Postcard RPPC Photo California San Jose Hart's Department Store Signed By Owner For Sale

Postcard RPPC Photo California San Jose Hart's Department Store Signed By Owner
1940's Era Real Photo Postcard Signed By Mr. Alex J. Hart Jr. Owner Of Hart's Department Store At The Time. See Description Below For The Interesting And Important History Of This Very Famous Department Store That Was Around For 102 Years.
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Below Is For Reference Of Inventory:(Location: B253)
Hart's Department Store Opened In 1866. It Closed It's Doors In 1968.Leopold Hart opened the downtown store in 1866, becoming the city's premier shopping destination for decades. Alex Hart Jr. believes the warehouse dates back from the early 1920s. At the time, the Harts owned three adjacent buildings, including the one with the outdoor logo, that served as warehouses.
In November 1933, the Hart name was seared into the national consciousness when A.J. Hart’s son, Brooke, was kidnapped and killed by two men who were subsequently lynched by a mob in St. James Park. The mob ignored A.J.’s pleas from atop a car to give the two men a trial.
It was one of San Jose’s darker moments, understandable only if you knew that the city, which at the time had about 50,000 people, was really a small town.
Everyone knew Hart’s, and many knew Brooke. And the crowd was enraged that the kidnappers bargained to return the heir alive after killing him.
Though the event changed the family’s trajectory — the 22-year-old Brooke was being groomed to succeed his father — the store continued to prosper, adding a major new expansion in 1938 in a gleaming streamlined style.
Customer service
It wasn’t just the selection of goods or the location that cemented loyalty. Hart’s was never the cheapest store downtown. Instead, it offered a range of customer service that’s almost unimaginable today.
San Jose resident Esther Rechenmacher, who went to Notre Dame High School, remembers visiting the second-floor yarn shop, which was the domain of Mrs. Hobart. A clutch of women would sit there sewing, sometimes almost all day.
“If you came in and said, ‘I want a sweater for myself,’ she would measure you and she would tell you how much yarn you needed,” Rechenmacher remembers. “She literally hand-wrote the instructions for each person.”
When A.J. Hart died in 1943, his younger son, Alex, returned from a job writing music for Paramount in Los Angeles to take over the store. For the next quarter century, he remained at the helm of Hart’s downtown.
Loyalty to downtown
Though he was criticized on business grounds for not seizing the chance to become an anchor tenant at Valley Fair, Alex Hart showed enormous loyalty to downtown. His employees loved him.
“Alex was the store,” said Dorothy Hogan, who worked for him as assistant treasurer in 1966 and 1967. “You never had to make appointments to see him. The lady from housewares would come up and knock on the door, and say, ‘Alex, can I see you for a while?’ He’d say, ‘Of course, sit down.’ “
Yet by the mid-’60s, the die was cast for the downtown store. Beginning with Valley Fair, a ring of suburban shopping centers sucked the life out of downtown.
And by 1968, even Alex Hart called it quits at Market and Santa Clara, moving to the Hart’s branch at West Gate mall. A soulless eight-story office building went up on the downtown site.
More than a year after Alex died at age 89, the memories remain, in the warehouse sign, and in the picture of Hart’s employees in the early ’30s on the second floor of City Hall.