_Giant Strides of Commerce_
Giant Strides of Commerce--The Reasoning of M. Honoré de Balzac--The
Aristocracy of Trade--The Story of a New York Shop--When Fifth Avenue
Began to Rival Bond Street and the Rue de la Paix--Shopping in
1901--Publishing Houses at the Beginning of the Century--Prices of
Real Estate--Some Great Houses of the Present.
Once upon a time, so the story goes, a French publisher, planning an
elaborate volume on the streets of Paris, went to Honoré de Balzac, then
at the height of his fame, to ask him to contribute the chapter on a
particular thoroughfare--let us say, the Rue Une Telle, or the Avenue
Quelque-Chose. The idea appealed to the fancy of the great man, and
matters were going along swimmingly, until it came to the point of
settling upon a price to be paid the novelist for his labour. "And now,
_cher maître,_ we must consider the painful triviality of emolument."
Without hesitation Balzac mentioned a figure that was simply staggering.
It was a minute or two before the astonished publisher could gather his
wits together sufficiently to protest and bargain. But Balzac was not to
be moved. He explained that the sum named was not merely for the work
but also for expenses that would be unavoidable in carrying on the
work. "It is this way, _cher Monsieur_. To write about a street it is
necessary to know it thoroughly. It is not enough to glance at the
_étalage,_ one must investigate the shop behind. Let us consider the
street that you wish me to describe. As I recall it, first on the right
is the establishment of B., the gunsmith. In studying his premises it
will, of course, be necessary for me to purchase a rifle or a revolver
and a box of cartridges. Next door to B., as you may remember, is the
business of X., the perfumer. Luckily for you, Monsieur, a bottle of
perfume is not expensive. But beyond that shop there is the one of Y.,
the furrier, and furs just now, as you doubtless know, are rather high.
Of course, proceeding in my investigation, I shall be obliged to buy a
ring at the jeweller's, a _chapeau de forme_ at the hatter's, a pair of
boots at the shoe-maker's, and a waistcoat at least at the tailor's. In
view of such a condition I protest that the price I name for writing the
article is astonishingly reasonable." Needless to say, M. de Balzac did
not write the paper desired. The publisher managed to find another
scribe who finished the task creditably without purchasing so much as a
sheet of paper. But imagine the expense account that would be presented
by a writer engaged to describe the stretch of shopping Fifth Avenue
from Thirty-fourth Street to Fiftieth who considered it necessary to
follow the method suggested by the creator of the _Comedie Humaine_!
Paraphrasing the saying of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, three or four
generations in the story of a New York store make an aristocrat of
trade. There are names of commerce that stand out in the imagination of
the New Yorkers like the names of great soldiers and statesmen. Solid,
imposing, facing the Avenue at a corner that represents land value that
is computed by the square inch, is the structure of Brown-Smith. In some
cases the passer-by will search in vain for any indication of the
name--the information being deemed wholly superfluous. It matters not in
the least whether the commodity upon which Brown-Smith has reared its
history be hats, or groceries, or furs, or jewelry, or silverware, or
boots, or men's furnishings. The story of the enterprise, its growth and
its migrations, is, in epitome, the story of the city.
The beginning of the tale, dealing with the first Brown-Smith, is the
narrative of the Industrious Apprentice, coming to the growing town
towards the close of the eighteenth century, a raw-boned country youth
from New Hampshire or Vermont, finding after much tramping and many
rebuffs employment which meant sleeping on a counter in the hours when
he was not running errands, sweeping out dusty corners, and polishing
up the handle of the big front door, slowly, persistently winning his
way to promotion and pay, perhaps, by way of romance, marrying his
employer's daughter, eventually setting up for himself and emblazoning
the name destined to be great over the entrance of a shop in Catherine
or Cherry Street, and there to purvey to the residents of the near-by
fashionable Franklin Square. Then the development of the hundred years.
The first migration, suggested and urged by an ambitious and far-seeing
son, to a corner on remote Grand Street. That was probably the hardest
and most radical step in all the history of the house, and there must
have been strange doubts and misgivings in the soul of the founder, now
grown grey, as he said good-bye to the familiar dwellings of Quality Row
in Cherry Street and prepared to venture forth on unknown seas. Be sure
that he took with him, as a sacred treasure, his first day-book, with
its quaint entries of expenses and receipts. Very likely he did not long
survive the change, and was never quite happy in it.
Probably, if you happen to be a patron of the Brown-Smith establishment,
and scrupulously leave its communications unopened in the letterbox at
the club, you received, three or four years ago, a little book,
commemorating the centenary of the house. They differ from one another
merely in form and detail--these souvenir booklets. In substance and
flavour they are all pretty much the same. There are the old prints
reproduced from Valentine's Manual, the allusions to the horse-propelled
ferry-boats to Brooklyn, to the advertisement that appeared in a City
Directory of one of the years of the fifties, to the attack upon the
establishment during the stirring times of the Draft Riots of the Civil
War, to the frequent extensions of business and the migrations that
carried the name from Grand Street over to Broadway and Prince Street,
thence up the great street to a point near Twelfth, then to Union
Square, to Madison Square, and finally, to the stately and spacious
edifice of the present, far up the Avenue. And who will venture to
predict how many years will pass before that structure, today regarded
as the last cry in the matter of architecture and convenience, will be
outgrown and inadequate, and its situation hopelessly far to the south?
It was about 1901 that the movement began that was to transform Fifth
Avenue from a residential thoroughfare into a shopping street beside
which the vaunted glories of London's Bond Street and Paris's Rue de la
Paix seem dim. In the Knickerbocker days the important shops of the town
lined lower Broadway and the adjacent streets. Then it was to Grand
Street that the ladies journeyed to barter and bargain for the latest
fashions from the Paris whose styles were dominated by the Empress
Eugenie. When Grand Street had been outgrown the shops moved northward
to Fourteenth Street and Union Square. There are tens of thousands of
New Yorkers whose childhood dates back to the early eighties who recall
as one of the delights of the Yuletide season the visit to the revolving
show in the window of old Macy's at the corner of Fourteenth Street and
Sixth Avenue. For a decade or so Sixth Avenue was the shop paradise.
Above Macy's were O'Neill's, and Simpson, Crawford and Simpson's, and
Altman's, and Ehrich's, besides the countless emporiums of lesser
magnitude. Macy's moved north to Greeley Square, and Gimbel's came to
take its place on an adjoining corner, but the movement in bulk turned
eastward at Twenty-third Street, lining the south side of that
thoroughfare as far as Fifth Avenue. Some of the pioneers had ventured
farther to the north, but Twenty-third Street was the centre as the
nineteenth century came to a close.
[Illustration: COMMERCE, WITH GIANT STRIDE, IS MARCHING UP THE STATELY
AVENUE. THE STORY OF A BUSINESS HOUSE THAT BEGAN IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF
CHERRY HILL, MIGRATED TO GRAND STREET, THENCE TO BROADWAY AND UNION
SQUARE, AND AGAIN TO THE SLOPE OF MURRAY HILL, IS, IN EPITOME, THE STORY
OF THE CITY ITSELF]
A writer in the "Century Magazine," describing "Shopping in New York" in
1901, said that even then New York was known as a City of Shops just as
Brooklyn was known as a City of Churches, and went on: "The district
begins at Eighth Street, where the wholesale establishments end, and
follows Broadway as far as Thirty-fourth Street. At Fourteenth Street
and again at Twenty-third Street it diverges to the west until it
strikes Sixth Avenue, including that part of Sixth Avenue only which
lies between the two thoroughfares. From Broadway at Twenty-third
Street, it makes another departure, running up Fifth Avenue and ending
at Forty-seventh Street." When the department stores lined the south
side of Twenty-third Street a number of the great book-shops were on the
north side, near the old Fifth Avenue Hotel. Among such was the
long-established Putnam, and adjoining that shop was the shop of the
Duttons. Of the publishing houses that carried in their traditions back
to Knickerbocker days Harper's was in the home of its beginnings and to
which it still clings to the present time, the rambling structure hard
by Franklin Square, while on Fifth Avenue, below Twenty-third, were the
houses of D. Appleton and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Dodd,
Mead and Company, the last-named being the pioneer in the movement
northward when it relinquished its corner at the Avenue and Twenty-first
Street to try the slope of Murray Hill at Thirty-fifth Street on land
that is now occupied by the Bazaar of Best and Company. The
international house of Brentano, before it moved into its present
headquarters in the Brunswick Building at Twenty-seventh Street, was in
Union Square. Today Brentano's is the largest shop of its kind in the
city, while Scribner's, on the east side of the Avenue at Forty-eighth
Street, has been called "the most beautiful bookstore in the world."
In the new shopping district beginning at Thirty-fourth Street and
running along the Avenue almost to the Plaza, like the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, so the saying goes, exclusiveness for the masses, Altaian was the
pioneer. In view of what was then considered the prohibitively high
price of real estate the projected invasion of the Avenue by the
department stores was thought extremely hazardous. In 1901 the street
still suggested the time when it had been lined by the dull, monotonous
high stoops. Those old fronts had been knocked away, business had
invaded many of the lower stories, but there still remained something of
the former flavour. But property holders were awake to their
opportunities. Inside lots twenty-five by one hundred feet on the Avenue
were held at one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and corner
lots correspondingly higher. Within two years these prices had doubled
and trebled. Altman's, covering an entire block, eight stories in
height, with an addition that rises twelve stories, is a stately
guardian of the corner at which the Avenue becomes the Lane of
magnificent commerce. The building, of French stone, was designed by
Trowbridge and Livingston. Directly across the street is an entrance to
McCreery's, although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street.
Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had
its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the
Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but
no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to
commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street.
Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between
Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. At the southeast corner of
Thirty-seventh Street is Tiffany's. Information as to the nature of the
merchandise in which the establishment deals would be superfluous, and
the management is evidently of the opinion that the display in the
windows tells the story to all the world, for the passer-by will look in
vain for any lettering indicating the ownership. Instead, there is a
bronze figure of Atlas, bearing a huge clock on his shoulders, adorning
the façade of the edifice. The clock is the old Tiffany clock. Of
American make, dating from 1850, it was for many years in front of the
original Tiffany Building at 550 Broadway, near Prince Street. Then, in
Union Square, it presided over the fortunes of the house, again to be
removed to serve as guardian of the destinies of the present structure,
which is of marble, adapted from the Palazzo Grimani of Venice, of which
Ruskin once wrote: "There is not an erring line, not a mistaken
proportion throughout its noble front." On the corresponding corner
above Tiffany's is Bonwit, Teller and Company, and directly facing the
latter on the west side of the Avenue is Franklin Simon and Company.
Conspicuous on the next block are Lord and Taylor's, and Vantine's, the
former Italian Renaissance, with vestibules finished in Bitticino marble
and Travertine stone, ceilings of Guastavino tile, and aisles bordered
with black Egyptian marble. Today this establishment represents the last
cry in construction and administration. Adjoining it to the north is
Vantine's, its dimly lighted and incense-scented aisles running between
counters covered with rare and costly curios from the Orient.
Northward to the Plaza commerce has moved with giant stride. The march
might be studied and pictured block by block, corner by corner, and page
after page blackened with detail and description. Any one of a dozen or
a dozen dozen shops of the Avenue might be made the subject of a fat
volume. For the present purpose it is enough to mention a few of them by
name, and in the order of march. At the south-east corner of Fortieth
Street, on land that was formerly occupied by the residence of Frederick
W. Vanderbilt, is the department store of Arnold, Constable and Company.
It is the new home of a house that dates from 1827. To the west of the
Avenue, on the north side of Forty-second Street, is Stern's. Other
names that have a commercial significance, that are conspicuous in the
stretch from the Public Library to the Plaza are W. and J. Sloane, the
well-known rug house, on the east side of the Avenue, between
Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets; Davis, Collamore and Company
(china and glass), Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street; Duveen Brothers
(antiques), 720 Fifth Avenue; Fleischman and Thorley (florists),
respectively at 500 and 502 Fifth Avenue; the jewellers and
silversmiths, Black, Starr, and Frost, 594 Fifth Avenue; Carlton and
Company, 634 Fifth Avenue; Kirkpatrick and Company, 624 Fifth Avenue;
and Gattle and Company, 634 Fifth Avenue; and such emporiums designed to
delight the hearts of extravagant women as J.M. Giddings and Company,
L.P. Hollander and Company, and Alice Maynard, all on the Avenue in the
neighbourhood of Forty-fifth Street.