Barker Bros.

Entrance to former flagship on 7th Street, built 1926

Full view of 7th St. Flagship building

Broadway location of Barker Brothers, 1910-1926, as seen in early 2010s

1923 ad for phonographs and radios at Barker Bros.

Barker Bros. was a major Los Angeles-based retailer of furniture, home furnishings and (for a time) housewares from 1880 until 1992.

History[]

Obadiah Truax Barker had owned upholstery and mattress shops in Cincinnati, Ohio and Grand Rapids, Michigan.^[1]

In 1880, was visiting Los Angeles on a trip from Colorado Springs to San José, Cal., and overheard an outraged Otto Müller at a horticultural exhibition complain about the high cost of furnishing his home from the only large furniture store in the city at the time.^[1] Barker approached Müller and together they founded a furniture shop on N. Spring Street near the Los Angeles Plaza, called Barker and Mueller.

In 1880, Los Angeles was a town a population of 11,183, but the city started to experience tremendous growth: its population would increase tenfold in the next twenty years, and tenfold again, to over one million, in the 25 years after that.^[1]

In 1883 Barker bought out Müller and went into partnership with W. S. Allen, forming Barker & Allen, and moved to the Merced Theatre Building at 8–10 Main Street (pre-1890 numbering), also just off the Los Angeles Plaza. Barker bought out Allen that same year and the firm became O. T. Barker & Sons.^[2]

Later the store moved to 3rd & Spring streets at the Stimson Building, Los Angeles' first steel-frame building, where their rent of $1500 was ten times what they had paid on Main Street, a sign of the rapid growth of Los Angeles at the time.^{[citation needed]}

Again they moved – the move was done overnight and widely reported – this time to the seven-story Van Nuys building at 716–738 S. Broadway,^[1] the area which is now known as the Historic Core, the part of Broadway that was the main commercial street of Los Angeles from around 1910 until World War Two.^[2]

1926 flagship store[]

On January 25, 1926,^[3] the company built and moved into an eleven-story building at 818 W. 7th Street, stretching the full south side block from Flower to Figueroa streets, with 23 acres (1,000,000 sq ft) of floor space. A 1931 article reported that they employed 1,444 people (including 432 women).^[2]

Branches[]

The company launched branch stores across Greater Los Angeles and in Bakersfield, with 15 branches by 1955: Hollywood opened in 1927, Long Beach in 1929, plus Glendale, Inglewood, Huntington Park, Santa Monica, Alhambra, Pasadena, Crenshaw, Westwood, Pomona, Van Nuys, Burbank, Santa Ana, Whittier, and Bakersfield, plus a decorator store in Beverly Hills. The company has sales of $30 million at that time, with two-thirds coming from the downtown flagship.^[1]

Epilogue[]

The Downtown flagship closed September 24, 1984.^[4] Prisma Capital acquired the company in a leveraged buyout and, having taken on too much debt, caused Barker Bros. to go bankrupt and close in 1992.

External links[]

• 1926 store directory

References[]