The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Banked record, this history lk-civ-retail; this history lk-tst-fashion; Exports lk-exp-gazetteer
The malls leg had no pre-mall baseline of its own — the storefront line stood only by pointer — and the baseline is assembled here from the banked business record, at the size that record supports. Lakeville's retail ground has only ever been one street: the Michigan Street storefront line. In the Polk era its clothing trade was John Hupp's millinery and fancy goods, with dry goods, boots and shoes carried as lines inside the general stores; its shipment trade stood a block's remove away in the handlers the gazetteer article names — Kramer & Wolf's grain elevator, the Lakeville Lumber Company, and by 1916–17 the Producers Union Dairy Company. The baseline's central finding prints plainly: no department store has ever stood in Lakeville — not in the Polk rosters, not in the business files, not in living memory's record — so the town entered the mall era, such as it was, without the downtown anchor the era is usually said to have killed. What regional malls later drew away from Lakeville was never a department store's trade; it was the general stores' and specialists' trade, and the succession in the fashion addenda shows how thin that was to begin with. The present line is the civic article's: storefronts on Michigan Street, of which the only centre-class store is the Dollar General carried below.