Radios were kind of like the iPod of the Depression. The December 19, 1934 edition of the Daily News is thick with ads for them—like this model, which features “foreign reception.”
What happened to Spear’s, an appliance store with five locations in the five boroughs?
Sounds like they were the 1930s version of Circuit City, the Wiz, Crazy Eddie, and all the other electronics stores that never seem to last very long.
Judging from the lack of automobile traffic on 14th Street, Broadway, and University Place—as well as the streetcar trolleys and horse and carriages—I’d guess this photo is from just about the turn of the 20th century.
It’s a great picture. There’s a statue at the southwest corner of Union Square, but it certainly isn’t Ghandi, who occupies that spot now.
Instead of Whole Foods we’ve got Automatic Vaudeville, a penny arcade offering a basement shooting gallery, peep shows, and phonographs in individual listening booths—kind of what the Virgin Megastore had for customers who wanted to sample music before they closed up shop last month.
And in place of Forever 21 is Brill Brothers, a men’s clothing store.
The Bed Bath & Beyond store on Sixth Avenue and 18th Street isn’t an ordinary big-box retail structure. Take a look at the massive bronze columns and huge lanterns flanking the entrance; they tip you off to the building’s elegant retail past.
It originally housed the Siegel-Cooper Department Store, opened in 1896. Until World War I, it was one of the city’s premier shopping destinations.
Carrying the latest fashions, gourmet foods, and furnishings, Siegel-Cooper was a star along Ladies’ Mile, the department-store district between 14th and 23rd Streets on Sixth Avenue that also featured retail giants such as B. Altman’s, McCreery’s, the Simpson Crawford Company, and the Hugh O’Neill Store.
All of these retailers are out of business now, though B. Altman’s moved to midtown as the city—and its main shopping district—inched northward.
This turn of the last century photo shows the same view of the building’s entrance as the first photo. The bronze columns and lanterns greeted customers then just as they do now.
It’s the middle of Fashion Week 2009, where designers show off what they hope will be the hot clothes for Fall 2009. Here’s what city department stores and boutiques were pushing on New York women in ads from the April 9, 1966 issue of The New Yorker.
Bonwit’s describes the frock on the left as a “sliver of silk, available in sapphire blue, lawn green or rose.” For the long-haired, artsy kind of woman, there’s this dress on the right, “graceful as a native sarong.” 
This is the time of year when Tiffany & Co. gets lots of traffic; Valentine’s Day is a prime day to get engaged. It probably was in February 1905 as well. That month, Tiffany & Co. ran this full-page ad in the general interest magazine The Cosmopolitan.
Besides pushing their famed “Blue Book” catalog (still published in 2009!), the ad probably served to let readers know about Tiffany’s new uptown digs.
Earlier that year, the store had moved out of its longtime location on 15th Street and Union Square West—a cast-iron beauty now serving as a condo. With Union Square on its way to becoming a low-rent theater district, Tiffany’s joined Lord & Taylor, B. Altman’s, and other shops in fashionable midtown.
Tiffany’s started out in 1837 downtown opposite City Hall Park. The store did a stint on Broadway and Prince Street (see photo below) in the last years of the 19th century. They moved into their current Fifth Avenue and 57th Street building in 1940.
Brooklyn’s Fulton Street used to be a department store mecca, home to one-time big-name retailers such as Abraham & Strauss, Loeser’s, and Russeks. The latter disappeared decades ago. Yet a ghostly reminder still exists on the side of a Fulton Street building.
Russeks started out specializing in furs, but the Brooklyn branch and its Fifth Avenue counterpart soon became known for their women’s collections. These ads appeared in The New York Times pre-World War II.
Russeks has a celebrity connection: The founders were the grandparents of photographer Diane Arbus and her brother, poet Howard Nemerov.
Terrific bargains on quality merchandise could be had on 14th Street—74 years ago, that is. Here’s a sampler of some of the department stores whose ads screamed across the pages of the December 19, 1934 Daily News, back when the 14th Street-Union Square area was a department store mecca.
Hearns was once one of New York’s largest department stores, located on the south side of 14th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues since 1879. It shut down in the 1950s:
Toytown! I wonder how many kids got this electric train under the tree in 1934?
I couldn’t find anything about Finlay Straus jewelers; just another chain store that eventually and quietly closed up shop. They had several locations—including one across the street from Hearns:
Not to be outdone by Hearns, Nortons, another department store on the same stretch of 14th Street, pushed their “genuine fur trimmed” coats. These are Depression prices:
When old buildings are rehabbed, long-lost ads come back into view. This one is on Third Avenue in the East Village. Hudson’s was an army-navy emporium located at Third and 13th Street, a place to buy work clothes, camping supplies, and assorted surplus items.
Opened in 1922, Hudson’s bit the dust in the early 1990s.
For the sophisticated New York City woman circa 1941: her very own “greatcoat” made from dyed or natural skunk. The copy says, “A ‘good investment’ fur…a Christmas gift that will make her eyes sparkle!”
This ad ran in the December 9, 1941 edition of The New York Times:
MU 9-7000, for Murray Hill
B. Altman and Company was one of New York’s most fashionable department stores, starting out on Third Avenue and 10th Street in 1865, then moving to Ladies Mile on 19th Street and Sixth Avenue in the late 1800s. In 1906, Altman’s opened its famous block-long flagship building at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.
When department stores all over the city fell out of favor, so did B. Altman. It closed in 1989; the Fifth Avenue store is now CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Sixth Avenue at 23rd Street has been the center of a prime shopping district since after the Civil War, first as one end of elegant Ladies’ Mile, then as a seedier discount store area, and now a bustling big box corridor.
Burlington Coat Factory has occupied 707 Sixth Avenue for about a decade. Still, several columns on the outside of the cast-iron building feature decorative terra cotta tiles with the letter K on them.
The K probably stands for Kesner, as this was the J. L. Kesner department store from 1911 to 1913. Just a teeny reminder of the businesses and companies that preceded today’s mega-retailers.
