Fred Rosen, Creator of the Modern Booze Superstore, Has Died

 

Fred Rosen, former CEO of Sam's Wine and Spirits, the first booze superstore.

Forty years ago, when I was contemplating a move to Chicago, a friend from my Louisville days, a Chicago native, advised me on many matters. He helped me get a lawyer, told me where to buy my suits, and because his father-in-law had been a liquor distributor in Chicago, he told me about Sam's.

Sam's was named for its founder, Sam Rosen, who started it in 1942, but it was his son, Fred, who put Sam's Wine and Spirits on the map, building it into a local institution, described by some in the industry as the first liquor superstore. Fred Rosen died on February 4 at age 88.

The original Sam's was on Halsted Street at North Avenue, then a much more marginal neighborhood than it is now. The legend, according to my Louisville friend, was that there was no glass in the windows, but the store was never robbed because it was guarded by ferocious German shepherds.

As Ashok Selvam wrote in his appreciation of Rosen on Eater, "He transformed a cut-rate liquor store into a destination where out-of-towners would visit and fill up their trunks with booze they couldn’t find anywhere else."

Fred Rosen moved the store from Halsted into a much larger space in a new shopping center further west on North Avenue, then into an even larger space in the same complex. A few branch locations followed. Binny's bought Sam's in 2009. The Marcey Street Binny's is the former Sam's.

Chicago has a long tradition of colorful booze merchants, beginning in the 19th century with Gardner Chapin and Jim Gore, whose Chapin & Gore store and saloon dominated the Chicago market until Prohibition.

In the post-WWII era, three names stand out. In addition to the Rosens at Sam's, you had Harold Binstein, founder of Binny's, and "Max the Hat" Zimmerman.

Binstein opened his first Gold Standard Liquors store in 1948, one block south of Wrigley Field. Binny's house brand is Clark & Sheffield, a reference to that first store's location. Harold died in 1995. His son, Michael, runs Binny's today. 

"Max the Hat" Zimmerman had the biggest store in downtown. It's now the Binny's on Grand Avenue. Zimmerman opened his first liquor store in Chicago in 1933, as soon as he could after Prohibition’s demise. It was in the old Cambridge Building on North Wells. He mostly sold whiskey and other spirits at first. The only wine in the store was in pints. “Sweet wines were big, stuff like Mogen David,” Zimmerman told a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1992. Known as “Max the Hat” for his trademark Stetson, Zimmerman died in 1998. 

Fred Rosen's youngest son, Brian, is the founder of InvestBev, the nation’s largest beverage alcohol private equity fund.