The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

The TV commercials, a 30-second spot for use in prime time and a 60-second version for fringe, went into production about six weeks ago, when an agency team went to check out locations scouted by the production company, Lou Puopolo Inc.

  The creative work is based on the results of a consumer study conducted by Consumer Behavior. Among many other things, it showed that New York had the lowest awareness as a vacation spot of any state. The marketing game plan calls for the state and the city to be promoted separately. The advertising for the Big Apple starts in September, using the same song, “I Love New York.”

  Melancholy Pervades Wanamaker Staff in the Final Days

  By MEYER BERGER | December 17, 1954

  THE DIGNIFIED RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT founded by Alexander Turney Stewart, first of the city’s great merchant princes, will close its doors forever at 4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. The store has been an institution at Broadway and Ninth Street—as Stewart’s from 1862 to 1904 and since as John Wanamaker’s.

  What is left of the department store’s stock will go to S. Klein’s or to some other shop that disposes of remainders. Several such establishments have put in bids.

  Unfortunately, though, there probably will be nowhere near the same lively bidding for the services of a good part of 200 older men and women who have served Wanamaker’s for a quarter century or more.

  The New York State Employment Service put 13 of its hands at desks on the store’s 12th floor a week ago and registered 800 Wanamaker employees who are still fairly young and have good job prospects. Many of the older folk did not go near the desks. They stayed at their counters, shocked and hurt.

  And there seemed to be something unthinking and pitiless in the rush of buyers eager to snatch bargains at 30 percent off. They emptied the bins and showcases and denuded most of the counters.

  You couldn’t find out what will become of the old store with its pale-green columns, softly lighted white ceilings, lovely old murals, its long-empty and long-silent auditorium where the carriage trade came to pipe organ concerts long ago. Only here and there did the despair show. One bit of evidence was the scrawl on one office wall: “Sic Transit Gloria.”

  A Bittersweet Finale for Gimbels

  By ELIZABETH KOLBERT | September 28, 1986

  EVERYONE, IT IS SAID, LOVES A SALE. SO when a store slashes its prices 40, 60 and, in some cases, 80 percent, one could expect to see a lot of euphoric faces rummaging through the racks.

  But when the store is Gimbels at Herald Square, a New York shopping institution for 76 years, and the sale is in honor of its last day of business, even an inveterate bargain hunter might feel glum.

  “It’s like seeing someone get buried,” said Irving Zand of Brooklyn, who was testing a chair of uncertain stability down in the basement. Mr. Zand’s wife, Helen, described him lovingly as “a real shopper.”

  “It was an ugly death,” Mr. Zand said, casting a sad eye over the desolate scene of empty shelves, unhappy sales clerks and rickety furniture. “Gimbels was a good store. It was a nice store.”

  The two Manhattan stores—the flagship, on 33rd Street at the Avenue of the Americas, and the other at 86th Street and Lexington Avenue—have been sold to a group of developers for “considerably in excess of $150 million,” in the words of one of the purchasers. The developers—a partnership among Silverstein Properties Inc., the Zeckendorf Company of New York and Melvin Simon Associates of Indianapolis—said they planned to maintain a retail center on the street level of the 33rd Street store and convert the rest of the building to office space.

  “It’s heartbreaking,” said Rose Berlast, 71, who was trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a further reduction in the price of a $350 chest of drawers, which, she pointed out, had deep gashes in the veneer.

  “Just look at it,” she said.

  “Lady, I’ve been looking at it for three months now,” the clerk replied.

  It was hard for most shoppers to work up much enthusiasm for the merchandise that was left in the store. “It’s all picked over,” said one assistant sales manager who had started out at the store 40 years ago as a stock boy.

  “Who would ever think that Gimbels would close down?” he asked ruefully. “They always said, ‘Gimbels would outlive you,’ but look, I’ve outlived the store.”

  Macy’s in Its 100th Year Is Still as Breezy as Ever

  By NAN ROBERTSON | January 6, 1958

  Macy’s store in Herald Square was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

  MACY’S IS A CENTURY OLD THIS YEAR, BUT she doesn’t look a day over 16.

  Sophistication laid a fine veneer on the store as it grew and grew and grew. But underneath, there remained the same bumptious, breezy and slightly breathless personality that keeps Macy’s young. Nowhere is this more evident than in the store’s advertisements, which have become bigger and certainly better over the years, but hardly less full of hope and confidence.

  Rowland Macy opened his “fancy dry goods” shop on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue on Oct. 27, 1858. The first day’s sales totaled $11. On the second day, they soared to $51.70.

  Less than a month later, while other, older stores murmured discreetly about their “modest prices,” Macy’s plunged into public view—yelling at the top of its lusty infant lungs.

  One of the first ads read: “CHEAP RIBBONS!!! You want them, of course. Go to Macy’s. He is now opening 10,000 yards for 12½ cents a yard that are worth 31 cents.” He also offered linen cambric handkerchiefs for $1.50 a dozen and “linen bosoms” at 12½ cents apiece.

  On Christmas Day 1858, Macy’s ad fore-shadowed Madison Avenue’s use of constant repetition and the “positive sell.” Flannel was the subject, starting at 35 cents a yard.

  “Thirty-five cents—for fine, all-wool Flannel,” it said. Then: “40 cents—for a little finer Flannel; 45 cents—for still finer Flannel; 50 cents—for much finer Flannel; 55 cents—for a superior Flannel; 60 cents—for much the best Flannel.”

  The women came in droves.

  By 1908 Macy’s had moved uptown to 34th Street, where it now stands. The store’s slogan—“R. H. Macy & Co.’s Attraction Are Their Low Prices”—was considerably less brisk than the later “It’s Smart to Be Thrifty.” But it carried the same message. As Macy’s explained: “We have never varied a hair’s breadth from the original idea that had for its motive—lower prices.”

  The Blooming of Bloomie’s

  By STEPHANIE STROM | November 28, 1993

  Bloomingdale’s in Soho on Broadway.

  FROM 1950 TO 1991, MARVIN TRAUB WORKED at a circus called Bloomingdale’s, one of the world’s best known and most flamboyant department store chains, and for the last 13 of those years he presided over the entire enterprise. His career and the evolution of the store into one of the icons of modern American business lore are one and the same.

  His book, “Like No Other Store …: The Bloomingdale’s Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing,” chronicles changing postwar appetites, preferences, life styles and mores as much as it gives a history of Bloomingdale’s and Marvin Traub.

  He sketches his rise, after the Army and Harvard Business School (in the famed class of 1949), from the bargain basement in Bloomie’s flagship store on Lexington Avenue and 59th Street to the executive suite. He also outlines the changing role of the department store in American society as it went from being a place to buy staples, rather like a Wal-Mart or Kmart today, to catering to sophisticated shoppers who pay premium prices for unusual, high-quality merchandise.

  But Mr. Traub and his co-writer, Tom Teicholz, also attempt to rebut the two principal complaints about Mr. Traub’s regime at Bloomingdale’s, voiced after he was forced out in 1991. He ably dispels the notion that while he was a good merchant, he knew nothing about marketing Bloomingdale’s as a brand name. He repeatedly underscores the methods he and his executives used to give the store an identity—those eye-catching shopping bags and those provocative direct-mail pieces, like a 1976 catalogue called “Sigh
s and Whispers” that featured scantily clad models in bordello-like settings. The catalogue, he says, is now a collector’s item.

  Mr. Traub is less successful at refuting the criticism that Bloomingdale’s did not exist for him beyond 59th Street. He mentions the branch stores only in passing, and the 11 pages he devotes to describing Bloomingdale’s expansion beyond 59th Street give the subject short shrift, particularly if the strategy was as unusual for the time as he claims.

  At Lord & Taylor, A Star-Spangled Banner Yet Waves

  By JAMES BARRON | May 26, 2008

  THE DOZEN OR SO PEOPLE IN THE FOLDING chairs did not quite know what to do when 10 a.m. finally rolled around and the sound system stopped playing soft, up-tempo jazz and started playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “We should stand, right?” a woman in a black dress asked no one in particular.

  So she did, in time for the rockets’ red glare.

  That is how the day, every day, begins at Lord & Taylor. Every morning at 10 a.m., before it allows customers to set foot inside its flagship store on Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor plays the national anthem—an orchestral recording that sounds like the Philadelphia Orchestra from the 1950s.

  The morning routine at Lord & Taylor is probably the longest-running ritual that can be traced to the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979. Joseph E. Brooks, the retailing legend who was the chairman of Lord & Taylor at the time, ordered “The Star-Spangled Banner” played daily “because,” he said at the time, “with all its problems, this is still the greatest country in the world.”

  Mr. Brooks handed in his resignation in 1986, days after new owners bought the company. But Lord & Taylor continues to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” even as it focuses on what a spokeswoman called “rebranding and re-imaging” and on bringing in new designers and new merchandise.

  Other stores treat the beginning of the day as a different kind of collective experience, more like a scrimmage in which managers give sales clerks last-minute pep talks. That is something of a throwback to the days when retail titans like Marshall Field himself “would walk around and summon the troops to battle,” said Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian and professor at Harvard Business School.

  Bloomingdale’s plays “New York, New York,” something it started a couple of years ago. “The sensibility—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere—for us, the sensibility’s right,” said David K. Ender, a spokesman for the store. “Also, a large portion of people standing around waiting to come in at 10 o’clock are tourists, and that song has a resonance to them.”

  Bloomingdale’s, Is That Really You?

  By RUTH LA FERLA | April 20, 2004

  MENTION BLOOMINGDALE’S TO JODI Sweetbaum and the name uncorks a stream of nostalgia. “Bloomingdale’s,” rhapsodized Ms. Sweetbaum, the business manager for a New York advertising agency, “it was very coveted when I was in my teens. It was where you went for real fashion, for the new, most fashion-forward clothes. They had everything.”

  In those days, the 1970’s and 80’s, the department store at Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, in Manhattan, was a shrine to consumption scarcely rivaled in New York. Style-struck shoppers experienced the thrill of snapping up the latest bougainvillea-tinted lipstick from Yves Saint Laurent, dagger-heeled shoes from Charles Jourdan or fashions from standard-bearers of the avant-garde like Kenzo and Norma Kamali. Once a fashion-crazed passerby smashed a window to swipe an armload of Claude Montana suits.

  Fast-forward a couple of decades to a store still thriving but much altered. A jewel in the coronet of the Federated Department Stores, with 32 branches generating about $2 billion in annual sales, Bloomingdale’s outshines most department-store rivals. But it has also ceded fashion excitement and leadership to smaller, more narrowly focused stores, sliding, some say, into complacency.

  Hoping to change that, to get its groove back, the chain is dropping anchor in SoHo. Built at a cost estimated at $30 million to $35 million, the six-level Bloomingdale’s SoHo is meant to capitalize on the flood of young, fashion-focused shoppers, who prowl SoHo on weekends.

  “Getting into that location raises the bar on being cool, and it gives Bloomingdale’s the opportunity to go all out on the grooviness scale,” said Candace Corlett, a principal in WSL Strategic Retail, a New York consulting firm. “This can’t be my mom’s Bloomingdale’s.

  Selma Koch, 95, Famed Brassiere Maven

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | June 14, 2003

  Selma Koch fitted four generations for bras at the Town Shop.

  SELMA KOCH, A MANHATTAN STORE OWNER who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.

  Her grandson Danny said he guessed that her only regret would be not dying in the family’s store, the Town Shop on Broadway at 82nd Street, something she had often said she hoped to do.

  But she certainly lived there almost as much as in her Manhattan apartment, in the end helping the great-grandchildren of her original customers. She kept the original customers, too.

  “Sometimes a lady will come in with either a walker or a wheelchair or a nurse,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press last year. “She can barely move and she’ll say to me, ‘You know, you sold me my trousseau.’”

  Selma Rose Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan on June 29, 1907. Her first job was in advertising, and a client was the Town Shop. The owner’s son Henry Koch flirted with her, but she thought he was married. Then a friend referred to him as “the most eligible bachelor around.”

  “So I went back,” Mrs. Koch told The A.P. “With more charm.”

  Their first date was the opening night of “Showboat” in 1927, and they were married the next year. Mrs. Koch soon went to work in the family store, learning to fit bras from her husband’s sister.

  In the final years of her life Mrs. Koch never stopped wondering why people kept asking her questions. “What’s the big deal?” the small woman asked in her raspy, staccato voice. “I’m just selling bras.”

  Rents Soar. Stores Close. Life Goes on, A Little Poorer.

  By DAN BARRY | April 2, 2005

  THE FATHER AND SON KEEP THE LETTER IN A lockbox behind the counter of their hardware store on the Upper East Side, out of sight but never out of mind.

  “Gentlemen,” it begins. As of May 1, your rent for the narrow storefront at 1396 Madison Avenue will double to $6,600 a month. Should you not acknowledge your acceptance of the above, we will assume that you will be vacating the premises by and not later than April 29.

  The father and son did not write back. How could any letter convey the despair caused by a nonnegotiable doubling of the rent? How could it capture the decades of sweat equity invested by the father, a Holocaust survivor, or the pride that a son took in carrying on the family business, M and E Madison Hardware?

  As Manhattan gradually morphs into a precious outdoor mall for the affluent, let us remember what it loses in the process: character; neighborhood distinctions; places like this hardware store, where good customers have credit accounts and the kids all call the father Pops.

  That father sits at his counter, eating a cheese sandwich from home. His name is Manny Schwarz; the “t” in the family name got misplaced somehow when he arrived here by boat in 1950. He is small, unshaven, nearly 80. He says he did all right for a while, selling “bobby pins and whatnot, thread and needles.” After Eric Schwarz graduated from college, he nudged his father into changing the product to hardware. Their world became one of flathead screws and saws, caulking guns and hammers.

  Now Eric Schwarz looks out onto Madison Avenue and talks about all the other small stores that will surely be displaying similar signs. In the background, his father is getting angry again. Then the egg timer went off. And an old man watched from his little store as his son went out to feed the meters.

  They’re Her Colors. We Just
Wear Them.

  By AMANDA PRISCHAK | June 22, 2008

  Essie Weingarten, founder and president of Essie Nail Polish based in Astoria, Queens.

  ESSIE WEINGARTEN IS AN ANIMATED TALKER, but as she spoke one recent afternoon in her glass-enclosed office in Astoria, a listener might well have been distracted by her nails. They were perfectly manicured, and she was sporting a base of Mademoiselle, a pastel pink, with a top layer of the best-selling Ballet Slippers, an even paler pink.

  Ms. Weingarten’s 27-year-old company, Essie Cosmetics, is a beige, windowless building, but behind its nondescript exterior is a cornucopia of color. Essie Cosmetics is famous for its more than 200 cheekily named nail polishes. Some have adorned the fingertips of A-listers like Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.

  Ms. Weingarten names her products herself, and the names are as attention-getting as the colors. The new Neon collection, for example, includes Short Shorts, a “shockingly flamingo pink,” and Bermuda Shorts, a “high-voltage violet.” Another shade, Aruba Blue, was born during a Caribbean vacation.

  Ms. Weingarten launched Essie after noticing, during a stint in the late 60’s and early 70’s as an assistant buyer at Henri Bendel, that the best polish colors went to department stores. “Salons only had pearly white, platinum, red, mauve and some boring pink,” Ms. Weingarten said, explaining how Essie added everything from inky blacks to pale pinks.

  She has taken heat for some of the saucier names she has coined. Prune Face went off the market in response to incensed customers in California, and After Sex was rechristened After Six in more conservative markets.

  “Of course, in New York,” Ms. Weingarten said, “we had no reason to change the original name.”