Hochschild Kohn's
American department store chain
Hochschild Kohn's, also known as Hochschild-Kohn or simply Hochschild's, was a 20th-century American department store chain based in Baltimore, Maryland. It was started in 1897 as a partnership between Max Hochschild, Benno Kohn, and his brother Louis B. Kohn. Hochschild-Kohn & Company opened that year with a downtown-Baltimore store on the northwest corner of Howard and Lexington Streets. The chain closed in 1984.
History
Max Hochschild was a Jewish immigrant from Hesse, Germany, while Benno and Louis B. Kohn were the American-born sons of Jewish parents who immigrated from Bavaria. The company prospered and in 1912 purchased a building at 208 N. Howard Street. When incorporated in 1922, Hochschild-Kohn was Baltimore's largest department store. Also in 1922, the company started the Belvedere brand record label. Space needs led to the purchase of most of the block bounded by Howard, Franklin, Park, and Centre Streets in 1923 in anticipation of building a new, more modern and spacious store, but financial difficulties and Max Hochschild's retirement as president led to the plan's abandonment. (The building now standing at the Howard and Lexington location echoes some of the original building's semi-circular arched door and window profiles.)
Benno Kohn died in 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hochschild Kohn's” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.