Saks-Fifth Avenue will be built on Wilshire Boulevard in moderately undeveloped territory a mile and a half from the centre of Beverly Hills. But more important than its distance from the centre of Beverly Hills is its distance from Fifth Avenue. Saks-Fifth Avenue already has a big branch in Chicago and sleek resort shops in such places as Jackson, N. H. and Sun Valley, Idaho. Another in Greenwich, Conn., was opened last month. But no New York store has ever gone so far away from home as California, apparently because New York merchants were afraid that Californians would resent being told what to wear by New Yorkers. Mr. Gimbel intends to handle his Californians gingerly. His personnel will be trained in New York but will be 100% native, when the store opens in April. On the flat roof of the building he helped design will be an open-air beauty shop, which Mr. Gimbel feels is the genuine California touch.