Seattle Department Stores

When I first moved to Seattle in 1973, there were three local department stores. Frederick and Nelson sold to high end consumers, while the Bon Marche catered to the middle class. Nordstrom, which began as a shoe store and still had the largest selection of shoes in town, occupied the space in between the two and was more fashion forward.

Nordstrom has since grown into a national department store. Frederick and Nelson, long owned by Marshall Field, was shuttered in 1992. The Bon, like so many other department stores in the United States, is now known as Macy's.

The Bon Marche was owned by Allied Stores from 1929 to 1989 when Federated Department Stores bought Allied. Federated later bought R. H. Macy and Co.

A good website for historic photos of these department stores is pdxhistory.com

The Frederick and Nelson logo never changed much, keeping its cursive type face and early 20th century feel.

 
The Nordstrom logos have always shown the name in a crisp, understated design. The early logos displayed the company name as a possessive proper noun with an initial capital letter. A later version was all lower case, and currently the logo is all upper case. The font has changed repeatedly. I like the elegance of the current version.


(Photo from a Seattle PI article on the history of Nordstrom).

    

The Bon Marche logo is somewhat unusual in having a different font for each word.



In the 1980s, a new logo used a much more modern type face as well as the company's nickname.


In 2003 Federated Department Stores decided to re-brand most of their department stores as Macy's. For a year, the Bon had hypenated logos, trying to get customers used to the new look.

   
Not everyone was pleased with the change. (I like that they thought the logos said it all, no need for further explanations.)



The next year, the Bon name was retired and the Macy's logo with a red star took over.


Old habits are hard to break. I still hear people say, "I am going to the Bon, I mean Macy's".

Fantastic Exhibit at the Juneau International Airport

If you are traveling to Juneau (as a friend of mine did recently and told me about this exhibit), be sure to allow some time to explore the exhibit showcasing the airlines that have provided air service to JNU and their logos. These pictures are courtesy of airport managment. Thanks!

Again we see the stylized birds. I also like the use of totem pole motifs in the Pan American and Alaska Washington Airways signs.

Union Pacific Part 1

I had intended to show the logos of railroads which were acquired by the Union Pacific, which I will do in Part 2. While I was researching the various mergers, much to my excitement  I found that Union Pacific’s website has a section dedicated to the history of its own corporate logo.  Check it out!

http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/history/uplogo/index.shtml

 It shows every logo the company ever used along with commentary both on the history of the company and the design of the logos from the founding of the company, to the first “shield” to current. Kudos and thanks to whoever in the company has a passion for history.

  An early logo from 1884. It looks very Victorian.

The first "shield" from 1887. In just two years, they switched to a much more modern looking type face. The next year saw the introduction of the red, white and blue color scheme, very similar to the current version.

Burlington Northern

Railroads changed the course of the 19th century history just as aviation and the internet did in the 20th. Today there are four railroad systems in the United States, two in the West (BNSF, previously known as Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and Union Pacific) and two in the East (Norfolk Southern and CSX), all the results of a series of mergers that climaxed in the 1980s.

Burlington Northern is now owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.



That's a boring logo. Warren Buffett is a financial genius and he's built a great company, but the logo looks like it was designed by a ten-year old geek. Type name, pick a font, done. Luckily, the railroads that were merged into the Burlington Northern had better logos.

The Burlington Northern started in the Midwest in 1848 when the Chicago and Aurora Railroad was founded. It later became the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy.



1970 saw the merger of four railroads into what became known as the Burlington Northern. They were the Great Northern Railway,  the Northern Pacific Railway,  the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway.

  

In 1996 the Burlington Northern merged with the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe railway. Their routes were complementary, as the Santa Fe lines went south while the Burlington Northern lines covered the upper Midwest, Rocky Mountain states and into the Pacific Northwest.



For a while, the combined company kept the elegant round logo of the Santa Fe and its blue color, before going to the rectangular version, and finally slimming down the name to letters only and changing the colors as well.

  

Early American Aircraft logos

  

 

Early American Aircraft Companies

How a photograph in a museum led to research on the history of the aviation industry and veered off into admiration of early 20th century corporate logos and indirectly to this blog.

By Darcy MacLaren

Last spring I visited the Museum of Flight with some friends. In one of the exhibits on the early history of the Boeing Company, there was a photograph of some young men with now famous last names who started companies to manufacture airplanes.

In the early 20th century, flight was the hot new technology, changing society as much as the internet has in our lifetimes.

Some research using Wikipedia and various corporate websites allowed me to create this chronology of the young men, the companies they started and what happened to the companies. Some still exist, either on their own or as divisions of other companies. Some have disappeared.

Early American Aircraft Companies

<><><><><><><><> <><><><><><><><>

Founder	Company Name	Date	Current Company
Edson Gallaudet	Gallaudet Engineering	1910	General Dynamics
Greely S. Curtiss	Burgess & Curtiss	1911	Curtiss-Wright, North American Aviation (owned by General Motors 1933-1948), Rockwell International, Boeing
William & Oliver Thomas	Thomas Brothers	1912	General Dynamics
Glenn Martin	Glenn L. Martin	1911	Martin-Marietta, Lockheed Martin
William Boeing	Boeing Airplane	1916	United Aircraft and Transport (Boeing)
Allan & Malcolm Loughead	Loughead Aircraft Mfg.	1916	Lockheed Martin
Chance M. Vought	Lewis & Vought	1917	Vought-Sikorsky, Chance Vought, LTV, Vought Aircraft Industries
Donald Wills Douglas Sr.	Davis –Douglas Co.	1920	McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing
Igor Sikorsky	Sikorsky Mfg. Co.	1925	United Technologies
Lloyd Stearman	Stearman Aircraft	1927	United Aircraft and Transport, Boeing
Clyde V. Cessna	Cessna Aircraft	1927	Textron
Leroy Grumman	Grumman Aircraft Engineering	1930	Northrop Grumman
Walter H. Beech	Beech Aircraft	1932	Raytheon
Lawrence Dale Bell	Bell Aircraft	1935	Textron
James Smith McDonnell	McDonnell Aircraft	1939	McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing
Jack Northrop	Northrop Corp.	1939	Northrop Grumman

While the chronology was interesting, the corporate logos were, it turned out, even more fascinating. Many of them showed the Art Deco sensibility of the time, combined with stylized pictures of birds to indicate flight. (Interestingly, in Hawaiian the word for airplane “mokulele” translates roughly as jumping boat. If airplane manufacturing had originated in Hawaii, would the logos have used marine imagery instead?)