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In my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” entry from a few weeks ago, I wrote about a building conversion in Plainfield, New Jersey, turning an old department store building into an apartment building with ground-level retail (which was already there, under vacant upper floors).

A news article about the building conversion project included this tangential bit of information:

Rosenbaum’s Department Store, one of the downtown’s former department stores along with Bamberger’s, Teppers, Sears, Montgomery Ward and Steinbeck’s, opened on Jan. 1, 1927, and closed in the mid-1980s.

Rosenbaum’s was the store that used to fill the structure converted to the apartments. But those other names—five of them. In other words, Plainfield, which in the early-to-mid 20th century had about 20,000-45,000 people, had six department stores in the core of the city, at least three of which were open concurrently.

Or, maybe not six but five—more on that towards the end.

That’s not terribly uncommon historically, but it’s still remarkable from today’s vantage point, where serious shopping pretty much takes place in malls and suburban strip plazas. Only large cities, for the most part, have retained their old urban department stores, with a few exceptions, like this one in Pennsylvania.

The extent to which even rather small cities were very much places of their own, with their own local industry and economic ecosystem, is hard for us to fully understand. This is what I mean when I say that urbanism is part of the American heritage. There was a whole urban world that we progressively lost over the course of the 20th century, and are now slowly rediscovering and rebuilding. The car-oriented, suburban interlude may turn out to be a brief moment.

But thinking through that is for other pieces. This time, we’re going to look at Plainfield’s other former department stores.

Here’s the building that used to house Bamberger’s, which closed as late as 1986 and was then a Macy’s until 1992. I really had no idea that urban department stores survived into the 1990s in smaller cities. That’s really interesting. Today, the building is a supermarket on the ground floor and a flea market on the second floor. Notice how this more modern and purpose-built structure is less amenable to other uses, compared to the 1920s structure of Rosenbaum’s, which could easily go from store to apartments.

Teppers is also still standing; here’s a collection of photos and a little bit of history. Here’s a blog post about it, in which one commenter recalls the trolley tracks down the main street.

That blank front was once an ornate façade, then a flattened one, and now the front of an apartment building. You might wonder why there are new apartments in a place with a lot less downtown vitality. But if they’re there and leased, that answers the question, doesn’t it?

Sears is still standing too—and pretty much the same as it looked when it opened in the late 1920s:

Look at the open windows along this large building’s side. These may be apartments now too. Again, these older buildings had a lot of innate flexibility, which permits a neighborhood and city to accommodate change without much altering its appearance.

Sears left downtown Plainfield around 1966 for Watchung, along the car-oriented shopping corridor of U.S. 22. (That structure was demolished in 2018 and the site is now home to a movie theater.)

Montgomery Ward is still standing and mostly unmodified as well!

Interestingly, there’s not much on the web about this one. It took digging up an old Montgomery Ward newspaper ad from 1932 for mail-order houses, which gave the store’s old address.

The building is so old that it had, and still has, a very early Montgomery Ward logo: a human figure holding a torch, representing progress and commerce.

And it resembles a factory more than it does an apartment building. It looks like a mix of retail and offices today.

The final Plainfield department store, Steinbeck’s, is a little tricky. First of all, it’s actually Steinbach or Steinbach’s—the newspaper article got the name wrong. Second of all, as far as I can tell, it was not a separate store in another structure, but replaced one of the other stores and resided in one of the buildings I’ve already shown you.

I’m pretty sure that the Steinbach’s was in the Tepper’s building, which was also apparently a Goerke’s at some point in between. That’s what a photographer who records the history of Mid-Atlantic retail concluded. There’s always a certain murkiness to this kind of history, even when it happened only a few decades ago.

But there you have it—five department store buildings in this small city’s shopping district, all five of which are still standing and in some kind of use. This is a city that could still use some help, but it’s far above it’s low point.

And if you find yourself driving through a decent-sized old place and see an unusually large or grand building, you could do you worse than guessing that it was once a department store, in a timeworn place with a bustling history.

Related Reading:

Kinney Shoes’ Architectural Afterlife

Didn’t Used To Be a Pizza Hut

Taking Preservation Into Their Own Hands

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

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