We are fortunate that Downtown Petoskey is a vibrant, year-round business district. Historically, we had a much more seasonal economy as discussed in this article written by local historian Rick Wiles in 2015. So while it is often lamented that we are losing retail storefronts to other uses, on the positive side, these are businesses that operate all year-around providing customers for Downtown retailers and restaurants.
The “Petoskey – Florida Connection”
Summer Specialty Shops of the 1940’s & 50’s
In July of 1952, the city of Petoskey, Michigan celebrated its centennial birthday which was based on the June 1852 arrival of one of its first permanent European residents. Some twenty years later, the northern Lake Michigan town saw the arrival of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railway (1873). The railroad changed everything. People could come to the area not only by boat, but via a passenger railcar. With the arrival of the railway, Petoskey would grow into one of the Mid-west’s most famous destination resort towns.
With the help of the GR & I railway’s promotion, and its advertising, summer resort associations, and summer resort hotels, catering to the more affluent members of the Midwest’s society, began to spring up along Little Traverse Bay. Soon, every summer saw a late June influx of what locals came to call the “Summer Resorters.” They came to Petoskey, and to the Little Traverse Bay area to enjoy a relaxing “summer season” that would only last some ten weeks. From the week-end before July 4th, until the week-end after Labor Day, Petoskey became a summer shopping and dining mecca.
In 1894, the state of Michigan published a booklet titled, MICHIGAN: A Summer& Health Resort State. Petoskey was prominently featured as not only the headquarters of the Western Hay Fever Association, but also the place to shop for those summering in Bay View, Roaring Brook, Wequetonsing, and Harbor Springs. The GR & I sponsored a 1900 publication titled HEADLIGHT, which promoted Petoskey as home to over ten “elegant and spacious hostelries (hotels) that welcome and care for the most fastidious tourists from all parts of the country. Those named were the Cushman House, the Imperial, the Arlington, the Occidental, and the National Hotel. Together, these five establishments offered over 1000 downtown rooms.
By the year 1915, Petoskey was promoting itself as the “Queen City of the North.” People could shop at Levinson’s Department Store on Lake Street, the Central Drug Store on Lake at Howard Street, G. Dale Gardner’s jewelry and home furnishing store on Howard, A. E. Remington Men’s Toggery Shop on Lake (specializing in men’s supplies and catering to the good dressers of Northern Michigan), Little Will “the Big Jeweler” store, across from the Central Drug Store, Fochtman’s Department Store on Mitchell Street, the C.B. Henika & Co. store, and the Horn studio of fine photography. Petoskey was calling itself the “Gem of the Resorts” and also advertising itself in a 10 cent tourist brochure as “a northern Michigan resort center noted the world over.” The self-promoting advertisement also stated, “Petoskey was the market place of 100,000 summer resorters who reside in or near the city, giving the merchant sufficient field for his efforts.” Perhaps a bit overstated!
During the summer resort season of 1930, the first summer during the Great Depression, Petoskey’s City Directory listed various specialty shops that were operating in the downtown area. On Lake Street there were many gift shops such as The American Gift Shop (331 E Lake), Bleazy’s Gift Shop (321 E Lake), The Craft Shop (319 E Lake), The Leather Shop (303 E Lake), Andrew Kan’s Oriental Arts Company (313 E Lake), and the Montgomery Sisters, who advertised themselves as an, “Art Goods & Bric Brac” shop.
The clothing stores in the downtown area advertising men’s furnishings in the 1930 City Directory were Fochtman’s Department Store, and the J.C. Penney’s store on Mitchell Street. Women’s furnishings were being offered that year from Rhoda Burke (305 E Lake), Bertine-Garrett (327 E Lake), Herman Wellings (317 E Lake), S Rosenthal & Sons (408 E Lake), and the I.M. Reinhertz Shops at 308 Howard. There also was the Reinhertz Sport Shop at 403 E Lake. Isaac (IKE) Reinhertz became one of the most prominent retail merchants in Petoskey, beginning on his own in the 1920’s.
Mr. Reinhertz had been born in Naubinway, Michigan and came with his family to Petoskey where his father opened a dry goods store in the 1880’s. Isaac worked for his father, and then opened his I.M. Reinhertz Shop on Howard Street. It was was a retail clothing store. Later, Mr. Reinhertz opened the Reinhertz Boot Shop, and the Reinhertz Sport Shop, both on Lake Street. By the mid 1930’s, the Reinhertz shops began to have a nation-wide reputation for offering “smart, high quality clothing” for both men and women. The Reinhertz shops also began to serve their summer customers via the mail after the summer resort season would end. Long time Emmet County-Petoskey history buff Wayne Richard “Dick” Smith said of Mr. Reinhertz:
“Reinhertz was really the father of the expensive resort wear trade in Petoskey. Prior to his reign, summer stores in Petoskey were essentially souvenir shops. Ike, and his wife Gertrude (Kauffman from Charlevoix), traveled every winter to England, Scotland, and France where they purchased most of their inventory for the following season. They always advertised using I.M REINHERTZ-London, Glascow, Paris. My mother worked as their bookkeeper for many years. She knew all of their wealthy summer resort customers. Almost all of the original summer shop owners of the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, were protégé’s of Ike Reinhertz.”
The wealthy summer clientele of Reinhertz, and other Petoskey retail shops in the 1930’s, were those same “Summer Resorters” who first came to the Bay View Association in the 1880’s, and then later the other Little Traverse Bay summer associations. They included Harbor Point, Roaring Brook, Wequetonsing, and Ramona Park. By the week of July 4th each summer, the hotels, cottages, and summer homes-mansions of the Midwest’s wealthy would be open and soon be full of guests, servants, and family. Names such as Armour, Gamble, Offield, Graham, Upjohn, and Kramer were found in the Petoskey area city directory of 1930. They, and others like them, would shop Petoskey in the summer months making for some very successful merchants, if they knew how to cater to this type of clientele’s needs.
In the year 1930, two young men were salesclerks in the men’s clothing section of the Reinhertz Sport Shop on Lake Street. Frank Hoffman had been born in Petoskey, his friend, William Maus, was from Indiana. The two gentleman were listed as boarders at the Cushman House in the 1930 census. In September, thirty year old William Maus married eighteen year old Gertrude Fochtman and was soon working with her at her family’s Petoskey retail store on Mitchell Street, Fochtman’s Department Store.
Four years later, in the summer of 1934, William Maus opened his own men’s furnishings shop at 424 E Mitchell. His motto was, “Always offer the best,” and he kept that in mind marketing to his very affluent “Summer Resorter” clientele. He knew he was going to compete with his former employer, Ike Reinhertz, for that short and exclusive seasonal business, and he was a success. Like other specialty shops in downtown Petoskey, the William H. Maus Shop closed in October, with the end of the “summer season.” Mr. Maus’ new venture was in addition to the women’s summer specialty shop of Sarah Weinstock. Mrs. Weinstock had opened her Petoskey summer shop, Sarah Weinstock Ladies Apparel (323 E Lake) in 1932. She later, by 1940, was operating a year around shop in Miami Beach.
Mrs. Weinstock would open her Petoskey location in mid-June, and close at the end of September. Sarah Weinstock, and her husband Daniel, began the summer –winter “Petoskey-Florida Connection.” They would live in their Oden, Michigan cottage on Crooked Lake during the summer months, while their Lake Street shop was open, and then move south to Miami Beach for the long winter. In June of 1947, husband Daniel passed away, and that winter, Sarah, age 66, opened her third store at 820 E Las Olas Boulevard, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It was to be a winter-only shop capitalizing on many of Petoskey’s summer resort clientele wintering in Florida.
However, Sarah Weinstock was not the first Petoskey merchant to see the advantage of a summer-winter Petoskey to Florida connection even though it is likely that she may have inspired William Maus and his friend Frank Hoffman to do the same. The first Petoskey-Florida specialty shop connection was in place as early as the late 1890’s when Petoskey’s noted Armenian merchants (originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan), Vahan Gueleserian and Manoog Altoonjian, would open their Lake Street oriental goods shops during June, July, August, and September. Once closed for the summer season, the two men would move to St. Augustine, Florida to run their winter specialty shops specializing in Persian rugs.
Meanwhile when William Maus checked out Miami Beach where Sara Weinstock and her husband took up winter residence, he decided the real estate was too expensive. He was in Florida with Hoffman and they then traveled a bit further north (while on vacation in 1940) and found the recently developing beach town of Ft. Lauderdale. By the winter of 1940, Maus had convinced his friend, and former Reinhertz co-worker, Frank Hoffman, to work with him for the upcoming summer season. Hoffman started out as a salesman at the Petoskey based William H. Maus Shop. That winter a business partnership evolved with the opening of a second store named Maus & Hoffman, located at 701 E Las Olas Boulevard. By 1946, both stores were named Maus & Hoffman, and the rest is history. The business philosophy of “Always Offering the Best” not only worked for the Maus & Hoffman Petoskey specialty store, but it was a perfect fit for newly developed Las Olas Boulevard of Ft. Lauderdale. Maus and Hoffman became known as the pioneers of the resort wear specialty business in Ft. Lauderdale.
They were the first specialty shop to open on the newly created street and were an instant success. Just a few years earlier the Depression born Civilian Works Administration had made the road to Las Olas beach a picturesque divided boulevard which would eventually lead to it becoming a shopper’s paradise. Is was not long before other Petoskey based summer-only retail merchants saw the advantage of a “Petoskey-Florida Connection.” By 1955, close to twenty Petoskey summer specialty shops had opened on, or near Las Olas Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale to cash in on the winter business it offered.
According to Janet Allen, a Sun Sentinel (Broward County, Florida) newspaper reporter:
“ . . .on a downtown corner was Ed Behans Tweed Shop, looking exactly like the Tweed Shop on a corner of East Las Olas Boulevard. A few doors down was Games Imported, just as Fort Lauderdales Games Imported store is in the same block with Behans. Nearby were Bob Bakers shoes and Gattles Linens, two more East Las Olas clones. Around the corner I found Mister K and Harold Grant. Bob Baker Shoes, open in summer in Petoskey, in winter on East Las Olas and in Naples . . . Hal Kingery has been operating his Mister K womens custom tailoring and dressmaking shop on the Galt Ocean Mile for 20 years, and in Petoskey for 16 years. ‘Many of my Southern customers have summer places up here,he said.Often Ill take an order in Michigan and deliver it in Florida, or vice versa. He said he had heard about Petoskey from someone at Maus and Hoffman. The Games Imported Michigan store was managed by Rose Case. Other branches are open all year in Boca Raton, the Broward Mall in Plantation, Fort Myers and Highlands, N.C. as well as on East Las Olas. Ed Behans Tweed Shop is run by Homer Golden, a Petoskey native who married Ed Behans widow; they live on Walloon Lake. Gattles Linens in Petoskey looks like the one on East Las Olas and at other South Florida locations, but the Northern branch has been sold and although the names the same . . . Maus and Hoffman started it all and was, in fact, the first store that wintered in Fort Lauderdale and summered in Petoskey.”
The Petoskey –Florida Connection
By the late 1940’s, Petoskey was using the motto, PETOSKEY-Your Vacation Land in its promotional material. The area was still only a summer resort destination site, however, that would soon change with the development of Boyne Mountain ski resort in nearby Boyne Falls, Michigan. Since the late 1920’s, Petoskey had become known as the Winter Capital of Michigan and its annual Winter Carnival celebration each February drew many outsiders north to the city. Besides the small summer specialty shop of Maus & Hoffman, the summers of 1946 and 1947 saw the opening of a Petoskey based JACOBSON’s Department Store at 409 E Lake Street, and a SAK’S FIFTH AVENUE shop at 215 Howard Street. Harold Grant, who owned a shop in Palm Beach, Florida, opened his Harold Grant’s Congo Shop at 210 Howard Street. Flora Ottimer Green opened her Flora Ottimer shop in Hollywood, Florida in 1945, her Petoskey store at 216 Howard in 1946, and then moved from Hollywood to Las Olas Boulevard in time for the 1947 winter season. She
was joined in 1946 by the Jack & Jill Shop at 316 E Lake Street, and Edna Brown’s Circus Shop at 325 E Mitchell Street.
During the early1940’s Petoskey’s Lake Street was home to the specialty shops such as William J. Barney Linen Shop (first opened in Petoskey in 1928), the Emily Nasser Gown Shop (opened in 1929), the Jack & Jill Shop (misses’ clothing), Bob Baker’s (shoes), and Gattle’s Linens (opened in Petoskey in 1920) at 403 E Lake Street.
Beginning in the early to mid-1950’s the Petoskey summer specialty shops pf Howard Street and the Las Olas Boulevard winter shops took on a new look in their interiors and their outside appearance. Beginning in Petoskey, Ft. Lauderdale based interior designer and architect Alva George Hartman came north to help with the changes on Howard Street. By 1955, he was joined in Ft. Lauderdale by architect Wells Squier to conduct a makeover of the shops in the Las Olas shopping area. Maus & Hoffman were one of the first to employ the two men.
SOURCES:
Fort Lauderdale: The Venice of America, Susan Gillis, Arcadia Publishing, 2004
“Las Olas, Boulevard at a Crossroads,” Sun Sentinel,Bernard McCormick, November 19, 1989
Polk’s City Directory, Petoskey, Michigan, 1955
“Link with Michigan Town,” Sun Sentinel, June 3, 1991
Wayne Richard “Dick” Smith, Emmet County and Petoskey, Michigan local history buff
“Leaving Las Olas,” Sun Sentinel, Matt Schudel, April 27, 1997
“140 Persons Are Employed in Petoskey Summer Shops, The Petoskey Evening News, Tom Warren, July 30, 1952
“Michigan’s Las Olas One Store,” Sun Sentinel, Jean Allen, December 22, 1985
MICHIGAN: A Summer and Health Resort State, Robert Smith Printing, 1894