When Herb Klapper returned to Jersey City from his service in World War II, the Army Air Corps veteran knew he wanted to open a business of some kind. He suggested a few ideas to his mother, who had agreed to loan him money to help get him started. His mother wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about most of his suggestions – until Klapper came up with the idea to open a camera and photo shop.
Banking on the belief that people like photos, the elder Klapper lent her son $1,000 to open what became Hudson Camera in August 1948.
“This was right after World War II,” said Pete Klapper, who took over the business from his father about 45 years ago. “Consumer products were in great demand because there had been shortages during the war. All they could buy during the war were some clothes and food. Nobody could buy appliances because everything was going to the war effort. So, after the war, people were definitely hungry for products.”
Klapper said there was also a lot of money in the economy because “soldiers were coming home with two or three years’ worth of salary. Anyone who didn’t actually fight in the war was back home and employed.”
For the next 64 years the store was a fixture on Newark Avenue – first at 132 Newark Ave., then at 136 Newark Ave, then at 122 Newark Ave., before its current home at 130 Newark Ave. But now, after more than six decades, Hudson Camera is closing its doors.
As Jersey City has changed in recent years, so has the downtown neighborhood that Hudson Camera calls home. The community’s younger, more affluent residents seemingly have more of a need for entertainment and service-oriented businesses, and less of a need for a camera store. Thus, it’s not surprising that Hudson Camera’s prime location near the corner of Newark Avenue and Grove Street – in the heart of the city’s Restaurant Row – will soon be transformed into a bar.
“That’s what the city wants here,” said Klapper, “It’s the kind of business that can survive.”
Photographic memory
In its heyday, Hudson Camera thrived, thanks to technological advances in photography in the 1940s and ’50s, Klapper said. Cameras became easier for untrained shutterbugs to use. Thirty-five millimeter film came into its own and anyone who could point and shoot became a photographer. As the place where these photographic memories were developed, Hudson Camera became enmeshed in the community.
“We were one of the very first Polaroid dealers in 1949,” Klapper said. “People were getting better pictures, and because they were getting better pictures, photography became more popular. And 35mm made very good photography available to a huge number of people.”
Before 35mm film and the popularity of the Polaroid, Klapper said most people used Brownie “box” cameras, which took “a decent picture under ideal conditions,” but often took unappealing photos and didn’t foster a love of photography.
By the 1970s and ’80s, at the peak of 35mm film use, photography was booming. Klapper recalls one Christmas season in the early 1980s when his sales people were so exhausted from work that they were falling asleep behind the counter. The flow of customers was “nonstop,” particularly during the holidays when people gave photographs and cameras as gifts.
As Jersey City has changed in recent years so, too, has the downtown neighborhood that Hudson Camera calls home.
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‘The digital sledgehammer’
Along with this steady stream of customers came a sense of community that united customers and local merchants in the neighborhood. Hudson Camera had hundreds of customers who the Klappers knew by name and who they counted among their circle of friends.
He recalled a woman who recently came into the store who introduced him to her new infant daughter. “I told her, I remember when you were born and your mother brought you in to the store for the first time when you were an infant,” Klapper said.
But Klapper said he rarely has those experiences these days.
“I used to walk around the [Grove Street] PATH Station and see hundreds of people and I’d know every one of them,” he said. “Now, I walk around the PATH station and I know no one…We’ve become a very transient neighborhood.”
These changes had as much to do with changes in photography – the shift from film to digital – as they did with changes in Jersey City. As digital photography became popular, people stopped printing their photos and started saving them on cell phones, computers, and memory cards.
“Printing ran into a brick wall at 50 miles per hour and was totaled,” said Klapper. “People today do not print their photos. They don’t print at home. They don’t print online.”
He estimates that only about 2 percent of all images taken today are ever printed.
“We now have one generation of people who don’t know what it means to have prints,” he said. “Within another five years we’ll have two generations. It bothers me because all of these images are going to be lost. Eventually no one will know what their ancestors looked like because photography was destroyed by this digital sledgehammer.”
Competing with Walmart
“Today, if you are a small business trying to sell physical products, you have to compete with Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, or other internet sellers, and it’s losing battle,” said Klapper. “The only thing a small business can survive doing today is selling services, food, and alcohol. If you want to be a small entrepreneur today you must sell something that Walmart doesn’t sell, something that you can’t order online.”
During his interview with the Reporter, three customers came into the store. One man needed a camera battery, and another wanted a camera bag and lens sleeve. A woman needed passport photos. Klapper is offering steep discounts on the few items in the store – picture frames, camera battery chargers, camera bags – to sell off his inventory.
He said he hopes to find another smaller store, perhaps on Grove Street, where he can open a custom framing shop. Revenue from custom framing is the only income that has kept Hudson Camera in business in recent years. Klapper estimates that while custom framing used to comprise 2 percent of Hudson Camera’s business; that number is now closer to 75 percent.
Behind the main counter are several alphabetized bags of developed rolls of film, unclaimed memories from customers who haven’t set foot in Hudson Camera in as many as five years. Klapper said he has called the phone numbers given when the film was dropped off. Most of the numbers are no longer in service.
“Used to be, you had a home phone number and you kept it until you died,” Klapper noted. “Now, people change their numbers every two or three years.”
Ironically, as Klapper speaks, the Ringo Starr song “Photograph” plays in the background on the store’s radio. The former Beatle sings:
Every time I see your face
It reminds me of the places
We used to go.
But all I’ve got is a photograph
And I realize you’re not coming back
Any more.
Comment at www.hudsonreporter.com. E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.