Kresge & Kmart

Another Detroit retailer that quietly became a national giant. In 1899, a former tinware salesman named Sebastian S. Kresge opened a five-and-dime on Woodward Avenue downtown — 2,000 square feet, 1,500 items, nothing over a dime. Shoppers loved the cheap, no-frills variety, and the S.S. Kresge Company grew into one of the country’s biggest chains, second only to Woolworth.

Then, in 1962, Kresge’s president opened a new kind of store — a big discount format called Kmart — in the suburb of Garden City (the same suburb where Little Caesars had started three years earlier). Kmart eventually swallowed the parent company, which renamed itself Kmart Corporation, and for a while it was one of the largest retailers on earth (“Attention, Kmart shoppers…”). The empire has nearly vanished now, but Kresge’s other Detroit legacy endures: he poured his fortune into the Kresge Foundation, still one of the nation’s great philanthropies, whose name graces the DIA’s Kresge Court and institutions across the city.