Competitive Consumption

Ladies’ Mile

Retail by the high-rise mile—and all for the ladies! By the 1870s, a shopping zone of unprecedented glory beckoned what Henry James called “innumerable huge-hatted ladies” who converged on the temples of retail between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, roughly from Fifteenth to Twenty-Third Streets. Driven by their coachmen or chauffeurs, the ladies alighted on the awning-shaded sidewalks of the new cast-iron department stores that catered to needs—and piqued new desires. The names became legendary: A. T. Stewart, Lord & Taylor, Siegel-Cooper, B. Altman, Arnold Constable, Macy’s, W. & J. Sloan, Best and Company, and others that competed and mutually benefited from shoulder-to-shoulder proximity.

The ladies, setting their own pace, enjoyed being out in public without the nuisance of impatient male escorts. The police officers directing traffic at the corners gave the all-clear signal, and the ladies stepped into the street. Before entering a store, they paused in front of the new plate-glass windows to inspect the clever displays of goods showcased exclusively for them. If not quite skyscrapers, the six- or seven-story cast-iron department stores rose to impressive heights reached by elevators, each floor featuring its own special departments: china or toys, home furnishings, ready-to-wear, books, or flowers. The stores provided comfortable seating areas for periods of rest, sometimes on a mezzanine balcony that offered a view of bustling activity on the ground floor below where Henry James observed the ladies in their extravagant chapeaux “communing” or “seated under palms and by fountains,” an indoor feature at Siegel-Cooper. With a tea room in the store or the vicinity, a lady could make a day of it.

A. T. (Alexander Turnbull) Stewart (1803–1876) was the mastermind behind Gotham’s new department stores. His idea of one retail establishment offering a wide variety of varying goods in a number of “departments” was an innovation. So was staffing by clerks who assisted customers while “cash boys” shuttled to a central register, aiding in managing inventory and accounting. Stewart also sensed that the earlier 1800s era of barter, or “swapping,” was yielding to a cash-based economy, and his genius lay in a system of fixed prices, which appealed to ladies who loathed the notion of haggling. His “Marble Palace” opened in 1846, a five-story retail establishment in lower Manhattan whose success prompted a move uptown fifteen years later to the “New Store,” as it was dubbed, between Broadway and Fourth Avenue (between Ninth and Tenth Streets). Painted white as marble, the new cast-iron building rose five stories and boasted Venetian-style arches, a rotunda, and two thousand panes of glass from France.

Stewart’s one-price innovation was soon adopted by Roland Macy and other department-store kingpins, avoiding the kind of frustration and embarrassment that Mrs. Clarence Day (Vinnie) recalled from one harrowing incident. Persuaded to bargain for an Oriental rug outside a summer-resort hotel, Vinnie was completely unable to name a price for the “priceless” rug the merchant had shown her. Mr. Day was at work in the city, so no advice from him. The merchant “seemed to mean well, poor creature,” but what was she to offer? She felt “a little ashamed” to ask for a deep discount yet feared spending “a great deal of money.” She tried calculating the probable price at W. & J. Sloan, Lord & Taylor, or Arnold Constable. The entire experience left her “half dismayed, half indignant,” recalled her son, Clarence Jr.

From then on, Vinnie Day’s purchases were made along Ladies’ Mile, where she had charge accounts and was well taken care of by attendants such as “Miss Smith, at Lord and Taylor’s,” a favorite saleslady who offered her “gloves, dresses, coats, or material by the yard.” At the various department stores, there were a good many personal shoppers who might inform a client of a desirable new item or a sale. “We did our shopping at Macy’s,” said the Manhattanite Frances Loeb, whose mother, she remembered, was charge account number eleven. Up and down Ladies’ Mile, the transactions of the Gilded Age would be charged and sent to the ladies’ homes, the bills to be posted by US mail at the end of the month for the gentlemen’s adjudication.

Gentlemen’s Emporia

No similar Gentlemen’s Mile graced Gilded Age New York, but sales of menswear nonetheless flourished in the decades when gentlemen’s wardrobes ran the gamut from tweed hunting jackets to swallowtail evening suits of finest worsted wool. Haberdashers were crucial for shirts, studs, night clothes, stockings, and other accessories, such as braces (suspenders), ties, and scarves. The prime retailers were well known, their locations dispersed about the city.

Brooks Brothers (est. 1818) featured fine ready-to-wear menswear that could be readily altered. By the time the flagship store was located at 346 Madison Avenue in 1915, Brooks Brothers’ innovations included the first button-down shirt (1896), an informal “sack” suit (1901), a Scottish-woven Harris tweed overcoat, striped Repp neckties, and Madras plaids (1902). (In 1898, Brooks Brothers made a new uniform for Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, whose exploits in Cuba in the Spanish-American War were much publicized. Roosevelt was probably wearing his Brooks Brothers uniform as he led his “Rough Riders” up San Juan Hill.)

The more conservatively attired hastened to J. Press, clothier to the gentlemen of Yale. The J. Press landmark store in New Haven featured the conservative three-button sack suit (Brooks’s was a trendy two-button affair), until finally in 1912, the New York store opened, “equidistant from the Yale and Harvard Clubs.”

Some gentlemen avoided the ready-to-wear (or ready-to-alter) emporia altogether, instead patronizing the preeminent men’s tailor, C. F. Wetzel at East Forty-Fourth Street. Employing thirty or more skilled tailors, Wetzel customized each order from bolts of the best cloth and was known for tailoring that concealed nature’s deficits. Seeking to satisfy the tastes of “the best-dressed male in the world,” the firm shunned extreme styles, a point of favor for American men averse to appearing as faddish dandies.

For custom haberdasheries, the patrons of Wetzel sought the New York retailer, Kaskel and Kaskel at 315 Fifth Avenue, purveyors of shirts to the wealthiest gentlemen (including, in 1902, the president of the United States). The firm specialized in men’s undergarments and nightshirts of finest linen.

The importance of jewelry for a Gilded Age gentleman was not to be overlooked. His timepiece, his cufflinks, his ring—all were best procured at Black, Starr, and Frost at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street (in the diamond district, where customers included members of the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families). The slimmest gold watches were to be purchased there, the handsomest signet rings, and the most elegant cigarette cases.

Not all of New York’s gentlemen dealt locally, favoring London clothiers such as Henry Poole of Savile Row (H. Poole, since 1806), purveyor of “suits, shirts, garments” (this last a reference to underwear). H. Poole kept the American gentleman’s measurements on file, sending certain items annually and filling custom orders as required. (Woe unto the gentleman who grew stout but resisted providing new measurements for neck or waistline, instead enduring the daily battle to fasten his shirt collar, vest, and trousers.)

Tea Rooms and Luncheons

While gentlemen lunched at their private clubs or at Delmonico’s near Wall Street, ladies needed alternatives. Chocolates from a nearby confectionary could briefly stave off hunger but did nothing for the fatigue that prompted visions of a comfortable chair. Since it was certainly verboten for ladies to dine in a restaurant or hotel dining room unescorted, the department stores along Ladies’ Mile came to the rescue, as Macy’s opened a soda fountain and lunchroom and other stores followed suit in the 1890s.

A suitably elegant luncheon spot finally opened in 1900, when the enterprising Henry Maillard leased space in the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel for his “Luncheon Restaurant and Bonbon Store” (the “Bonbon” signaling a feminine confection). The vaulted ceiling and columns lent an air of classical Rome to the cavernous dining room where travelers gathered for their evening meal, but during the day, ladies flocked to nibble “light and dainty” lunches with nonalcoholic beverages, tea and cocoa both featured. As the city inched northward in years to come, Maillard relocated to Thirty-Fifth Street in 1908. His clientele followed.