Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

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.

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 passengers into it. It is a thoroughfare of surpassing importance.

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_