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
titles 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-titles 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 space 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-space. 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 space--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-space, 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 passenger 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 passenger 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 space 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
passageway 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 passageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for
more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the space
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 passage 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 morass, 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-space, 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 anticipated 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 assistant. 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 Saturday,
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
Saturday, 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
participation in it, when the Government was very glad to make use of
their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of
Macy's old-time competitors 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 Saturday
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 spacious 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 pass in
the big town ere now.