Thalhimer's

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Thalhimer's
Type	private/department store
Founded	1842
Headquarters	Richmond, Virginia
Industry	Retail
Products	apparel, furniture, accessories

Thalhimer's was a department store in the Southern United States. Based in Richmond, Virginia, the venerable chain at its peak operated dozens of stores in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and one store in Memphis, Tennessee.

Thalhimer's traditions were most notable during the holiday season with visits from the sticker-distributing Snow Bear and, in later years, the arrival of Lego Land at the downtown Richmond store.

[edit] History

William Thalhimer immigrated to the Richmond area from Germany in the early 19th century. In 1842 he opened a dry good store which his grandson, William B. Thalhimer (1888-1969), transformed into Richmond's first department store. In 1978, the company, by then developed into a regional department store chain, was acquired by California-based Carter Hawley Hale Stores.

At one time, Carter Hawley Hale owned several notable department stores, including upscale Neiman-Marcus and John Wanamaker. After poor financial results throughout the 1980s, and saddled by the effects of leveraged debt from fending off two leveraged buyout attempts, in 1990, Carter Hawley Hale decided to concentrate on its West Coast department stores such as The Broadway, Emporium, and Capwell's and sold Thalhimer's to St. Louis-based May Company.

In 1992 Thalhimer's was merged into The Hecht Company (May's Washington, DC division), and nearly all locations were rebranded as Hecht's, excluding the Charleston and Memphis stores which were sold to Dillard's.

[edit] Downtown Richmond store

Thalhimer's massive six-story flagship store at Seventh and Broad Streets was built in 1939. Its luxurious restaurant, the Richmond Room, was the source of many recipes still published today. The Richmond Room also had a fast food spin-off, the fried chicken chain Golden Skillet. For many years it and its main rival, Miller & Rhoads, were the fashionable retail anchors for downtown Richmond.

On February 22, 1960, a group of students from Virginia Union University staged a protest against racial segregation at the Richmond Room. Some 34 were arrested, the city's first mass arrests of the Civil Rights Movement. The case of Raymond B. Randolph, Jr. v. Commonwealth of Virginia (202 Va. 661, 665 (1961)) would test whether trespassing laws constituted a violation of free speech.

Along with several other Thalhimer's locations, the downtown flagship closed in February 1992 after purchase by the May Company. It had been the last major department store in the once-bustling retail corridor; Miller & Rhoads had closed in January 1990. The building remained vacant until demolished on June 12, 2004 to make way for a controversial performing arts center.

[edit] External links

• Thalhimer family member's masters' thesis (VCU, 2005) with store history/chronology and anecdotes [1]
• RichmondCityWatch.com: Thalhimer's Department Store photographs
• Virginia Union University: The Richmond 34
• Forsyth County Public Library: Photograph Collection, including 1959 pictures of the Thalhimer's in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina