Kaplan's Ben Hur

Kaplan's Ben Hur
Originally uploaded by Vanita.

I wrote about the closing of this Houston area department store earlier in the month and I came back to the entry in a roundabout way. This flickr photo shows the street sign. I asked the photographer, vanita, about the store, and this is what she had to say:

You asked me about the area it is in... Here in Houston it's in an old neighborhood called The Heights. The area has ebbed and flowed in desirability. Currently it is enjoying substantial renovation and area-sensitive new construction, which is basically Victorian style. That said, you still encounter run down areas as well as the reclaimed areas within the neighborhood.

Kaplan's seemed frozen in time as a 1950's old style department store. It most certainly did not trend along with Foley's and Dillard's or any other store that followed fashion trends in terms of both merchandise and the display of said merchandise.

Both my mother and mother-in-law are long time Houston residents, women in their 70's, and they both have definitely known of it, but used it very rarely over the years. They both think of Kaplan's as having higher end
items and above-and-beyond customer care.

My husband looked up the following Houston Chronicle article on the store for you...
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2003_3644725

Plus he also found this...
A snip from another article about funny Houston names:

In the Heights, Dave and Bessie Kaplan sold clothing at Kaplan's Department Store, which they opened in 1913. Both their sons, Bennett and Herman, fought in World War II and wanted to work with their parents when they returned from the war.

But the store's revenues weren't sufficient to cover two more people on the payroll, says Martin Kaplan, Dave and Bessie's grandson. Dave pointed out the empty building space next door to Kaplan's and suggested the sons openanother business there. The two combined their names and opened a business called Ben-Hur ("Her" sounded too feminine, Martin speculates), which dealt in home and kitchen furnishings - items not produced during the war and very scarce.

"In the public's eye, we've always been one store," says Martin, the only child of Bennett and Dorothy Kaplan. Herman died a bachelor.