Advertisements for Abraham & Straus in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and The Brooklyn Citizen
Pedestrians on Fulton Street in front of Abraham & Straus, 1909. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. Library of Congress.
Abraham & Straus was a pioneering Brooklyn department store located, as of 1920, on Fulton Street, later to expand into buildings extending down Livingston to Hoyt Street. It was bought out by Macy’s (once its rival) in 1995.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 4 Jan, 1920, p. 2
The Brooklyn Citizen. 4 Jan., 1920, p. 2
The “January Sale” full-page ad in The Eagle and the smaller one in The Citizen indicate the kind of shopping middle-and-upper-middle-class Brooklynites might be doing in the early days of 1920. But they wouldn’t be doing it on January 4:: stores were closed Sundays, subject to New York’s blue laws, which were ruled unconstitutional in 1976.
According to this inflation converter, one dollar to them was the equivalent to $12.43 to to us, so those pink batiste nightgowns were a steal at the equivalent of $24.95.