After 72 years, this downtown Fresno business has closed, but not why you might think
After 72 years, the Pep Boys in downtown Fresno has closed.
Workers were taking down the neon sign Wednesday at the garage at 716 Broadway St. The store had been emptied out and repainted.
A company spokeswoman confirmed that the store was closing, but said it wasn’t because of the coronavirus pandemic that has put pressure on so many businesses.
“The closure had been planned for several months, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Arianna Stefanoni Sherlock, director of communications for Icahn Automotive Group, Pep Boys’ parent company.
The company’s other stores in the area — on Blackstone Avenue, Kings Canyon Road, and West Shaw Avenue in Fresno, and the Clovis location — will remain open, she said.
The downtown location’s tall neon sign was familiar part of downtown’s skyline, along with the faces of Manny, Moe and Jack, the company’s founders, on the building.
“We are taking steps to save and preserve the neon sign,” said Sherlock, though she did not share specifics.
The downtown Fresno store was noticeable for one other aspect: It had an employee who had worked there since the beginning in 1948.
Harold Dennis celebrated his 60th anniversary of working at the store in a Fresno Bee story in 2008. He shared a story about scolding three men who strolled in sometime in the 1940s.
“I was sweeping out the storeroom, and here come these three guys,” he told The Bee. “I said, ‘You can’t come through here, this is off-limits to customers,’ but they just walked up and came on through.”
They turned out to be Manny, Moe and Jack — founders Emanuel (Manny) Rosenfeld, Maurice (Moe) L. Strauss, and W. Graham (Jack) Jackson, whose faces grace storefronts across the country.
The store had changed over the years. It once did booming sales in bicycles, and Dennis used to use tacks to attach straw-woven and cloth seat covers to wooden-framed car seats.
This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 2:46 PM.
