Chapter I: A Day in a Great Store (6)

Still another ascending and descending escalator; this time for the store's own family. Remember that here is a second stream, whose prompt and efficient handling is quite as important as that of the shoppers. The broad stair in Thirty-fourth Street at which the majority of the family arrives, between eight-thirty and eight-forty-five of the business morning, is frequently choked with the rush of incoming employees. It will never be choked once the new Macy's is done. For then the workers will be handled in great volume upon a double escalator, not merely double-file, but double in the sense that ascent and descent are handled simultaneously and in compact space, very much as the double stairways that are installed in modern school-houses and industrial plants.

In the enlarged building the locker rooms and the other facilities of the arrival of the store's employees will be placed upon the second floor and the first and second mezzanines; retained from the present plan, but very greatly enlarged. The Macy worker comes to them by means of the escalator, quickly and easily, and in a similar fashion ascends or descends to his or her department. It sounds simple and easy but it is not quite so easy when one comes to plan for a maximum of 8,800 employees--in 1932.

A third traffic stream remains for our consideration--and the architect's. In many respects it is the most difficult. Human beings, to a large extent at least, can move themselves. Goods cannot. Yet obviously the great stream of merchandise into the building and then out again must never be permitted to clog its arteries--not for a day, nor even for an hour. This means that there must be not only plenty of channels and conduits for it, but ample reservoir space as well. Which, being translated, means of course generous warehousing rooms, of one sort or another.

Perhaps it would be well before we come to the ingenious plans for making this inanimate stream most animate indeed, to consider the general plan of Macy's as it will be after its structural renaissance. The exterior of the present great building will remain practically unchanged. Just back of it and to the west of it on the new plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet in depth in both Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets, and extending the full two hundred feet between them, will be erected a new steel and concrete building, harmonizing in its facade and of the most modern type of construction; as we have already seen, nineteen stories in height with two sub-basements in addition. The first ten stories of this structure, at the exact floor levels of the old, will be thrown into the existing building and the lower seven of them used for selling purposes. The uppermost three stories of the combined building--covering the entire Macy site--will be used, as we shall see in a moment or two, for the reception and the warehousing of the merchandise, and other non-selling activities of the store.

The nine stories of the new addition which will rise tower-like above the parent building are destined to be used entirely for non-selling functions. Thus from the architects' plans we see the executive and financial offices, including that of advertising upon the thirteenth and the fifteenth floors of this super-cupola; and the store's own great laundry upon the high nineteenth. The department of training and the bureau of planning, with an assembly room, will share the sixteenth. The more purely recreational features, however, the Men's Club and the Community Club and the lounging rooms and library, are placed as low as the accessible eighth floor. The general manager's and employment offices will be as low as the second mezzanine--for obvious reasons of convenience.

None of these departments will be hampered for a long time to come, as they have been hampered for a number of years past, by a fearful lack of elbow room. The new plans have provided for abundant facilities of this and every other sort. The employees' cafeterias also are to go into the new section--also upon the eighth, or public restaurant floor. They will be greatly enlarged over their present capacity.

These non-selling facilities are given their own elevator service from the street; a separate and distinct entrance there. The purpose of this last quickly becomes evident. There are many occasions--nights and Sundays even--when some or all of the recreation facilities are in use far beyond the regular store hours. Access to them, entirely free and separate from the store itself, is an enormous working convenience, and the new Macy's has been planned to be filled with working conveniences.

The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been overshadowed by the growing importance of the other. There are to be in all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city delivery.

Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of goods in and out of a department-store.

This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the building for unloading. In the present store--as well as in a good many other stores--a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the third floor, it is about as ten to one.

Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the least important of its frontage streets--Thirty-fifth Street--by long lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really important cities of the America of today. If municipal ordinance permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of today--to say nothing of tomorrow--never ignores public sentiment.

So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go--on two huge high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect, planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the electric storage battery--to say nothing of the engineers who helped to make them possible.

Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's (the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind them.

Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor to the great tenth story--extending through both the present building and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of a double table some five or six hundred feet in length which will extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this center table--the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular distribution--will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it, whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron, with many tiny interstices.

Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city, whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned--into six great zones. Every selling department of the store--118 in the present one--is assigned to one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It is, in truth, a reservoir.

Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a matter of minutes--almost of seconds--to locate the necessary cartons in the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling department.

For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's, especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building; the other three at equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts, standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute (this last for the despatch of sold goods).

The selling-floor location of these utility units determines the zoning system of the warehouses on the tenth. There is a zone to each unit. While from that zone the requisitioned merchandise descends to the selling department which has asked for it by its own unit--which always is closest to it. Haul is reduced to a minimum. And system becomes simplicity.

With the actual selling of the goods in the store that is to come we have no concern at this moment. It is quite enough to say that the methods and the ideals that have brought Macy selling up to its present point are to be continued there, in the main at least, although broadened and advanced as future necessity may dictate. But with the despatch of the goods once sold in the new store we have an intimate and personal interest.

We have bought our pair of shoes. The financial end of the transaction is concluded. We have asked--as most of us ask--to have them delivered. Now follow their movement:

The clerk takes them to the packer. This, however, is but a mere detail. It is their future course that interests us. And if we had eyes properly X-rayed and farseeing we might observe that from the hands of the packer they will go presently to the spiral descending chute of the nearest utility unit.

Now we shall indeed need our new X-ray eyes. They follow the package for us--down the chute--with its gradients and curvatures so cleverly devised as to bring our purchase to the basement in just the right time and in just the right order--and into and upon the next stage of its progress.

Steadily moving conveyor-belts along each outer wall of the building receive the constant droppage of the packages from the six spirals of the utility units. Together these two long belts converge upon a terminal, the revolving-table, in the terminology of the present store. And here our packages receive fresh personal attention.

In the chapter upon Macy's delivery department we paid a careful attention to this revolving-table--which really is not a table at all and does not revolve. We saw it, then, as the very heart of the complex clearing-house of Macy distributions. It is, however, in itself a wonderfully simple thing, and yet when it was first installed it was regarded as nothing less than a triumph of efficiency.

Fortunately we do progress in this gray old world. Today we see how the revolving-table can be improved. For one thing, today we see it cramped and inelastic--no more than eight men may work at it at a single shift. Yet when it was built no one in Macy's dreamed that more than eight men would ever be required to work at it at a single time. And even in times of great emergency, but eight!

At the revolving-table in the new store, not eight but forty men may work simultaneously--when necessity dictates. The change has been effected by the simple process of elongating the "table." If a revolving-ring may be changed from round to square--and this was the very thing that Macy's accomplished in its present basement--why not from square to oblong? There is no negative answer to this question. And oblong it will become. And a present handling capacity of forty thousand packages a day can be increased to all the way from seventy-five thousand to ninety thousand.

Yet the main principle changes not. It is only in detail that one sees one's shoes traveling outward on a different path in 1931 from that of 1921. The great conveyors that lead from the revolving-table of today to the various delivery classifications as they are now made, will so lead in the new arrangement of things to such classifications as may then be made: only they will no longer be revolving-tables, but will in due time become the moving backbone of very long tables in the basement mezzanine, similar to the one which we saw extending the full length of the great tenth floor. And from those long tables, running the entire width of the building and up just under the basement ceiling, the sheet-writers will recognize their individual group of packages (by means of the clearly written numerals upon them), lift them off the slowly moving belt and make record of them, for the delivery department's own protection. After which, it is but the twist of the wrist to thrust them into the bins, separately assigned to each driver's run.

So go our shoes, or come, if you prefer to have it that way. Rapidly, orderly, systematically. System never departs from their handling. Even in the driver's own little compartment-bin there are four levels, or shelves, and each is inclined gently and floored with rollers so that he can pick out the packages for his run with greater facility. And in placing the packages upon each of these levels, the sheet-writer, well trained to his job, begins a rough process of assortment by streets.

Now we are come to wagon delivery, itself. Now we shall see why Macy's will not have to clutter Thirty-fourth Street with a long row of its delivery trucks. The length of such a row may easily be estimated when one realizes that sixty electric trucks will stand simultaneously at sixty loading stations in the new basement, with a reserve or reservoir space there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this basement will serve as a garage at night and on Sundays for these trucks. There is no fire risk whatsoever in the storage of an electrically driven motor vehicle. So the new Macy basement will not only be able to store this considerable fleet but to charge its batteries and make necessary light repairs upon it from time to time.

Access to and from this basement--and the sub-basement--is by means of elevators; not only the two which we have seen reaching aloft to the eleventh floor, but two more just beside them for sole service between the level and the two basements. As a matter of operating expediency it will be easy indeed to arrange in the early morning rush, or at any other time when emergency may so demand, to operate all four elevators in exclusive service between the street and basements. With such a battery Macy's can perform a genuine rapid-fire of discharging merchandise.

To the mind of the novice there immediately flashes the thought: why not use ramps--long, sloping driveways--from the street level to the basement? Long ago the architects of the new building asked themselves that very question. It was, in this particular case at least, rather hard to answer. The main basement of Macy's is very high. To install a ramp--double-tracked, of course, for vehicles both ascending and descending--of any easy practical grade would therefore have required a great deal of valuable floor-space. So, for the moment, they dismissed the ramp idea for motor trucks and held to that of elevators. The Boston Store in Chicago solved the problem. It is the same store that has successfully installed descending escalators, floor upon floor.

Out of the sub-basement of that Chicago store the Macy investigators saw thirty-two cars come, all inside of eight minutes; and all upon elevators. That settled the question for the big shop in Herald Square. Elevators it should have for this service, and elevators it will have, even for the big five-ton trucks that go into the deep sub-basement for the hampers for suburban delivery as well as large special packages. Furniture, however, as in the present store, will be both sold and packed and shipped from an upper floor of its own, the large truck elevators to the eleventh floor being also used for this purpose.

The sub-basement of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the main basement delivery service that it requires no special description here. It, too, has been designed, not only amply large enough for the present needs of Macy's, but for that mythical traffic of 1932, which we now know is really not mythical at all, but a matter of rather exact scientific reckoning.

Architects' drawings are indeed fascinating things; doubly fascinating when one comes to consider all the infinite thought and labor and patience which have entered into their fabrication. I shall not, however, carry you further into the details of the plans for the new Macy's. You now have seen enough to give you at least a fair idea of the main structure for the enlarged store. You have seen how carefully and how ingeniously the great main traffic streams through the huge edifice are to be carried--to be brought together, when they needs must be brought together, and kept apart when properly they should be kept apart. Add, in your own mind, to this fundamental structure, all of the refinements which you expect to find in the modern retail establishment today and you may begin to depict for yourself the Macy's that is to come--to construct for yourself at least a partial vision of the year 1932 in Herald Square.