From This Valley

By Pete Steiner

Clearly visible from Second Street, the landmark brickand-stone exterior rises three stories above downtown Mankato Place mall. The large script sign to this day proclaims to the eastern horizon: BRETT’S!

But even if London still has its Harrods and New York still has its Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, Mankato no longer has Brett’s. It was 30 years ago this month that our own iconic department store announced it would be closing for good, joining the list of other beloved “places that are no more.”

George E. Brett founded a dry goods store downtown in 1868. As the store evolved and expanded, by 1910 it had moved to its ultimate location at the corner of Front and Jackson streets, where it anchored the downtown business district for eight decades.

But after 124 years, Mankato’s retail scene was changing dramatically by 1992.

For a quarter century, Brett’s had weathered the challenge of Madison East Shopping Center, which had taken Sears and Woolworth’s out of downtown. Now, however, there was a newer, larger mall, River Hills. And oh yes, there was the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 and then more bad-weather weekends during that crucial holiday shopping season.

“That cost us a million dollars during our most important time,” said Nancy Zallek, the great-great granddaughter of George E. Brett. She and her brother Scott had joined their dad, Brett Taylor Jr., at the head of the company.

“We probably held on longer than we should have,” she told me recently in her offices at the Mankato Area Foundation, where she is now president and CEO.

“We were fifth generation, but we were aware (the business model) would not survive the test of time. Shoppers were enamored with malls. You keep hoping it will turn around. … We were family, many of our 100 Mankato employees had been with us for decades.”

In May 1992, the announcement of the pending closing was finally made.

Never much of a shopper, I still have fond memories of wandering through Brett’s departments, not just the men’s clothing section, but watching the elegant women at the cosmetics counter, checking out household items and, of course, gazing at the window displays.

There was a third-floor lounge, a respite space for women to take a break from shopping. And did you know that Brett’s installed the very first escalator in Minnesota? “But it only went UP!” Zallek joked. You had to use the stairs or take an elevator to come back down.

Elaine Schoeneberger started out as an elevator operator — you know, the kind you see now only in movies on TCM. She rose to become a vice president at a time when women still struggled against the glass ceiling in most businesses.

Donna Strand was another female vice president for marketing. Zallek said she couldn’t ever mention key employees without bringing up the effervescent Dixie Johnson. For nearly 30 years Dixie directed Brett’s Teen Board, staging fashion shows and charity events with high school girls interested in fashion and retail.

And then there was John Turner, a true creative artist, and as Zallek said, “a hippie before there were hippies.”

Even if you didn’t intend to shop, you were intrigued and impressed by Turner’s elaborate window displays, especially the ones with animated figures at Christmas. Turner was nationally recognized for his efforts to make the store visually appealing.

By 1992, it was not only malls that were changing retail. For 30 years, Walmart and Kmart and Target had been building big-box stores and had begun locating in Mankato. Amazon would ramp up the online retail onslaught in 1994.

By 2001, even Minneapolis’ iconic Dayton’s downtown store was forced into merger, eventually closing altogether in 2017.

Zallek said that while she can still get nostalgic reminiscing about “when it was good,” and despite many fond memories, all those changes she and her brother foresaw quickly remind her “how incredibly difficult retail is to be in now. … Over the last 30 years, there’s not many times I’ve said, ‘I wish I was still in retail.’”

The pandemic put further pressure on brick-and-mortar stores. Yet it appears recently some shoppers, perhaps eager to shed “COVID fatigue,” are happy to get back to making purchases in person. And Zallek noted there are many boutique-type retail stores opening even now, in Old Town and elsewhere, a sort of “back-to-thefuture” trend.

In a front-page article of the May 21, 1992, edition of The Free Press, reporter Sue Menton quoted former Brett’s employee and Teen Board alumna Kris Connors as feeling “awful” when she learned the store was closing.

Connors, who would go on to found her own women’s clothing store, told Menton: “Brett’s always supported the community. We won’t appreciate for a long time how easy they made it for us.” Longtime radio guy Pete Steiner is now a free lance writer in Mankato.