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 passengers into it. It is a
thoroughfare of surpassing importance.
[Illustration: THE MACY'S OF TODAY
By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business
going forward in great strides]
Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his
daughter--as was his frequent wont--from the simple little old red-brick
store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused
for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.
"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he.
"A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered
between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future
business heart of this wonderful city."
It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that
the success of their enterprises depends.
_Today_
I. A Day in a Great Store
The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is
the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad
ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however--from three of the morning
until four--when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are
at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is
nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally
emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the
echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train;
the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the
measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated
suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh
Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New
York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to
knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New
York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.
Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's
heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so
slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The
policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiter
and the cook in the _Firefly_ lunch wagon which has stood in the busy
Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are
out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other
comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of
Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six there is real animation in the
broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there
begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his
appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares
come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.
All this while Macy's has stood dark--save for the few yellow and red
lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward
Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated.
Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol.
There are miles of corridors to be paced--the night walking of the Macy
watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to
Erie--millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A
diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing
must be disturbed. And in order that the owners of the store may sleep
in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol
is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and
there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an
occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.
Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof.
The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this
market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their
heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-half hours of hard
endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping
job. There is at the best a vast litter--and yet a litter that cannot be
carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny
article of great value--a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or
careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and
in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances
are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.
Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy
days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of
filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or
no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at
eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial
pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing
your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the
panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers
work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below
them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and
Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the
boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of
the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out--not
even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and
blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are
engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the
Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can
be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily
light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of
any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.
Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the
first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do
not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made
ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly
cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long
miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming
of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must
come well in advance of its patrons.
In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of
the minor executives--particularly those of the selling floors--make
their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the
parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are
divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its
selling or non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a
sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a
time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious about keeping an
exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest
to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five
thousand folk, there are not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted
from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year
salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of
the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high
principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better
bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.
Half after eight!
A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives--perhaps
it is better to remember them as the specials--are closed, and new ones
substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section
manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the
earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as
before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.
But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file
of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors--one in
Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and
two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers and the
junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour.
Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of
the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in front of them.
They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender
receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little
later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off
to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various
posts in the store.
For fifteen minutes this rank and file--a miniature army it is--comes
trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or
confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite
unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.
At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair
at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even
the slightest particle of unfairness--one gains an increasing admiration
for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this--the
pressing of a button at that stairhead automatically orders closed the
two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that
perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a
bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever
translated at the employees' doors as eighty-forty-seven. And in cases
of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven
becomes the stroke of nine by the clock--in very extreme cases even
later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the
occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation
system.
From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the
late-comers--out of breath as a rule and extremely embarrassed into the
bargain--are herded into a special group and given special "late"
passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say
nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes--when the tardiness
percentages of the store have been running to unwonted heights--the
group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to
them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost
invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is
given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one
of his several assistants to receive these late-comers personally and
individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been
entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both
of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling
between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that
might even tend to such an end was abolished--completely and
permanently.
In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family,
we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the
force in in the morning and out again at night--as well as in and out at
different intervals throughout the day. Consider now that it is still
lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The
sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon
the floor. The non-selling forces as well--elevator-men, cashiers, all
the rest of them, are at their posts. A doorman is told off to each of
the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post
for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of
nine.
After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the
moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers
"signing in"--once again the inevitable time-list--at the
superintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten
minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his
section managers their special instructions for the day. The rest of the
aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers
at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked
and waiting at the ground floor-- Then--
Nine o'clock!
The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up
Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a
single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great
main aisle of the store--one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this
city within a city--is populated once again. The chief stream of the
store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in
the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up
the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing
off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the
upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of
that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout
it is of a great mass of hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any
well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings
constantly and forever changing.
And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour
there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them
have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the
comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that
it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as
nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York.
Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.
For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its
own interest. The saleswomen--the men as well--may obtain permits from
their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and
conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes--the
identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper
(she is not supposed to go nosing around other departments merely in her
own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to
which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no
special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional
shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but
only upon the same terms as every other sort of customer. But the rule
bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed
within it. After all, he or she _is_ a part of the family and so
entitled to be recognized. This recognition takes the form of a sizable
reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal
use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business
expense.
By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum
force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this
hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon is a very simple
human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never
countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and
stores and offices for an hour and a half or two hours in the middle of
the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so
seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might
be written.
But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community
must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day
the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes
is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk
shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has
made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in the form
of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there
are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And
proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.
By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least
is back again. The hardest portion of the day begins. For, no matter
how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate
its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less
crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn
fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average
New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she
does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon--although a single
glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that
she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of
Herald Square--and then gets right down to the serious business of
shopping.
And at Macy's it _is_ business; always business. The big store at
Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not
gone in for shows--for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or
anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always
upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that
have added entertainment features to the other routine of their
operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely
satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite
strength.
"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the
house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase
to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to
which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it
steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort--save, of course, those
wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a
different color indeed--but it has also refused up to the present time
to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors,
hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the
fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile
sundries--to take two specific instances out of several--it has gone
considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of
its New York competitors.
"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A
hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least,
the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American
city."
Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of
an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm
had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who
passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely
succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in
the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand
mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the
main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour;
each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of
passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of
other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever
ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.
And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant
autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the
big store on a December day--say the Saturday before Christmas last--he
would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far
nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have
been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It
would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special
policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those
which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a
task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour
to get out again. Certain departments--notably toys--possessed
navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as
refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted.
The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.
Through a store such as this one may wander, _ad libitum_, and find a
new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its
floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which
the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the
eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little
workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men,
fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon
silver--the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me
that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so
many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly
Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench--and the one down in
Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to
Thirty-fourth Street--for over thirty-two years. The three men were
artisans--of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred
these days.
"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them,"
said the superintendent.
"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.
He answered quickly:
"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find
others--even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for
training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond
of painstaking work of this sort."
I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut"
experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting
detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is
looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive--no
matter by what name or title--and in as short a time as is humanly
possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A
laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a
land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we
might develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came
to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.
The oldest of these men--the man with thirty Macy years to his
credit--was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent
over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry.
A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate
cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time
and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that
made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.