Chapter 1

Pride of Place

(excerpt)

To understand our Three Ls, we must place them in a setting. For the same reason that a person doesn’t carry precious gems in his pocket or hidden in a purse, these department stores are best understood in the context of their place in Toledo’s downtown, where they were meant to be seen. The Three Ls didn’t exist on isolated blocks, apart from the teeming
life that could be found in the downtown of their heyday. They formed one element of a variety of ingredients, which together brought to life the center of town and made it an attractive place to do business.
Downtown Toledo was not only a retail district. Nor was it just an area in which business offices and churches were located in isolation. It was not just a governmental center, or solely the place where people could find a hotel for the night. It was all of these things, and all of them simultaneously. It housed Toledo’s best stores, its most prestigious office buildings, its finest theaters and its greatest hotels within its boundaries or on its fringes, and it housed them cheek by jowl in an area that was easily accessed by the city’s population. It was where everything happened, and it was the place to be when Toledoans needed to shop, sought entertainment or desired civic participation, not to mention
that an enormous daytime population came there to work as well.
The combination worked so beautifully that, until postwar suburbanization began to alter the central business district’s status, no one could conceive of shopping, going to the theater or transacting most types of business without thinking of downtown. As such, it was central to not just city but also the lives of most Toledoans.