Remembering the Department Store Era in Cities

I'm old enough to remember when...

I’m reading a really good nonfiction book. (It is SO SO exciting to me when I find a nonfiction book I can really get into.) It’s called “Children of the City” and it’s by the historian David Nasaw. It’s pretty old; it was written in 1985, so I don’t think much of it has made its way to the internet.

The book is about working-class urban children at the turn of the century. And the way he describes cities at this time, even though I know they were brutal and had all sorts of negatives, it’s just hard not to get caught up in wonder.

People were teeming into these cities, immigrants from Europe at this time and transplants from the South and living in tenements. There was horrible overcrowding and sanitation, obviously. But also, so many aspects of what he describes are so undeniably charming: children playing in the streets by the thousands, a vibrant peddler economy, public theaters packed with well-dressed watchers. It was an amazing era in American history and in urban history probably in particular. (I wrote about my desire to time travel to the Jazz era in Kansas City in an earlier post and I stand by it!)

One thing Nasaw discussed that hit me right in the gut is the introduction and heyday of department store. I’m dating myself, but I remember the tail end of the department store era in the U.S. (maybe we’re still in it). Department stores always remind me of my grandmother, who would shop and them her whole life. They always smelled of perfume, from the samples that they offered in the center.

What Nasaw says in this book is that it wasn’t until the streetcar era really that Department stores emerged. Before that people shopped in their little ethnic neighborhood shops. But streetcars, and commuters to downtowns, brought the necessary mass of people to make these really palatial stores possible. And he says they influenced American culture tremendously.

The glory of this retail era, he does a good job describing:

“Every city had its own special stores, store which had grown up with the downtown areas and in the beginning helped lure customers from the outskirts: Jordan Marsh’s and Filene’s in Boston, the original Wannamaker’s and Gimble’s in Philadelphia, Kauffman’s in Pittsburgh, Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, Rich’s in Atlanta, Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, Goldwater’s in Prescott and then in Phoenix, Arizona. I Magnin’s in San Francisco, Hudson’s in Detroit and Lazarus in Columbus.

The department stores were more than containers of goods or huge indoor markets. They were living encyclopedias of abundance design to overwhelm, the consumer with the variety of items available for purchase. The department stores brought together under one roof an unimaginable collection of commodities, catalogued by department, arranged by floor. Furniture, rugs and bedding were on the upper floors; ready-to-wear clothing and shoes for women and children on the middle floors; bargain goods and groceries in the basement. The street-level stores displayed clothing and accessories for men, who it was feared would not take the time to ride to the higher floors; and for the women, dozens and dozens of alluring, lower-priced items: cosmetics, lotions, gloves, stationary, hosiery.”

There are so many part of this that resonate with my memories. We shopped at Lazarus at City Center Mall in Columbus when I was a kid. That place, during Christmas time, oh man. I’m such an old person but it really was grand. One time my little kids violin group performed there and it was SO exciting.

The classic children’s book Corduroy is set in a department store. And he wanders from the basement to the upper floors where furniture was traditionally sold.

The Kauffman family (Pittsburgh) financed Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in that era.

The impacts to our culture, I’m just listing little items that occur to me but I could go on all day.

Today we’re doing our shopping at Target with the big parking lot and stopping at Starbucks — and it is what it is. And even now Amazon threatens, to some extent, brick and mortar stores. I’m not going to make a big argument in favor of one model or another. It’s just fun to reflect on this era, I guess, which is disappearing/has disappeared.