The Emporium (San Francisco)
Coordinates: 37°47′04″N 122°24′23″W / 37.78442°N 122.40638°W
The Emporium was a mid-line department store chain headquartered in San Francisco, California, which operated for 99 years—from 1896 to 1995. The flagship location on San Francisco's Market Street was a destination shopping location for decades, and several branch stores operated in the various suburbs of the Bay Area. The Emporium and its sister department store chains were acquired by Federated Department Stores in 1995, with many converted to Macy's locations.
The Emporium was a department store founded in 1896 in San Francisco by Adolph Feiss as a co-operative of individually owned shops in a building owned by the Parrott estate. Then in 1897, through the efforts of Frederick W. Dohrmann, a German immigrant who arrived in California in the 1860s and had made a reputation in the general merchandise and flour milling industries in the Bay Area, a merger was orchestrated with the Golden Rule Bazaar, founded in the 1870s by the Davis Brothers.
In 1898, Mr. Dohrmann's son, A. B. C. Dohrman became officially involved in day-to-day affairs and along with others, was instrumental in the reorganization of the new Emporium and was president of the company at the time of the elder Dorhmann's death in 1914. In 1927, the Emporium merged with the Oakland-based department store, H.C. Capwell, forming a new holding company, Emporium-Capwell Co., but retaining their respective identities. (Capwell founded his Oakland store in 1889 under the name The Lace House and changed it to his own name two years later.)
In the years after World War II, as the population of the Bay Area increased tremendously and spread out far beyond the urban cores of Oakland and San Francisco, several suburban branches of The Emporium were opened in newly developed shopping malls, mainly in San Mateo, Marin, Solano, Sonoma and Santa Clara counties. Capwell's focused its postwar suburban expansion closer to Oakland, opening branch stores in southern Alameda County and Contra Costa County.
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