The Romance of a Great Store

Fourteenth Streets had come to be as much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equal

itude of its operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great growth s

reet, Koch was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue. None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been com

ace the homes of the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van

zation for a long time after their going. Miss Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long hours and wearying ones. A type that has q

ne in Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest valu

less drab. One of them told me not so long ago of the entente cordiale wh

t of his work. Behind it all he was most human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks down the avenue. That settled it. He would

bakery at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street-sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other tim

registers-which do the work they once did, much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the 'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters

H STREET STOR

s Macy's had absorbed

reet and 6th Avenu

ture of

k a radically different position in regard to them. Here was the electric-light-that brand-new thing which this young man Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and generation. How it drew folk, to gaze ad

very dependable. Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The store's real reliance was upon its gas-ligh

a habit of calling up their friends, just so that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the device became so apparent that folk stood

t only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory; generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of merchandise-a practice which it

in the store. Up to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the store-there really seemed to be no wa

in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on. This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified width-say "D" or "Double A"-she must rummage through the entire drawer until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomp

some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business, soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its second decade. In fact, his actual

r continued with the house for a considerably longer time, maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his private office i

cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value alone was enormous. Young

it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of purpose. Nor was he-as some of them were then inclined to believe-devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it for forty-eigh

raus told the other gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he was in business in New York.

ashioned modesty

the performance in an uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to close his safe-a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the night watchman to th

ain upon the copper coin market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington, to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned to New York and went

tly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece, Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer." Affable, direct, appro

n Straus-of whom much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in the development of Colorado and,

undation of the original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks would be cleared from shelves and counters,

e elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater mig

ho specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the wax-figure experts of Eden Museé in Twenty-third Street to order the saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's ca

l of novelty, such as the securing of the mechanical bird-which a moment ago we saw Margaret Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The mechanical bird appealed pa

ew England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He took

r the building-blocks and the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down another, stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and would have to close his