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Family perseverance keeps founder’s King Street dream alive
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
Beneath the ornate facades of turn-of-the-century buildings, bulldozers and jackhammers are re-shaping Charleston’s upper King Street into the shopping district it was a century ago.
New stores, bars and restaurants have nestled into the neighborhood, which retains a bohemian quality even as it sheds the blight of the past, when crime, shuttered storefronts and deteriorating buildings dominated the blocks north of Calhoun.
This is an area many businesses fled during the 1970s and early 1980s, when Charleston’s suburbs beckoned with indoor shopping malls and miles of free parking.
One of the street’s oldest businesses, however, stayed the course.
Morris Sokol Furniture still stands where it opened 77 years ago, an anchor in the midst of fast-moving development and a testament to one man’s work ethic as well as his family’s determination to carry the torch.
“Thank goodness we stayed with our intuition that this would someday become a beautiful area. We have people coming who said their grandparents used to buy furniture here,” said Frieda Sokol, who is married to founder Morris Sokol’s son, Joe.
Like a number of other furniture stores formerly in the area, Morris Sokol Furniture nearly relocated. The Sokols bought property in West Ashley more than 20 years ago as upper King Street slid into decline.
“The property was bought, thinking we’d go with everybody else,” Frieda Sokol said. “We called (upper King Street) the war zone. We just had a great feeling things were going to get better.”
Today, Morris Sokol Furniture is centrally located in what has been dubbed Charleston’s design district, an emerging mecca for interior designers, custom furnishings, lighting and flooring companies, clothing boutiques and enough trendy eateries to feed them all.
“There’s no question it’s been a tremendous change,” Joe Sokol said. “The down side is, I can’t park my car and go in a store and do business. You’ve got to find a parking garage.”
Upper King Street today is far from the street Morris Sokol knew 85 years ago, when he began peddling house wares such as pots and pans from his bicycle. Later, he used a horse and buggy, and eventually, he sold house wares and dry goods from his car.
A family tale recounts the day the young Morris Sokol got a speeding ticket while driving his horse and cart. “It’s supposed to be true,” Frieda Sokol said.
The beginning
Morris Sokol immigrated to the United States from Poland at the age of 17 and began selling his wares in Charleston in 1921. He only knew a little English.
“Back in those days, everyone had what they called a route,” Joe Sokol said. “In many cases you’d just get paid off in groceries.”
Morris Sokol eventually had an opportunity to purchase accounts from another salesman, which provided the impetus to build a store.
A sales ticket from 1936 shows that one Charleston family paid $344.50 for a houseful of furniture, including: a four-piece bedroom set for $129.50; a “parlor set” for $132.50; and a Red Cross mattress for $24.75. The order included a rocking chair that Sokol tossed in for free.
There was never a question that Joe Sokol would join the family business. He was always around the furniture store as a youngster and enjoyed meeting people. Since his childhood, the store has evolved from a depression-era business that sold necessities like oil stoves to a stylish furniture showroom that lures customers from places like Kiawah Island.
“It just kept growing and developing,” said Sokol, who received a degree in business from The Citadel.
Store expansion
In 1957, the Sokol family expanded the store at 514 King Street into the adjoining property at 510 King, adding a two-story showroom. The property today is 48,000 square feet and includes the original store at 514 King and a warehouse in the back. The company has three other warehouses in Charleston and owns a parking lot adjacent to the store on Reid Street. The private parking lot is a rarity for King Street businesses and one of the store’s advantages.
An even bigger advantage is that Morris Sokol bought the King Street property, now worth millions.
“He just didn’t buy enough. He should have kept going up and down the street,” Joe Sokol said. “I couldn’t afford the rents they’re paying downtown (now). It almost takes a national retailer to stand the rents.”
Joe Sokol credits the store’s success to a number of things, including merchandise upgrades and an expert sales staff.
Around the time upper King Street began to decline, Joe and Frieda Sokol’s son, Edmund, came on board with some new ideas. He was instrumental in leading the store toward buying more trend-setting, contemporary furnishings as opposed to the more conservative furniture groups it had been carrying. Although it would be years before the design district emerged, Edmund Sokol was onto something.
“I feel like if we’d stayed with our old image, we would have dried up on the vine,” Joe Sokol said.
The store reinvented itself while retaining employees who had worked there for decades.
Seventy-six year old Henry Hunter still runs errands for the store where he started working 54 years ago, driving trucks and performing service calls.
“They’re good people to work for,” Hunter said on a recent week day afternoon.
Frieda Sokol said the store’s employees are like a family.
“Nobody leaves here unless they’re deceased,” she said.
Customer satisfaction
Joe Sokol’s brother-in-law, Herbert Rosner, has been with the store since 1970. Rosner said the biggest change in the years he has worked at Morris Sokol has been in the confidence of shoppers coming back to upper King Street.
Jan Kubista, who visited the store five years ago when her daughter came to Charleston as a college student, vowed she would return to the store if she ever had a house in Charleston. Now, Kubista is retiring here and furnishing a home on Isle of Palms.
“Everything in my house is from Morris Sokol and it’s 4,800 square feet,” Kubista said. “It has been the most fun I’ve ever had furnishing a home. I’m not kidding. I know why they’ve been there for 85 years.”
Joe Sokol said the changing upper King Street scene, including a streetscape still in progress, is bringing a whole different group of shoppers to the area. Not only are newcomers discovering the area, but Charlestonians who used to avoid upper King Street are flocking back.
“It’s unbelievable how many Charlestonians say they haven’t been north of Calhoun in 30 years,” Sokol said. “Like our old motto says, ‘We’re well worth the trip downtown.’”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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