The fantasy of window shopping in New York City

When Ashcan artist Everett Shinn painted this woman seemingly spellbound by the stylish mannequins behind a department store window, the concept of “window shopping” was a relatively new phenomenon.

Shinn completed the painting, simply titled “Window Shopping,” in 1903. It perfectly captures the consumerism ushered in by the rise of the Gilded Age city’s magnificent emporiums, where the latest fashions were on display on the Flatiron and Chelsea streets that once made up Ladies Mile.

“Shinn may have appreciated the way shop windows, like the vaudeville stage, created a fantasy space that functioned also as a site of cultural exchange,” art consultant Janay Wong explained on a Sotheby’s page focusing on the painting.

“Moreover, he may have been drawn to the ‘modernity’ of the shop window, which had only recently come into being, the result of new technologies that made possible the production of plate glass, colored glass, and electric light.”

This woman made Macy’s a Gilded Age success

Macy’s—the retail giant that got its shaky start at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street (below right) in 1858—takes credit for a lot of firsts.

This dry goods emporium was the first to offer set prices for each item (in other words, no haggling), a money-back guarantee, and a store Santa starting with the 1862 holiday season.

But the retailer that eventually operated 11 shops across 14th Street in the Ladies Mile shopping district before decamping for Herald Square in 1902 can also claim another first.

Macy’s was the first store, or perhaps the first business in New York at all, to employ a female executive.

Having an astute woman leading a company that largely marketed itself to women may have been the secret that helped make Macy’s the retail giant it still is today.

Born in 1841, Margaret Getchell (above) was a former schoolteacher from Nantucket who moved to New York City at the age of 20. She applied for an entry-level job as a Macy’s clerk.

[Some accounts have it that Getchell was a distant relation of Rowland H. Macy, the store founder; but it’s unclear if this was actually true.]

“[Getchell] was an incredibly hard-working employee and, aside from her quick calculations as a cashier, she would often stay late at night to help with the company bookkeeping,” states The Folding Chair, a women’s history website. “Macy decided to promote her to the store’s bookkeeper.”

Soon, Getchell wasn’t just keeping track of the books and training new “cash girls,” as the shopgirls were called. She was recommending trends to Macy that he should capitalize on.

“At the end of the Civil War, Margaret suggested the addition of military-inspired fashion. She also began to spot budding trends in gifts, jewelry, clocks, homeware and cooking equipment,” The Folding Chair explains.

“These suggestions, as they began to materialize in the shop, transformed Macy’s into the first modern department store in America.”

By 1867, after pioneering an in-store soda fountain and window displays with cats dressed in baby clothes, Getchell, 26, was promoted to store superintendent.

She married another Macy’s employee, and the two lived above one of the stores, according to Macy’s for Sale.

As consumerism exploded in the Gilded Age, Macy’s became one of New York’s leading new department stores.

Getchell, sadly, didn’t live to see the store make its historic leap to Herald Square at the beginning of the 20th century.

Two years after her husband died of tuberculosis in 1878, Getchell succumbed to heart failure and inflammation of the ovary.

Her business motto, however, still applies to retail today: “Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer.”

[Top photo: The Folding Chair; second photo: Bettman/Corbis; third photo: Postcards From Old New York/Facebook; fourth photo: Alice Austen; fifth photo: The Folding Chair]

Christmas sidewalk vendors of Sixth Avenue

Sixth Avenue along Ladies Mile was a prime shopping district during the 1902 holiday season, with enormous emporiums like Siegel Cooper, Hugh O’Neill, and Macy’s offering Christmas windows, in-store Santas, and deals galore.

A smart vendor could make some cash selling his wares there, as this tree or wreath vendor appears to be doing.

Hey, isn’t that the house of worship once known as the Limelight? These New Yorkers would have called it the Church of the Holy Communion.

Christmas shopping is pretty much the same as it was 100 years ago, as these additional photos reveal.

Where fashionable Gilded Age ladies lunched

Let’s say you’re a well-off New York woman in the late 19th century, and you’re on an excursion to Ladies Mile—the area roughly between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 10th and 23rd Streets where the city’s chicest emporiums and boutiques were located.

Shopping is time-consuming, and your stomach starts growling. Where could you grab a bite to eat or a snack?

Social rules at the time made it almost impossible to sit down at a restaurant, as most eateries either banned or discouraged women unaccompanied by men (you might be mistaken for a prostitute).

You certainly couldn’t sit at the counter at a saloon or club, as these were off-limits to women as well.

Your options, then? Going to one of the new women’s lunch rooms or tea rooms, sometimes in the department store itself. Or you could visit a confectionery—a fancy sweets shop that served a light lunch and treats.

Maillard’s Confectionery, on 23rd Street inside the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel, was one of the most fashionable. Billing itself as “an ideal luncheon restaurant for ladies,” the shop was “an Edwardian fantasy” according to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets.

This description of a new Maillard’s on Fifth Avenue and 35th Street that opened in 1908 (as department stores relocated uptown, so did the restaurants catering to female shoppers) gives an idea of what was on the menu.

“The lunches, as of old, will be light and dainty with the Maillard chocolate and cocoa, coffee or tea. Wines will not be served,” stated Brooklyn Life in October 1908.

Life for New York women after the Civil War was decidedly not coed, with ladies generally expected to stick to and find fulfillment in what was dubbed the domestic sphere.

Find out more about how women’s roles began to change in The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

[Top photo: MCNY: 93.1.1.18170; second image: The Theatre Magazine Advertiser, 1908; third photo: MCNY: 93.1.1.18409; ; fourth photo: MCNY: X2011.34.3811]

Three views of Sixth Avenue and 20th Street

In 1901, when this first photo was taken, Sixth Avenue and 20th Street was the center of the city’s posh shopping district.

It was part of the fabled Ladies’ Mile, where stores like Siegel-Cooper, Adams & Co., and Hugh O’Neill’s Dry Goods Store sold fashion and furnishings.

“By 1915, all these stores had failed, merged, or moved farther uptown,” states the caption to the photo, which was published in New York Then and Now.

Here’s the crowd of well-dressed, well-to-do women in front of O’Neill’s. A hansom cab waits, a gas lamp will light the street at dusk, and the Sixth Avenue El is hurtling down the tracks, bringing smoke and more shoppers to the 18th Street station.

By 1975, when the second photo (also from New York Then and Now) was shot, the area had become grungy and grim.

It hadn’t been a viable shopping district of any kind at least since the El was torn down in 1939. The gas lamppost has been replaced, and the lovely cast-iron buildings support light manufacturing and small offices.

Today, in 2012, it’s a bustling shopping strip again—and residential area too. The O’Neill building has been renovated into pricey luxury condos.

The ground-floor store is home to a bank branch, of course.

The ladies who watch over Ladies’ Mile

A row of six life-size caryatids—decorating the facade of stately 118 Fifth Avenue—peer out at the street below.

When 118 Fifth was built, these female figures would spend their days watching other females.

Fifth Avenue at the time was part of Ladies’ Mile, the premier shopping district for Gilded Age New York women.

Lavish department stores such as B. Altman, Siegel Cooper, and Arnold Constable catered to the desires of these rich wives and mothers, who arrived in elegant carriages looking for the latest fashions and furnishings.

With so many shoppers and shopkeepers concentrated between Broadway and Sixth Avenue south of 23rd Street, it was safe for women to shop unaccompanied, which they did here until the Depression, when opulent stores moved northward.

Since the 1990s, Ladies Mile has had its comeback. But does anyone notice these figures above them?

Where Macy’s got its modest start

$11.06. That amount was reportedly what Rowland Hussey Macy earned on the first day his new dry-goods store opened for business in a small building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in 1858.

But after that slow start, the R.H. Macy store began grossing tens of thousands of dollars a year. It became a full-fledged department store in 1877 and eventually occupied many storefronts along West 14th Street (like the one in the photo at left).

Fourteenth Street was a more upscale shopping district at the end of the 19th century. But even then, department store moguls could see that the future of retail was farther uptown. 

So in 1902, Macy’s packed it up and relocated to a colossal new store at Herald Square on 34th Street—its current quarters today.

This weekend, Macy’s is sponsoring its 33rd annual Fireworks Spectacular, this time over the Hudson River. Macy’s pledged the first show as a tribute to America’s Bicentennial, and it quickly morphed into an Independence Day tradition.

Shopping along Ladies’ Mile: then and now

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.

B. Altman’s Skunk Coat: Only $395

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.

All that’s left of the Kesner Department Store

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.