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August 11, 2005 - Image 61

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 2005-08-11

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

Wasserman family rides retail rapids
to keep local hatter on profitable
course.

Wasserman, 58, has seen a
lot more trouble than that.
Any businessman who has
managed to hang on down-
town this long almost cer-
tainly had more than his
share.
"We've been through a
lot," he said. "Almost every
downtown landmark that
existed when my dad took
over Henry's has disappeared.
Hudson's. Hughes and
Hatcher. The London Chop
House. Paul's Cut-Rate
Drugs. Go right down the
list, places we thought would
never close. If you'd told me
25 years ago that they'd all
be gone and we'd still be
here, I wouldn't have
believed it.
"Then last year, they tore
up Broadway for major
reconstruction. It was Sup,-
posed to last 90 days and it
was a fiasco that went on for
a year. My customers could-
n't drive here. They could
barely walk here because
there were so many barri-
cades on the sidewalk. Right
PaultVassei7nan at the holiday season.
"But Detroiters are a tough
is the third
bunch.
They managed to get
Henry the
here
and,
although it wasn't
Hatter
one of our best Decembers,
we made it through. And
now, finally, I can see it turn-
ing around. I really believe
"I can tell you exactly when it
that we have survived the worst."
changed," says Paul Wasserman,
whose family has owned the local
Changing Times
headwear institution on Broadway for
57 years. "It was at John F. Kennedy's
The Wasserman family has owned
inauguration in 1961.
Henry's for a bit more than half of the
"A president always wore a top hat
venerable store's 112 years. It was
to take the oath of office, but the hat
opened by Henry Komrofsky in 1893,
mailed to Kennedy underestimated
on the site of what would become
his head size. So he stood out there in
Crowley's Department Store, another
the cold with no hat on. Kennedy was vanished landmark. The present store
such a trend-setter that before you
is its third downtown location.
knew it, the entire hat industry was in
Henry's also has outlets on Joseph
trouble."
Campau, in downtown Hamtramck,

,

GEORGE CANTOR

Special to the Jewish News

A

poster hangs in the window
of the store in downtown
Detroit: Sean Connery and
Harrison Ford in one of the Indiana
Jones movies. They are both wearing
hats.
Those were the good old days, as far
as Henry the Hatter is concerned. In
the 1930s, the era in which the movie
was set, no well-dressed man would
think of leaving home bareheaded.

and at Ten Mile and Greenfield, in
Southfield.
But the Broadway store, with its
long, narrow space lined on both sides
with hat-laden display cases, is the
mainstay.
"I can tell you when it turned
around," says Wasserman. "It was a
movie in the early '70s, Superfly.
Suddenly, a hat became a fashion
statement for young urban males and
we were back in style.
"By that time, the local hat market
was ours by attrition. The big stores
had dropped their hat departments
and our competitors were all out of
business."
A small group of clothing stores,
clustered around Broadway and
Randolph, managed to adapt to the
changing downtown market. Serman's.
The Broadway. Stone's. Hot Sam's,
Henry's. Most of them are or were
once Jewish-owned, and for the last
25 years, they were virtually the last
outposts of downtown retail.
"I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'd
feel a lot better if we had more venues
that brought consumers downtown,"
said Steve Ross, whose family has
owned Serman's since 1917. "We get
no business from the big-ticket proj-
ects — the casinos, the stadiums,
Compuware. But build a multiplex
movie theater down here and a few
more small restaurants and that would
be great.
"Even more important than that is
addressing the health of the city, the
outflow of people. Because those are my
customers. If they leave Detroit, they'll
be shopping somewhere else, too."
Henry the Hatter was purchased by
Paul's father, Seymour Wasserman, in
1948. It moved across Gratio t to its
present location five years later. The
building dates to the 1880s and was
used first as a vaudeville theater and
then a bank.
"My dad tried to break through the
vault when he moved in here and
couldn't do it," says Wasserman. "You

.

HEADSTRONG

on page 62

47N

8/11
2005

61

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