Monday, October 15, 2007

Macy's (former Hecht's), Marlow Heights Shopping Center, Marlow Heights, Maryland. Recreated front facade using original "The Hecht Co." logo.(Neil Strawbridge).

Macy's (former Hecht's), Marlow Heights Shopping Center, Marlow Heights, Maryland. (Neil Strawbridge).

11 comments:

  1. The Hecht's logo is a thing of beauty.

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  2. I agree. It's a shame Hecht's decided to switch to a simpler logo, but those were the times.

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  3. Yeah, that logo was really good. I mean, Sears is probably the only store to add more style upon redesigning their logo. Very Sega-y.

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  4. The new Sears logo isn't bad, but I think I preferred the all caps version or the '50s script version more.

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  5. Wow, and to think I'd never seen the older version of Hecht's logo before! Does anyone know when they switched away from that logo, to the one they used in all the years before the conversion to Macy's?

    As for the Sears logo, I have to agree with Steven on that. I've gotten over my initial dislike of that logo, but I still don't like the red underlining that I've occasionally seen used with their new logo. Not to mention, it makes that logo, plus the company, look really cheap!

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  6. The best I can tell, Hecht's dumped the script logo in its advertising sometime in the early '70s and switched temporarily to a lowercase logo before settling on its final Avant Garde font logo somewhere around 1977.

    The signs did not tend to change that quickly however. Published reports suggest that the Marlow Heights store kept the script logo as late as 1993, while other stores with it were upgraded with a new logo when they underwent major renovations in the '80s.

    The '77 logo was the first to use the 'Hecht's' nickname; all previous logos refered to the company as 'The Hecht Co.'

    You can gauge it somewhat by the stores they built during the era. Tysons Corner, Landmark and Montgomery Mall were all built in the late '60s and had the script logo. Landover Mall, opened in 1972, had the lowercase logo. Lakeforest, opened in the late '70s, had a 'Hecht's' logo.

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  7. I guess I wasn't clear: when I said "Sears is probably the only store to add more style upon redesigning their logo," I meant the 1984 redesign. The one they had before that was a lot like the last Hecht's logo.

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  8. That fancy script only heightens the great architecture on this store.

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  9. Jake: OK, I get it.

    Didi: I definitely like the old logo on this store better than the new one.

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  10. I was born in '81 and mostly remember that script logo. They updated the logo but it couldn't have been more than a few years before I left for college in 1999. The new logo didn't look bad. The Macy's logo looks painfully tiny on that large plane.

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  11. Too bad they didn't keep the logo until the Macy's takeover. The original sign looked the best here.

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