nearly six hundred members of the Iroquois Theater audience would lose their lives that afternoon, but few fatalities or serious injuries came from first-floor seats.  Many from there, like the Phillipson party, lost nothing but their coats. Lillian, the youngest, became separated from the family and was briefly thought to be a victim.  According to one newspaper, the girl made it to the Union Hotel (probably referring to the Grand Union Hotel in the former Music Hall building on Randolph street) then somehow found her family. Other stories connected the Phillipson family to the more distant Continental Hotel. There were many discrepancies in reports about the family's Iroquois experience, but the appearance of Lillian's name on missing lists suggests she was missing for a few hours.

Many errors

Some newspapers reported there were three rather than four Phillipson daughters. Francis became Florence. Flora was at the Continental hotel sobbing for her children as others searched for them in area stores, but she found Lillian in a drugstore, dead, and left her there (!) All three girls were missing; only Lillian was missing.  By some reports Flora's hysteria might have contributed to erroneous information. If so, it was a temporary response to her fear.  A lifetime of shrewd business activity says Flora Phillipson was not a flibbertigibbet.

Flora

I've failed to learn much anything about Flora's childhood. She was the daughter of immigrants Joseph and Theresa Marks, and had at least two siblings, Isaac and David. One story stated she was from Philadelphia but the 1900 U.S. Census reported she was born in New York. The same census has Joseph emigrating in 1875 but his naturalization filing reported 1867. Flora might have had a fuzzy recollection of when Joseph emigrated, and Joseph might have been mistaken about the state of Flora's birth but another possibility is that the oldest daughter, Francis, then sixteen, supplied the information to the census enumerator.

Team Flora and Joseph

Married in 1882 to Joseph Phillipson (1861-1906), Flora's family in 1903 lived in a ten-room duplex at 4325-27 Grand Blvd in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in northwest Chicago.

Joseph continued doing business on the near west side. He employed Polish-speaking workers and his customers were as familiar as family. The series of Phillipson dry goods stores from 1882 to 1906 were located in this Maxwell street area, called "the ghetto," where his parents, Phillip and Rachel Phillipson, settled after immigrating from Poland c.1867. It was there that Joseph and his brother, Samuel Phillipson (1866-1936), had worked as teenagers, learning the dry goods peddling business from the ground up by helping their father peddle merchandise door to door, carrying packs on their backs. It was there that Flora, yet a bride, helped Joseph work the peddling wagon and in 1882 urged him to set up his first store, a 14 x 20 structure at 491 S. Jefferson St. that sold notions at retail and wholesaled to other peddlers. Reportedly Joseph credited Flora as critical to his success. In the early years and again during the 1893 depression, she served as saleswoman, janitor, bookkeeper, and secretary.

The first new construction for a Phillipson store was in 1897 at the southwest corner of Jefferson and Dussold, a $35,000 four-story building designed by Cowles & Ohrenstein. It was attached to an existing structure, producing an 85'x125' store.
Three years before the Iroquois fire, Joseph had leased a building on Chicago's Jefferson and O'Brien streets. It had been the city's only Yiddish playhouse and the manager of the theater was angry to be ejected, but Joseph prevailed and annexed the structure to their six-story dry goods store facing Jefferson. The store was described as the first big department store in the "ghetto."†

In the years after the fire

A year after the Iroquois fire, Joseph took out a ten-year loan to build a new $150,000 store on the northeast corner of Halsted and Twelfth. It was described as a sign that merchants were ready to bring big State street type department stores to distant neighborhoods. He lived to see it in operation for only a few months. A brief obituary notice stated that a fuller obituary would follow but I failed to find it. He was in Hot Springs at the time, presumably in Arkansas, perhaps trying to treat an ailment.

Three years and three days after the Iroquois Theater fire, Flora purchased a box seat at the Coliseum Theater to attend a benefit for the Jewish Old People's Home on Albany and Ogden avenues. She'd been active in Jewish society from the early days of her marriage, serving as vice president of the Hebrew Ladies Aid Society in 1890, but the Jewish Old People's home was special. Joseph had been one of the organization's founders, and an officer. He'd been gone for ten months and Flora, ever the helpmate, donated $5,000 to the home.

Joe Phillipson exceptional

An estimated 20,000 people joined the February 1906 funeral entourage for Joseph Phillipson. They were the shopkeepers, employees and families he'd helped get started over the prior two decades, resulting in fifty shopkeepers stores within an eight-block radius of the Phillipson store. They included five millinery shops and multiple shoe and boot stores, generating an estimated $2 million in annual sales. Many had begun as employees at the Phillipson store, recognized by Joseph as having good business sense. Known as the  Phillipson Brigade, they became his loyal customer base when he later opened a wholesale branch.

Flora sells Joseph's baby

At Joseph's death. Flora had four daughters aged thirteen to twenty-two to continue raising and see wed. She held out for three years, running the store herself then, in March, 1909, sold the stock and fixtures of the Joseph Phillipson Department store and the warehouse on Jefferson and O'Brien, the former site of the Yiddish theater, for $339,757 ($9 million today) plus a twenty-year $19,000 annual lease on the property. It was heralded as the largest deal of its kind in the ghetto district. The buyers: Henry Isaacs, owner of Fairbanks department stores in Alaska and Joseph Weissenbach, son-in-law of Leon Klein, owner of Joseph's primary competitor, the L. Klein department store a block away at Halsted and Fourteenth streets. The new owners changed the name to "The Twelfth Street Store." 

The decision to sell the store may have been difficult for Flora. She surely considered continuing to run the store herself. As a woman living in Illinois, unlike some other states, she could own property and control her earnings, but it would have been hard work regardless of gender. Joseph's store was a much larger entity in 1906 than it had been when she worked there in 1893. Many more employees and customers, much more inventory.

And two sets of brothers. There were Joseph's brothers, Samuel and Louis Phillipson (1874-1941), and Flora's brothers, Isaac and David Marks. Samuel had been a silent partner in Joseph's company (a silence ended after his brother's death when he seemed to want shared credit for his role in the venture's success), and Louis was in management. Both men may have had ideas about a future role. Isaac L. Marks (1859-1916), had operated a dry goods store in Brooklyn before he and his wife, Minnie Smith Marks, relocated to Chicago in 1908. Did Isaac and David come to Chicago in expectation of having a role in Joseph's store? In September, after the sale, Isaac and a third Marks child, David J. Marks, formed the Marquette Motor Vehicle company to manufacture automobiles and engines at 3626 S. Halstead (no connection to the Marquette-Buick), capitalized with $20,000 that may have come from Flora. They exhibited at the 1910 & 1911 Chicago Auto show, and one of their delivery wagon trucks ran a reliability race that year. Three years later, they were out of business. Samuel Phillipson started over with a wholesale company and a retail department store, Samuel Phillipson & Bro. He prospered for two decades, but the business failed during the 1929 Depression. The name of the retail store suggests Louis was involved but Samuel made a point of identifying himself as the sole owner. Am thinking Samuel may have been a bit less orthodox than Joseph.

It would be interesting to know what factors motivated Flora to sell Joseph's store. Perhaps Joseph had built an empire that could only be run properly by Joseph. Maybe she didn't want to juggle two brothers and two brothers-in-law. Or maybe Flora had just had her fill of dry goods and operating a business. She'd watched her husband die at an early age so maybe decided to do a bit more living before her time came.

Flora and her girls moved to the  Chicago Beach Hotel in the Kenwood neighborhood, a luxury hotel built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1919, thirteen years after Joseph's death, at age forty-nine, Flora remarried, to widower Samuel R. Zwetow, a wholesale jeweler and insurance broker from Denver - of a similar age to Joseph and also a Russian immigrant. (Zwetow is sometimes Americanized to Sweet.) In 1921 they left Denver and returned to Chicago. Both died in 1929 and were buried next to their respective first spouses, Flora in Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago next to Joseph, and Samuel in Denver's Congregation Emanuel Cemetery next to Annie Rubinsky.

Lillian bore two children with Samuel L. Dinkelspiel (1891-1961), son of a Louisville cloth and hides wholesaling family. Samuel became a producer of antique reproduction furniture and lighting, including his Legacy Lighting line, examples of which turn up today at auctions and flea markets.  In 1917 he announced that Crest Company would no longer manufacture furniture and would concentrate on floor lamps. Table lamps were added later.  In 1939 the Crest Company table lineup included this Eucalyptus theme Rookwood Pottery lamp. The vase portion was 14" high with an 8" glass reflector and crystal ball finial. From top to bottom it was 30.5"c  high.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Adeline married grocer Harry Futchenfeld / Feilchenfeld in 1909 (later shortened to Field) with whom she had two children, including a daughter named after Flora.

Francis married jeweler Maurice A. Barnett two and a half years after the fire.  One of their two children was named Joseph, after his grandfather.‡

Theresa, likely named after her grandmother, Theresa Marks, married stockbroker Alexander Kieferstein (later shortened to Kiefer), with whom she had two children.

Discrepancies and addendum

The name Phillipson was sometimes spelled with just one L and the spelling of Flora's maiden name was sometimes given as Marx. Frances' name was sometimes spelled as Francis. Joseph Phillipson employed a manager named Marks that was perhaps a relative of Flora's.

The Phillipson's had lost four children prior to the fire, including Ruth who died in infancy in 1899 and Mark who died at age three in 1889.

Joseph Phillipson's mother, Sarah Rachel, died in 1899 and his father, Philip Feivel Phillipson (c1830-1903), followed in 1903, six months before the Iroquois fire.  Philip was from Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in southern Poland.  Joseph and Samuel's youngest brother, Louis, also worked in Joseph's store.

†  This1891 description of Chicago's ghetto is filled with insensitive generalizations of a type that were once common but helps provide a picture of the scene in the ghetto when Joseph and Flora Phillipson were building their business. For a historical perspective of Chicago's Jewish community, see the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE)'s Virtual Library discussion.  It is not known what motivated Philip and Rachel Phillipson's mid 1860s emigration but a Library of Congress site provides an overview of the situation in their native country twenty years later.  Just found a copy on Ebay of the 1996 The Jews of Chicago: from shtetl to suburb by Irving Cutler for $9 including shipping.  You can read an excerpt here.

‡ Maurice Barnett was in 1930 convicted of insurance fraud after masterminding a 1929 conspiracy with two partners to stage a fake holdup. He was sentenced to the state penitentiary for one to five years. Multiple appeals over thirty-two months kept him out of jail until November, 1933 when the governor denied his petition for parole and he was sent to the prison in Joliet. He was out of jail by Feb, 1936, in time to post bail for his son in a marital dispute. Maurice and Francis later moved to Los Angeles.

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