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| (The Daily Times. April 22, 1913) |
If you needed a suit in Davenport in 1913, Dave Neustadt wanted you to come to Second and Main.
His family’s new clothing store opened May 1 in the Putnam Building. It had the ground floor, the basement, and a corner that was hard to miss. You could shop for a suit, boys’ clothes, shoes, and the little things that finished an outfit.
R.
M. Neustadt had begun the business with a one-room clothing shop in La Salle,
Illinois. By the time the family came to Davenport, it also had a store in
Decatur. Davenport made three.
The
sons divided the work. Dave ran Davenport. His brother G. A. managed La Salle
and handled advertising for the stores. Another brother, B. R., managed
Decatur. R. M. remained the head of the family business.
For
its opening, Neustadt invited people in for music and souvenirs. There were no
sales that evening. You could look around, meet the people running the place,
and come back to spend your money the next day.
Plenty
of people apparently did. The Davenport store added departments, eventually
taking space on the second floor. Dave and his wife became a familiar name
around town, involved in civic and fraternal groups. He and his family lived on
East Eleventh Street.
Then, in June 1923, he announced he was leaving.
He’d
become involved with Kuh, Nathan & Fischer Co., the Chicago manufacturers
of “Sincerity Clothes.” He’d had a financial interest in the company for about
a year and a half, and its growth called for more of his time and money. He was
going to Chicago to join his brothers in the wholesale and manufacturing
business.
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| Inside Neustadt's Department Store (The Daily Times. April 22, 1913) |
That meant clearing out Neustadt’s. The sale started June 23, with the stock to go. Dave also worked out an early end to his lease. The Putnam estate was due to get the space and fixtures back on September 1.
Edward
K. Putnam hated to lose the family as tenants, but he had no plans to leave the
corner empty. He was already hearing from people interested in the space and
thought it would stay a men’s clothing store. Clothes had been sold on that
corner long before Neustadt’s arrived.
The
papers don’t say exactly when Dave rang up his last Davenport sale. They give
us a pretty good picture of what happened: a family store opened with music and
souvenirs, grew upstairs, and ten years later sold off its stock because
Chicago was its next stop.
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