Another sign of the heydays of downtown Hammond as a mecca of department stores will soon be gone with the razing of the former J.C. Penney building.
The building, which sits at the northeast corner of Hohman Avenue and Sibley Street, has suffered water and other damage, and city officials decided the best route was to tear it down. Phil Taillon, executive director of the city’s Planning and Development Department, has said that for the time being, the spot will become a parking lot.
The building joins a number of other structures built when the Hohman Avenue corridor was filled with shoppers and department stores. The area used to be home to a number of large retailers including Goldblatt’s, Minas and Rothschild department stores in the middle part of the 20th century.
Richard Barnes, president of the Hammond Historical Society, said he remembers spending time in along Hohman Avenue as a child living in the city.
“A kid could spend all day down there,” he said. “It was a really healthy community.”
Barnes worked as newspaper delivery boy growing up and would often spend his money downtown watching movies and getting a milkshake, he said.
Hammond City Councilman Robert Markovich, D-at large, remembers his mother taking him and his two brothers to go shopping, holding all of three of them in harnesses to keep them in check.
“Downtown Hammond was packed just like State Street in downtown Chicago,” he said.
The Christmas season was particularly popular as the stores would put up large displays. Markovich said he also loved watching a toy train run at one of the stores.
After graduating from high school, Louie Karubas worked as a stock boy at Minas Department Store.
“I thought it was the greatest thing because Minas was such a high-class store,” he said.
Karubas then decided to join the other business owners and bought the LaSalle Hotel in the 1970s.
“When I came here, everybody was booming downtown,” he said.
Although his hotel remains, many of those stores and other retailers are long gone. The building of Interstate 65 in the 1960s and then the opening of Southlake Mall in Merrillville and River Oaks Mall across the state line in Calumet City took shoppers away.
“That was the doom for downtown Hammond,” Markovich said.
Barnes argues part of the problem was also that Hammond’s once-strong Jewish population moved out of the city. He said the community had played a large role in some of the stores, such as Goldblatt’s and Rothschild’s, and worked to market the area to shoppers.
According to a Post-Tribune story, the number of retail stores in all of Hammond dropped from 753 in 1972 to 332 in 2002. Many of the buildings were torn down to make way for other projects such as the overpass just north of Sibley on Hohman Avenue. Goldblatt’s is now a parking lot. The area is now dominated by the likes of Franciscan St. Margaret Health and the U.S. District Courthouse.
Karubas said he hates seeing the buildings torn down.
“I’m just disappointed that they didn’t try to do more to save downtown,” he said, adding that he wants something more than just another parking lot.
Barnes, who owns office spaces in downtown and rents them out, said the days of large department stores aren’t coming back for the downtown area but that he thinks business development can still happen. He pointed to the recent opening of 18th Street Brewery as another attraction that will hopefully help bring more people to the area.
“We’re very bullish on downtown Hammond,” he said.
Barnes supports an effort to move Hammond City Hall to Hohman Avenue from its current home on Calumet Avenue in the hopes that will further increase business and has collected more than 1,000 signatures, he said.
Karubas said he’s also optimistic that the best days of the downtown area aren’t in its past but work needs to be done.
“We’ve got to do something,” he said. “It isn’t right to see downtown dying like it is.”
