Department Stores

The painting “New York Department Store,” by Max Weber, painted 1915 -- which I saw (and photographed) yesterday at The Detroit Institute of Arts -- envisions a particular side of American life in its time. A similar vision appears in paintings of industrial scenes, railroads, bridges, and workers by painters such as Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Stella, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

I was especially interested in this painting because I’ve been thinking and reading a bit about department stores and their importance in society. Department stores already had a firm place in urban life of the early 20th century – many had been in existence for over half a century by then, both in the US and abroad. In 1881, Emile Zola presented the department store as “an emblem of modernity and optimism,” in his novel Au Bonheur Des Dames -- The Ladies' Paradise.

At the time, the architecture of department stores was an urban fantasy. The Marshall Fields building on North State Street in Chicago (interior shown in the third photo) was built between 1893 and1915; it still stands in downtown Chicago today -- though now named Macy’s. From the New York Times: “The giant cast bronze clocks jutting from the store’s two western corners remain, as does the glass ceiling designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany… . Even the elevator button for the seventh floor, home to the famed Walnut Room and its chicken pot pie, is still green.”

In every generation and in every culture I’ve ever read about, shopping in some form is an important economic and leisure activity. Exactly how department stores (both in Zola’s Paris and in the US) formed the way people shopped is a fascinating subject. Usually only the women’s role as shoppers attracts the attention of writers, but in fact, men are shoppers too, and at some times, they must have shopped in department stores. After all, at some of the peak times, department stores were the major sellers of men’s clothing, books, appliances, and even tools -- counting Sears as a department store.

During their long founding years, department stores were relatively local -- Sears at that time was mainly mail order. The founders of these stores often played a role in the civic, social, cultural, and political life of their towns and cities. Marshall Field, founder of the Chicago store, was also a major benefactor of the Field Museum, named for him in 1905. Goldwater’s department store in Arizona produced 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. And so forth.

I think one of the biggest changes in the department store institution with the consolidation of everything into Macy’s (and maybe a couple of others, even including WalMart) is that these local wealthy people no longer exist to contribute to the life of their towns and cities. Although they may have at times used their wealth to dictate inappropriately, their contribution to local culture was probably on the whole positive, and the loss is probably on the whole negative.

In one sense, department stores have undergone 60 years of decline since they predominated American downtowns and urban shopping. However, they keep reinventing themselves. Shopping is still, if anything, the major out-of-home leisure pastime of Americans today – I suspect, I don’t actually have any statistics. A great deal of that time is spent in shopping malls, which usually have a descendant of one of the great old department stores.

My mother’s friend Annabelle M., in the 1950s and 1960s, used to spend every Thursday shopping in the big department stores in downtown St.Louis: Famous-Barr (a May Company store), Stix-Baer-and-Fuller, and Vandervoort’s. Each one had a huge building with vast numbers of floors dedicated to specialized merchandise. Mrs. M. did not drive a car, so she rode the bus or streetcar from her suburban home. In the evening, her husband met her for dinner and maybe more shopping – stores back then were only open one evening per week. They often (or perhaps always) ate at Miss Hullings’ cafeteria, another downtown institution. It seems to me that this set of habits only differs in a few details from the way modern families use shopping as recreation.

The J.L.Hudson corporation is memorialized as a named donor on the walls of the Detroit Art Institute, I noticed yesterday. Its downtown flagship store didn’t survive, as Detroit isn’t as lucky as Chicago and New York in still having any recognizable commercial life in its old downtown area (unless you count gambling). Its suburban mall stores first became Marshall Fields, and then Macy’s. But here in Ann Arbor, we can still shop in the old Hudson’s store -- now Macy's -- in our big mall, Briarwood. It gave up selling furniture and some other commodities long ago, but we can still buy perfume, cosmetics, linens, clothing for men, women, and children, and housewares of all sorts. I think it even still has a lunch place, though nothing like the old department store lunch places.

I’ve been reading a blog about the recent history of department stores. It has covered certain parts of the history, especially recent history. It concentrates on just how the stores moved around and changed. I hope the author will talk more about the various social details about the store owners and the shoppers. See this blog: That's the Press, Baby: The future of newspapers, copy editing, and how it all relates, like everything else, to department stores.


Sources:
“Emile Zola, Au Bonheur Des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise)” by Elaine Showalter, from Penguin Classics.
“Loss of a Beloved Department Store Breeds a New Kind of Superfan,” New York Times, January 17, 2007
“Marshall Field and Company”-- web essay
“Views of the City: 1910s - 1940s” notes from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, exhibit held 2001