It has been many decades since Downtown Bloomington was the premier destination for shoppers in the community. There was a time, though, when there were four large department stores downtown.
“My Store was a discount department store, kind of the Kmart or Walmart of its day. I guess you could say Amazon. It was billed as the laboring man's favorite trading place. Its sales and its marketing was geared toward working-class folk in Bloomington,” said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
My Store was at the south end of the downtown, starting in the early 1890s. Kemp said it speaks to the important role German Jews played in shaping Bloomington's thriving retail scene in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.
“German Jewish names like Griesheim, Stern, Livingston, Heldman all shaped downtown retail. And in the case of My Store, you have three German Jewish families, Bachrach, Schwarzman and Mandel,” said Kemp. Downtown trade had an immigrant owned presence as early as 1877.
Livingston’s was one important store. It lasted more than a century before falling to the mall culture of the 1970s. New Market was another, located at Front and Center. Later, Montgomery Ward took its place and now the building is being demolished for surface parking and later redevelopment. Two other stores owned by German Jewish families were C.W. Klemm’s and W.H. Rollins, both on the north end of the courthouse square.
My Store was a touch south, on Grove Street, today the site of the Law and Justice Center.
The key figure in the history of My Store was Oscar Mandel. He was born in 1855, before the Unification of Germany, in one of the German states. His family sent him to Chicago as a teenager to work for his uncles at Mandel Brothers.
“Mandel Brothers, at one time, was one of the largest department stores in Chicago. And Oscar Mandel earns a reputation as an excellent bookkeeper,” said Kemp. “His grandson, Oscar Cohen, remembers his grandfather being a “human computer.” “
Mandel found himself spending weekends in Bloomington, keeping accounts for a clothing store owned by his brother-in-law, John Bacharach.
“Bacharach himself was said to be a lousy bookkeeper,” said Kemp. “Oscar Mandel, interestingly, could also speak seven languages, German, of course, his home country, home culture, Yiddish, of course, because he was Jewish and Hebrew, English, obviously. But he also spoke Dutch and a fair amount of Italian. The latter, Italian, because he had a love of opera.”
Mandel moved to Bloomington and partnered with Bacharach to open My Store in the early 1890s.
“By the turn of the last century, the Pantagraph is calling My Store one of the leading department stores in all Illinois, outside of the city of Chicago, of course,” said Kemp.
Another brother-in-law Albert Schwarzman joined the business, and in 1912 they opened a five-story store. It was called a “trade palace” at the location of their previous two-story store, at the corner of Center and Grove streets. They did the construction without closing the doors to the existing store.
The trade palace was designed by prominent local architect Arthur L. Pillsbury. It opened in April 1913 and featured a state-of-the-art electric cable package system.
“This was running along the ceilings, connecting every floor and department within My Store. This was a cable system with little cash boxes, which you could send cash and receipts and other things from department to department and to the package desk and the cashier's room,” said Kemp.
Oscar Mandel passed away in 1922, and five years later Schwarzman died.
Although sales were strong, even as the Great Depression took hold, Mandel’s wife Sarah and daughter Elsie decided merchandising was too much for them and closed My Store in 1931 after four decades in business.
“One of the finest, largest buildings in downtown sat vacant for a while. It served many purposes over the years. Most prominently it was the home to OK Appliance and TV for quite a while,” said Kemp.
The building was razed in 1972 as part of the grand urban renewal project for the south end of downtown to make way for the Law and Justice Center. There is not now a corner of Center and Grove where My Store once stood.
McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
