Baltimore's Bygone Department Stores: Many Happy Returns

by Michael J. Lisicky

Michael J. Lisicky is the author of several bestselling books, including Hutzler' Where Baltimore Shops.

In demand as a department store historian, he has given lectures at institutions such as the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Milwaukee County Historical Society, the Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. His books have received critical acclaim from the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Pittsburgh Post Gazette. He has been interviewed by national business periodicals including Fortune Magazine, Investor's Business Daily and Bloomberg Businessweek. His book Gimbels Has It was recommended by National Public Radio's Morning Edition program as "One of the Freshest Reads of 2011." Mr. Lisicky helps run an "Ask the Expert" column with author Jan Whitaker at www.departmentstorehistory.net and resides in Baltimore, where he is an oboist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 28, 2012

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real trip down memory lane. Behind the scenes, action 0f what was happening when.

[Leslie Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see how this book would work well for nostalgia buffs: lots of great photos, tons of interviews with former employees and shoppers, great tidbits like memories of particular favorite foods (ice cream cone snowman) and ad campaigns. As a reader from Chicago who never visited a single one of these stories (or really every heard of them other than Hecht's), I'm amazed how similar the story in Baltimore is to the story in Chicago. Department stores tended to emerge at about the same time, go through similar building phases, adopt similar ideas at the same time, and so on. The challenging part for me is that without any personal knowledge, the stores in this book tend to meld together (I found myself thinking "which is the one with the balcony? Which was old-fashioned and stuffy?" and it doesn't help that they all seemed to start with an "H"). And there were lots of mentions of street names that meant nothing to me (a map would have been a big help). Tighter editing to clean up repetitions and typos would have helped too. I really liked the book's organization -- some chapters were devoted to individual big stores, but there were also conglomerate chapters for big issues like desegregation, holiday traditions, and the declining years. Nicely done for a book with a broad topic and a lot of ground to cover.