The Romance of a Great Store Part 4

Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad, which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan.

Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now two parallel trunks--the one on the east side of the town and the other upon the west--and the now isolated link of the original main line in Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to Times Square and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.

It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had been moving steadily uptown--shrewd observers used to say at the rate of ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been slow and dignified--relatively at least. With the coming of the new subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty, forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small, smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek--there remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue.

It seemed incredible that such a huge investment should be thrown to the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.

Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than any of its compet.i.tors. True it was that the firm had builded for its own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it.

Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however, stood upon leased land--the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well, each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.

The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual t.i.tle to the valuable site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded.

Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or efficient planning of the building had been quite out of the question.

The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well, against such a handicap.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS

In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street gave but faint promise of its present importance]

The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to slide backward--would have been a precarious experiment, to put it mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious--the dangers of the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.

With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street--the site of the present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south, threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad--the McAdoo Tubes had not then come into even a paper being--was crossed at acute angles by an even more important street--New York's incomparable Broadway--and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania Station was to confirm it--for all time.

In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad, in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing--and using them very well indeed.

But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free t.i.tles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square!

There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so far back from the elevated railroad as not to be bothered by its noise or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious, puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York town, were doomed to an early disappearance.

The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting searches into its land-t.i.tles were made. Some three hundred feet back of Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster & Bial's, extending all the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was quite large enough for the new Macy's--with the possible exception, perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago--the Pekin and the Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street and, for the time being at least, out of business.

The Macy plan did not go through to a final culmination, however, quite as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For, remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner.

The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000--a stupendous figure in that day.

The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster & Bial's. It was the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street--a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the small corner was $250,000; an astonishing figure for such a tiny bit of land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any price for it that he saw fit to ask.

While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of actual floor s.p.a.ce the Macy management felt that it was so essential to the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's price--and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter immediately upon his arrival.

A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city, decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own investment in that street was too great and too recent to be jeopardized.

Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep to the possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it.

The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be underestimated.

In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.

Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-s.p.a.ce. Without hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the huge theater of Koster & Bial--about twenty thousand square feet of ground s.p.a.ce--which enabled it to place its mechanical departments (engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it turned its attention to the gentleman from Chicago. It leased him the premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never again appear on the buildings of that site.

With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district, were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building represented the last word in department store design and construction.

Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-s.p.a.ce, it was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest expedition, and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would be required fourteen pa.s.senger elevators, ten freight elevators and seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted, too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which the step upon which the pa.s.senger rides is held continuously horizontal.

In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel cleats at right angles to it.

Lighting, ventilation, plumbing, all these received in turn the most careful consideration and planning. For instance, it was determined quite early in the progress of the planning for the new Macy store that it should be ventilated entirely by great fans, which, sucking the air in ducts down from the roof, would heat it or cool it, as the necessities of the season might demand, before distributing it through another duct to the working floors of the building. In this way the close and stuffy atmosphere somewhat common to old-time department stores when filled with patrons was entirely obviated in this new one.

When we come to the consideration of the everyday workings of the Macy store today we shall see how well these architects of twenty years ago planned its details. We shall not see, however, one of the most interesting of them. When it was originally builded, by far the greater part of its ninth floor was devoted to a huge exhibition hall. Within a short time this room was in a fair way to become as famous as the larger auditorium of Madison Square Garden. In it were held poultry-shows, flower shows, even one of the very first automobile shows. Within a few years after its opening, however, the business of the store had grown to such proportions that it was found necessary to give its great s.p.a.ce to the more mundane business of direct selling.

The problem of the corner tip there at Thirty-fourth and Broadway was quickly overcome. If the new owner of that point had counted upon the new store which completely encircled him turning tens of thousands of folk past it each day he was doomed to disappointment. For Macy's made its own corner by means of a broad arcade entirely within the cover of its own huge roof; an inside street, lined with show-windows upon either side and giving, in wet weather as well as fine, a dry and handsome pa.s.sageway direct from Broadway into Thirty-fourth Street.

The original suggestion for such an arcade came in an anonymous letter to the original architects of the building. Only within the past year or two has this pa.s.sageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the s.p.a.ce that the arcade consumed became entirely too great to be used any longer for such a purpose.

In that summer of 1901, while the architects and contractors were busy at their plans and specifications, there was wholesale and systematic devastation upon such a scale as New York has rarely ever seen. Such pullings down and tearings away! The scene was not without its drama at any time. The writer well remembers strolling into the Koster & Bial Music Hall on an evening during that season of destruction. There was no one to bar his pa.s.sage into what, at the time of its opening, but eight short years before, had been New York's most elaborate playhouse. If his glance had not been turned downward there was nothing to indicate that the evening performance might not easily begin within the hour. Upwards the great auditorium of red and gold was immaculate. The proscenium, the tier upon tier of balcony and of gallery, the dozens of upholstered boxes, the exquisitely decorated ceiling had not been touched.

But if the eye glanced downward--what a difference! The main floor and its row upon row of heavy plush chairs was entirely gone. In their place was a mucky black sea of mud; a knee-high mora.s.s, if you please, in which a dozen contractor's wagons, hauled and tugged unevenly by squads of lunging mules and horses in their traces, circled in and circled out--inbound empty and outbound laden deep with their muddy burden. On the stage, back of what had once been the footlights and in the same place where the darling Carmencita had once been wont to make her bow, stood a shirt-sleeved gang-boss. On either side of him, spotlights--things theatrical yanked from the memories of yesteryear--threw their radiance down into the auditorium and the motley audience it held.

So went Koster & Bial's, the pet plaything of joyous New York in its Golden Age. In a short time the scaffolding was to rise in that mighty amphitheater and the decorations to come tumbling down. Gang upon gang to the roof; more gangs still to the stout sidewalls, brick by brick; down they came until Koster & Bial's was no more. Its site was marked by a huge and gaping hole in the subsoil of Manhattan.

There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his location--seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners.

His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run.

He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon him--that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its disappointed proprietor moved out--at the end of his perfectly good lease--and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same strategic position as the _restaurateur_. He had no lease. He merely was going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his neat, immaculate shop.

They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk, neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling the Anvil Chorus.

About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new building. On the first day of November of the following year it was complete--or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway (widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-s.p.a.ce, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all, had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A Washington concern--Saks and Company--was on its way toward Herald Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it ahead of Macy's.

Herald Square! There was, and still is, a site well worth rushing toward. We have seen already the strategic advantages of the new site, even as far back as 1902, long before the coming of the great Pennsylvania Station just back of it at Seventh Avenue. Ever since 1890, when the remarkable vision of the late James Gordon Bennett had seen the crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue as the finest possible location for his beloved _Herald_ and had torn down the little old armory in the gorge between these two thoroughfares, Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets, to build a Venetian palace for it there, the square had been a veritable hub for the vast activities of New York. Hotels, shops and theaters sprang up roundabout it. And the coming of what is one of the finest, if not the very largest, of the great railroad terminals of the land but multiplied its real importance.

The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task.

Yet it was accomplished within three days--which means that large enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its possibilities had not been antic.i.p.ated long in advance and planned against.

The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his very active a.s.sistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the moving-day task that confronted them. To pick up a huge New York department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks--almost an even mile--was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it--a plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.

The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day.

The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown--stock and fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue--to Thirty-fourth--from the old store to the new--and the empty wagons returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen, and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the 6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told quietly:

"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."

But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Sat.u.r.day, as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of Sat.u.r.day, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for the entire forty-four years of its life, instead of but a mere twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step forward safely taken--and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of its existence.

In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York; one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord & Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable & Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's, first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's--one by one these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York.

Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months and for years--in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our partic.i.p.ation in it, when the Government was very glad to make use of their s.p.a.cious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of Macy's old-time compet.i.tors downtown who failed to join in the uptown movement, but three remained--Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they have occupied for almost half a century.

The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories walk its s.p.a.cious pavements. The Eden Musee, that paradise for youth of an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the town. That part of New York today is all but dead--inside of twenty years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pa.s.s in the big town ere now.

In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The construction of the two modern railroad terminals--the one in Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second--has created in the district that lies between them what today would seem to be the permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings nearly 60,000 folk--transients and commuters--the other almost 100,000, into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third Street two decades ago, so has Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis and private motor-cars pour their pa.s.sengers into it. It is a thoroughfare of surpa.s.sing importance.