Center City Shopping in Days Gone By

Feb 16, 20212 min read

Long before Amazon and online shopping, before suburban shopping malls, if you really wanted to shop, you came to center city. It wasn’t that long ago, that Center City had six major department stores all within a few city blocks: Wanamaker’s, Strawbridge and Clothier, Lit Brothers, Gimbels, N. Snellenburg & Co., and Frank & Seder.

Most U.S. department stores grew out of dry-goods stores, which in 1860s Philadelphia centered on two main areas – Second Street, and on Market and Chestnut Streets west from Eighth Street. The development of City Hall at Broad and Market Streets and the surrounding railroad stations in the 1870s and 1880s pulled retailing away from 2nd St.

As department stores became central to retailing in American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Philadelphia played a major role. Led by John Wanamaker, whose store was a national model, Market Street became home to the giant stores known as the “Big Six.”

Wedged between the large department stores were hotels, smaller shops, businesses of all kinds, and restaurants. The ornate head house for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was on Market Street at 12th Street, making it convenient for rail commuters to shop and work in the heart of the city. Trolley lines running along Market Street made it easy to navigate Center City, travel to other parts of the city, and connect with the ferry lines on the Delaware River transporting passengers to New Jersey and beyond.

As the suburbs grew before and after World War II, department stores expanded into developing areas, from the affluent Main Line to working-class Northeast Philadelphia. But while the big stores seemed at their height in the 1950s and 1960s, they were already starting to succumb to new competitors and lifestyle changes, and each decade eliminated one or more of the institutions that once seemed impregnable.