My great-grandfather bought his hats there. My grandfather did too. Then came a generation that didn’t. And then came me.
My great-grandfather came from England as a footman and made his life in Detroit, eventually becoming head waiter at the Detroit Hotel Statler downtown. He was a good Englishman, which meant he always wore a hat. And those hats came from Henry the Hatter.
He could not have picked a more Detroit place to shop. Henry the Hatter, founded by Henry Komrofsky in 1893 on Gratiot Avenue, has never closed, making it the oldest retail hat store in the United States. Komrofsky had worked as a hatter at the John C. Hartz store before going out on his own. In 1904, he hired a young stock and delivery boy named Gustave Newman; by 1919, they were running the place as partners. When Komrofsky died in 1941, Newman (Henry II) carried on until the late 1940s, when he put the business up for sale. A New Yorker named Seymour Wasserman (Henry III) bought it in 1948 and moved his family to Detroit. His son Paul Wasserman (Henry IV) ran the company from 1973 until 2017, when the Southfield store manager, Joe Renkiewicz, who started working for the company in high school, took on the challenge of finding a new location to replace the flagship Broadway store Henry the Hatter had been evicted from. He found that location in Eastern Market, purchased the company, and is now Henry V.
The short answer is: by serving the people who never stopped caring.
Most American cities lost their hat stores after Kennedy. The cultural story is usually told around one famous photograph—the new president, hatless at his inauguration—as if a single image could explain a generation. But that story mostly describes one demographic. Black Detroiters never set down their hats. The tradition of formal dress, the investment in presentation, the fedoras and homburgs and Sunday-best that carried through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Henry the Hatter survived in large part because it served that community, and that community kept showing up.
The celebrity customers tell the same story: the inaugural hat of Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Clinton, Steve Harvey, and Jimmy Kimmel, to name a few.
Beyond that, the store simply did its job across every era it passed through: the Depression, two World Wars, the 1967 race rebellion, fires, demolitions, rent hikes, the Broadway closure, the move to Eastern Market.
At each turn, instead of throwing in the towel like most other hatters, they threw their hat into the ring again.
People weren’t buying as many hats? They started repairing and refurbishing the hats people already had.
The business model of making hats was no longer cost-effective? In 1985, they shut down their hat-making factory and began selling hats from large-scale makers such as Biltmore, Borsalino, Dobbs, Stetson, and Tilden.
As each new hat trend from Indian Jones’ downturned brim fedoras to rappers wearing Kangol caps and hats and today’s Yellowstone resurgence of the Stetson, Henry the Hatter was ready to meet the demands.
You may ask yourself, what happened to all those hat-making machines? In 1996, after seven years of apprenticing with Johnny Tyus, Graham Thompson decided it was time to go out on his own and founded the Optimo Hat Company in Chicago, IL. He had the skills, but he needed the equipment, and since hat-making tools were no longer made, he acquired those Henry the Hatter was no longer using.
My grandfather, Thomas Charleston, ran the Poletown Plant in Hamtramck, MI, for the Cadillac division of General Motors until he retired in 1992. A whole blog could be written just about my grandfather’s thoughts and experience with the attempt to merely name the plant, but that’s a story for another time.
The Henry the Hatter location nearby was a regular stop for buying hats and bringing them back for cleaning. It was the location he always patronized and the first one I experienced. My grandfather was famous for his malaprops, so to him, it was simply “Harry’s.” I never questioned the name as a kid. It just went in the file next to all the other adult things that made sense without requiring explanation.
When the Hamtramck store manager retired in 2009, so did that location.
None of my grandparents’ children wore hats. My father certainly didn’t wear anything other than the occasional baseball hat when it was hot and sunny. The Kennedy era took hats with it for a whole generation, and no one in my family’s middle tier picked the habit back up. Henry the Hatter survived the gap. My family just didn’t participate for a while.
Since the Hamtramck location had closed the year I started college, my grandfather took me to the flagship Broadway store, where he bought me my first real hat. The Broadway store was reminiscent of the Hamtramck location—narrow and deep, with cases that covered every inch of available wall space, extending from the floor to almost the ceiling, leaving only room for some hat boxes on top. I am quite particular with lighting and still remember the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs.
Choosing a hat isn’t as simple as just what you like, although that is a factor. It also involves what looks good given one's head size and shape, which informs the style and shape. The color and maker are left to personal preference. I have long admired those who can wear a bowler or derby hat and a newsboy cap. But alas, the more slender, diamond shape of my head doesn’t lend itself to those broad styles. And so, a black Biltmore fedora, size 7 1/8, it was. I still have it, and the fedora is still my hat style of choice.
Paul Wasserman, or Mr. Wasserman as I always call him since my grandfather, who introduced us, would never have had it any other way, is the kind of proprietor who knows what works on a face before you do. Since selling the business, he’s in partial retirement, but it’s a joy to see him on my ritual visits.
Every other year, I go back for a Dobbs Optimo formal dress hat and a straw fedora. The store handles all my hat cleaning and restoration. Over the years, the fedora has become my standard style that suits my proportions. But the collapsible top hat, along with my white tie, formal tails and cape, comes out when the occasion calls for something that makes a statement before you’ve said a word.
When a well-hatted person enters a room, they don’t just show up. They arrive.
The bow tie is my public and professional signature. But the hats from Henry’s are an older inheritance. Older than anything I chose deliberately, and far older than my personal brand that adopted them as a thing I’d never leave the house without. It runs through my great-grandfather’s English tradition, my grandfather’s Hamtramck routine, across a generational gap, and back to me through a man who called it Harry’s.
Henry the Hatter has survived over 130 years in Detroit by knowing what it is and by serving the people who never stopped caring about what they put on their heads. I think about that every time I walk out with something new. Some things are worth passing on. Some stores are worth returning to. Henry’s is both.