Once upon a time, no self-respecting New York lady went shopping without donning white gloves, a fancy chapeau, and her nicest dress…while the stores duked it out for her money.
IN THE BEGINNING
In 1856, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney (A. T.) Stewart opened the first department store in New York City…A.T. Stewart at 280 Broadway. Inside the building—nicknamed the “Marble Palace” because of a showy exterior that featured expensive marble and Italian architecture—shoppers could find all kinds of European goods at decent prices. Best of all, everything was in one place, so they didn’t have to run around town to dozens of shops.
Within a few years, A.T. Stewart was joined by several new department stores, and the section of Broadway between Eighth and 23rd streets became known as “Ladies’ Mile” because so many of the stores catered to women. Shopping on the Ladies’ Mile was a fantastic and fancy affair: Stores lured women with marble floors, personal shoppers, and high tea on mezzanines overlooking the stores.
AND STEWART BEGAT…
The owners of the stores on the Ladies’ Mile soon realized, though, that uptown was where the money was. The city’s most fashionable families lived closer to Central Park, so New York’s high-class shopping hub gradually shifted north, until it centered around Fifth Avenue between Midtown and the park. The quintessentially New York department stores that lined the streets helped make Fifth Avenue (and Park, Melrose, and Lexington to the east) some of the “most expensive streets in the world”:
• Lord & Taylor was the first store on Fifth Avenue to install an elevator and the first to set up grand Christmas displays in its windows each holiday season. Technically, this store opened before A.T. Stewart, but it sold only a handful of specialized things: mostly clothing and lingerie in the 1820s. What became Lord & Taylor wasn’t technically a “department store” until 1861, when it varied its merchandise. To this day, the Fifth Avenue store starts each morning with the “National Anthem.”
The Statue of Liberty was shipped to New York in 214 separate crates.
• Opened in 1892, Abercrombie & Fitch originally catered to men by selling mostly hunting, fishing, and outdoor gear. Before the company sold its brand in the 1980s and the new owners switched over to casual wear for men and women, the store outfitted such adventurous celebrities as Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and Howard Hughes. Abercrombie & Fitch’s original Manhattan store (which closed in 1977) even had a shooting range in the basement.
• Bloomingdale’s opened in 1872 on the Lower East Side but moved uptown in 1886. By the 1920s, the store covered an entire city block at 59th and Lexington. Bloomie’s execs mastered the use of direct-mail catalogs, and the store marketed itself as being “fashion-forward,” with its avant-garde designer clothing. In 1961, Bloomie’s also became the first department store to design its own shopping bags.
• The first Saks store opened in 1902 on Ladies’ Mile as Saks and Company. In 1923 Saks merged with Gimbel Brothers Inc. (but kept the name of Saks). Finally, in 1924, Saks Fifth Avenue—founded by Horace Saks and Bernard Gimbel—opened on 5th Avenue near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Merging the two huge department store families (the Saks and the Gimbels) was supposed to create a megastore that had a reputation for offering only the most lavish and upscale merchandise. It worked.
• The first Macy’s store—a small Sixth Avenue emporium that sold dry goods—opened in 1858. The first day, it netted $11 in sales; the second was a little better…$51 worth of merchandise was sold. But thanks to savvy merchandising and good business sense, Macy’s sold almost $100,000 by the end of the next year—an amazing amount for the times—and things just got better from there. Within four years of opening, Macy’s was a New York City destination, particularly at Christmas. It was the first New York department store to invite Santa in for annual visits, and in 1867, it was the first store to stay open until midnight on Christmas Eve. In 1902 Macy’s opened a much larger store on 34th Street near Herald Square. It boasted 33 elevators, four escalators, and that cool pneumatic tube system that sent payments to invisible clerks in an upstairs office. The building eventually grew to 11 stories of retail heaven.
First manufactured in 1870, chewing gum is a NYC invention.
Not every fancy department store that opened in New York City managed to stick around. These three fought the good fight but lost:
• Altman’s (also known as B. Altman’s) opened in 1865 and became Fifth Avenue’s first large-scale department store in 1906. Altman’s was famous for its lavish Christmas window displays and its in-house restaurant, which was built to look like Scarlett O’Hara’s house in Gone With the Wind. In 1989, the corporation filed for bankruptcy; it closed the next year.
• Opened in 1895, Bonwit’s (originally Bonwit Teller) was known for high-end merchandise and the higher-than-average salaries paid to its upper-management employees. Located on Fifth Avenue, the store merged and morphed over the years until its parent company went bankrupt in 1989. But in the store’s heyday, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all shopped there.
• Not originally a New York store (the first ones opened in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), Gimbels opened in 1910 near Macy’s in Herald Square. The first Manhattan store to sport a bargain basement, Gimbels boasted that they would not be undersold. Giant enough to be considered Macy’s main competitor for many years, Gimbels bought out Saks and Company in the 1920s. But by 1987, Gimbels was no longer making enough to stay afloat and had to close its doors.
Park rangers get a lot of silly questions, including “When do they turn off the water at Niagara Falls?” But in 1969, the answer was an astounding, “In June.” For five months that year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers diverted the water that typically flows over American Falls so that they could figure out how much the rocks underneath had eroded and repair any damage.
Thousands of years ago, wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers walked across a dry Long Island Sound from Queens to Connecticut.