Barker Bros. was a major Los Angeles-based retailer of furniture, home furnishings and housewares from 1880 until 1992. Obadiah Truax Barker had owned upholstery and mattress shops in Cincinnati, Ohio and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1880, was visiting Los Angeles on a trip from Colorado Springs to San José, Cal., and overheard an outraged Otto Müller at a horticultural exhibition complain about the high cost of furnishing his home from the only large furniture store in the city at the time. Barker approached Müller and together they founded a furniture shop on N. Spring Street near the Los Angeles Plaza, called Barker and Mueller. In 1880, Los Angeles was a town a population of 11,183, but the city started to experience tremendous growth: its population would increase tenfold in the next twenty years, and tenfold again, to over one million, in the 25 years after that. In 1883 Barker bought out Müller and went into partnership with W. S. Allen, and moved to the Central Business District at that time, into the Merced Abbott Building on Main Street. Barker bought out Allen that same year and the firm became O. T. Barker & Sons. Later the store moved to 3rd & Spring streets at the Stimson Building, Los Angeles' first steel-frame building, where their rent of $1500 was ten times what they had paid on Main Street, a sign of the rapid growth of Los Angeles at the time. Again they moved – the move was done overnight and widely reported – this time to the seven-story Van Nuys building at 716–738 S. Broadway, the area which is now known as the Historic Core, the part of Broadway that was the main commercial street of Los Angeles from around 1910 until World War Two.
On January 25, 1926, the company built and moved into an eleven-story building at 818 W. 7th Street, stretching the full south side block from Flower to Figueroa streets, with of floor space. A 1931 article reported that they employed 1,444 people.
Branches
The company launched branch stores across Greater Los Angeles and in Bakersfield, with 15 branches by 1955: Hollywood opened in 1927, Long Beach in 1929, plus Glendale, Inglewood, Huntington Park, Santa Monica, Alhambra, Pasadena, Crenshaw, Westwood, Pomona, Van Nuys, burbank, Santa Ana, Whittier, and Bakersfield, plus a decorator store in Beverly Hills. The company has sales of $30 million at that time, with two-thirds coming from the downtown flagship.
Epilogue
The Downtown flagship closed in 1984. Prisma Capital acquired the company in a leveraged buyout and, having taken on too much debt, caused Barker Bros. to go bankrupt and close in 1992.
