Hudson’s (J.L. Hudson’s)

For a century, “Hudson’s” meant Detroit. Joseph Lowthian Hudson opened a men’s clothing shop in 1881 and grew it into the tallest department store in the world — 25 stories, an entire Woodward block, 12,000 employees, 100,000 sales a day, a children’s toy floor, a circulating library, and more than 700 fitting rooms.

Its reach went far beyond retail. Hudson’s launched Detroit’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924 (still rolling down Woodward every year), and the 1969 Dayton-Hudson merger eventually became Target Corporation — yes, Target traces its corporate roots to this Detroit store. The flagship closed in 1983 and, in 1998, was famously imploded, at the time the tallest building ever brought down that way, an event 20,000 people came to watch. (Part of its old warehouse complex was even folded into Ford Field.) Today the site is rising again as Hudson’s Detroit, a gleaming new tower. The store is gone; the name, the parade, and the spirit very much aren’t.