Goodman's Haberdashery - Hoboken, NJ
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 40° 44.262 W 074° 01.875
18T E 581796 N 4510091
This sign is located on the building at 100 Washington Street in Hoboken, NJ.
Waymark Code: WMENM3
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 06/19/2012
Views: 5
On the side of what is now a Coldwell Banker office at 100 Washington Street and across the street from Hoboken's City Hall, is this ghost sign which in faded paint reads:
"KNOWN FOR RELIABILITY
GOODMAN'S
EST. 1923
HABERDASHERY
CLOTHING SPORTSWEAR
FOR MEN AND BOYS"
This website (
visit link) further reveals:
"Near the corner of First and Washington is the painted sign for Goodman’s. Benjamin Goodman, whom everyone called Bob, was part of a small but thriving Jewish community that was well-represented among the shopkeepers on First Street. Goodman opened his store in 1923 in his early 20s. Locals who remember him say he was short and balding but tough and serious. “He was a businessman,” said Fitzgibbons. “Back then, that’s the way they were.”
Goodman owned other properties in town, but his store was his career. He called it a haberdashery, a term with European heritage, meaning a men’s outfitter. It had two entrances, one on Washington and another on First. Goodman sold nice pants and suits, belts and hats like walking caps and fedoras, but mostly work clothes. “They sold to the longshoremen, to the truck drivers, to the laborers,” said Hoboken’s City Historian Lenny Luizzi. And with all the industry in Hoboken – the factories, the piers and the railroad – Goodman had plenty of clients. “Everybody who was born and raised in Hoboken between 1923 and 1983, at one time or another, bought some kind of clothes at Goodman’s,” said Luizzi.
But as the years passed, the styles and local clientele changed. Leone said he never had a reason to go into Goodman’s since the merchandise was more the fashion of his father’s generation, not his. “We didn’t wear hats like that,” he said. But Goodman managed to hold on to the store until 1990, when he was 90. His son, Sal, a much taller and milder man than his father who’d worked in the store for decades, also retired at that time and moved to Florida after the last stock was sold.
When the first real estate office moved into the building, the Goodman’s sign remained on the side facing First Street. Luizzi said the new retailer’s management had plans to paint over it, but the Hoboken Historic Preservation Commission asked them not to, and they complied."