A big streamlined box of a department store, its corner swung around in a broad curve faced with large smooth stone panels and ringed by horizontal bands. A round clock sat on the curve just above the ground floor, and a flagpole rose from the roof. The long side walls were plain dark brick with only a few small windows. Around the base, the stone wall rested on square dark piers over a recessed ring of show windows full of mannequins, with FAMOUS-BARR spelled out in metal letters on the band above.
Famous-Barr opened its Southtown store at Kingshighway and Chippewa in August 1951, two months after the Southampton streetcar line was replaced by buses. It was one of the department store's first branches away from downtown, set at a busy crossroads of the South Side's postwar shopping district. The May Company closed the store around 1992. Developer Sansone demolished it at the end of 1994, planning a Venture store that was never built, and the site sat empty for years while neighbors fought a proposed Kmart. Southtown Centre, a strip shopping center with a Walgreens at the corner, opened on the land in June 2004.
