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Arts & Entertainment

Brooklyn Rewind: The A.I. Namm & Sons Department Store, 1898

One of the first places in Boerum Hill to buy clothes.

The A.I. Namm & Sons Department Store stood at 450-458 Fulton Street. Polish immigrant Adolph I. Namm came to the United States in the 1870's and started his business in Manhattan. In 1885, taking advantage of Brooklyn’s physical and commercial growth, Namm moved his business to Brooklyn.

Eventually, his business expanded from a storefront to a block-long complex stretching from Fulton Street to Hoyt Street. By the 1920's, A.I. Namm was one of the largest department stores in the United States, with more than eighty departments and 1,200 employees.

The store’s motto was: “Don’t sell America short…sell it shirts.”

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By then, the Namms had cornered the dry goods market, beating out top competitors like Abraham & Strauss.

Since the late 1950s, the building on Fulton Street has been sold and purchased numerous times. Today, part of the structure still remains, occupied by various offices and firms including Liberty Mutual Life Insurance and Abraham and Strauss accounting agency.

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Interested in seeing more photos from BHS's collection? Visit the online image gallery. Use this database to search for individual photographs. Currently a small number of images are available online, but new photos are added regularly. You can also visit BHS's Othmer Library Wednesday - Friday from 1 - 5 p.m. to search through the entire collection of images.

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