department stores

Generations of New Englanders remember fondly the glorious downtown department stores at Christmas. Those great retail palaces brought magic to the holidays with stunning window displays, conversations on Santa’s lap and walks through enchanted villages.

The holiday season brought out the best in the great downtown department stores. They were at once arbiters of quality and fashion, makers of dreams, vibrant elements of city life and landmark consumer paradises.

A trip to a department store often marked a milestone. There we bought a back-to-school outfit, a wedding dress, a new suit for the first job.  And at Christmas, the trip to the downtown department stores meant – well, Christmas.

Downtown Crossing

During the heyday of Downtown Crossing in Boston, carolers serenaded shoppers atop the Filene’s marquee. A giant manger scene loomed above Summer Street at Jordan Marsh and three large gold bells swayed with the Christmas music.

“I remember going to Downtown Crossing in the early 1970’s and being met by enormous crowds of people who were towered over by the Boston Police officers on their mounted horses…what a sight!,” commented Ellis Paulman.

“I visited Gilchrist’s, R. H. Stearns, Filene’s, and Jordan Marsh,” he wrote. “It was an exciting time and an exhilarating experience for this small-town boy from Connecticut!”

A Boston newspaper reporter in 1956 waxed elegiac about the scene: “Gay Christmas music on the streets and in the stores added to the spirit and helped brighten the mood for the intrepid shoppers,” he wrote. “Store windows, a kaleidoscope of color, added to the gay splashes of varied hues on Christmas-wrapped bundles. Everything was bright and cheerful and sparkled in the sun.”

Under the Shepard’s Clock

It was the same on Congress Street in Portland, where Porteous boasted ‘lavish and delightful’ Christmas decorations of colored lights, thousands of yards of greenest evergreen and ‘truly fascinating show windows.’

In Hartford, a Christmas village with historic scale-model Connecticut buildings rested atop G. Fox’s marquee, and for several years the store windows featured Christmas paintings from the Wadsworth Athenaeum.

The three great Providence stores on Westminster Street – Shepard’s, Cherry & Webb and Gladdings – decked themselves out for the holiday, and if you got lost you waited for your parents under the tall, neon-lit Shepard’s clock. The Outlet Company in downtown Providence outlasted them all. Founded in 1891, it grew to occupy a city block. Woonsocket, R.I., 15 miles north, had its own institution: McCarthy’s. It had a sidewalk clock, too, and a talking Christmas tree during the holidays.

The Good Old Days

Internet sites are filled with blogs and websites devoted to department store history. eBay does a brisk business selling branded items from favorite stores. Books have been written about them: Denholms: The Story of Worcester’s Premier Department Store, G. Fox & Co.: Where Connecticut Shopped and Filene’s: Boston’s Great Specialty Store.

The Connecticut Historical Society not only houses the Remembering G. Fox & Co. archives, it hosts G. Fox talks that draw attendees dressed in G. Fox items (the store closed in 1993). Elizabeth Abbe, who presents the talks, compares the G. Fox & Co. fans to the cult following of  The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Today, the great Providence Shepard’s store – once the country’s largest — is used by the University of Rhode Island. The Porteous flagship store on Congress Street is the Maine College of Art. Sage-Allen in Hartford was converted to luxury apartments. Jordan Marsh’s Enchanted Village is now at a Jordan Furniture store in Avon. What remain as department stores are invariably Macy’s.

A $35 Teddy Bear

But back in the day, you brought your best self to the great old downtown department stores. You hoped to find the wondrous toy, the fantastic dress, the wild extravagance you just had to have.

In 1965, a 19-year-old Hartford Courant employee spent her entire Christmas bonus on a Stieff teddy bear at G. Fox.  “I believe he cost $35,” she posted in The Department Store Museum blog. “That was outrageous for a 19 yr old to spend on a Teddy Bear. Oh my goodness I have so many great memories.”

For roughly 50 years, from the 1920s to the 1970s, downtown department stores transported customers from their everyday cares. Their vast assortments of merchandise put flesh on our admittedly materialistic dreams. The stores sent buyers all over the world to bring back wares to would wow customers.

Filene’s

Filene’s opened a Paris office in 1910, which established its reputation as a fashion authority and sent stock to its high-end French Shop.

That was just one of many shops within Filene’s flagship store, designed by the great Daniel Burnham. There was ‘Young Breed,’ ‘Varsity Shop’ and ‘Junior Gown Shop.’ There was a special repair department, back when you repaired broken merchandise rather than replacing it.

Filene’s was known for its Lilly Pulitzer clothes, its Kimberly knits, its ski shop, its cruise shop, its Oxford shop and its fine men’s clothing.

And the basement! Filene’s paid 10 cents on the dollar for leftover merchandise from stores like I. Magnin. Bargain hunters could thrill to the shopping hunt with end-of-season luxury goods at a fraction of their original prices — with labels and original price tags still intact.

Items purchased at the great department stores sometimes took on special significance.  Such was the case of a handkerchief from Boston’s R. H. Stearns, a 10-story emporium that offered simple elegance to little old ladies from Beacon Hill.

A woman told the Department Store Museum that she met a handsome sailor on the Boston Common in 1958. “We went for a walk on Tremont St. I was having a sneezing attack from Hay Fever. My sailor friend went into RH Sterns and purchased a fancy lace hankie for me. I kept the hankie for over 50 years. We rediscovered each other in 2011 and just married this past April 2012. I gave him back the hankie. He couldn’t believe I kept it all these years. The hankie is still in good shape and just as beautiful as the day he gave it to me.”

Customer Is Always Right

Downtown department stores treated customers like royalty, but perhaps no store treated customers better than G. Fox. Its motto: The customer is always right.

Beatrice Fox Auerbach, the beloved matriarch who presided over G. Fox’s glory years, would not allow a customer to go away unhappy. The hallmark of G. Fox since her grandfather founded it in 1847 was free home delivery –- first by wheelbarrow, then by horse-drawn carriage, and finally by automobile and truck. In 1947, G. Fox celebrated its centennial by delivering packages by helicopter.

Recalled one G. Fox employee, “The policy was if a customer wanted to return a spool of thread, the great G. Fox fleet would pick up the thread.”

Auerbach was so anxious to please customers that on Christmas Eve she kept a small staff and drivers on standby until midnight for desperate parents who still needed a Christmas gift.

As far back as 1917, Hartford had an amazing emotional attachment to G. Fox. When the five-story store burned down that year, 98 percent of the customers still paid their bills though all customer records had been destroyed. The owners paid employees their salaries during construction of the new store, and Hartford merchants let G. Fox sell its goods in their storefronts.

Good Employers

The great downtown department stores treated their employees well, with employee cafeterias, on-site nurses, paid vacations and sick days and benefits. Auerbach promoted minority employees at G. Fox well before it was the norm. Edward Filene encouraged the company’s union and instituted profit-sharing. His brother Lincoln stood at the door on Christmas Eve and shook the hand of every Filene’s employee.

As a result, department store employees could be fiercely loyal. For example, a Cherry & Webb employee drowned during the Hurricane of 1938 while trying to rescue the furs in the Providence store’s basement.

Lowell’s Bon Marche in 1938 had 62 employees who were 10-year veterans of the store.

“I loved, loved, loved working for this store,” wrote one Jordan Marsh employee.

A G. Fox employee tells of his late mother who retired from G. Fox. She proudly won many customer service awards and was buried wearing her G. Fox name badge.

Sensory delights

Shopping filled the senses at the great downtown department stores: the ring of the bell, the smell of the city, the shining marble, mahogany and brass and most of all the merchandise displayed in tasteful wooden-and-glass cases.

Children found it exciting to dine in the elegant restaurants of the downtown department stores, like the Venetian Tea Room at Read’s in Bridgeport or the Top o’ the Town Restaurant at Forbes & Wallace in Springfield. They had to wear their Sunday best and put on proper manners.

“It was a tradition in my family to go to Providence on Thanksgiving night to walk off our big dinner and to window shop,” commented Gail Merrill. “It was the first night that they lit the Christmas lights and all the store fronts had beautiful displays! The dolls and train sets were sure to be on every child’s list! Shepard’s, Gladdings, and the Outlet window displays rivaled New York’s. Oh the memories!!!

Each department store had a signature food item.  Shepard’s in Providence had chicken croquettes, while Gilchrist’s in Boston had almond macaroons. Sage-Allen in Springfield smelled like sticky buns, so spicy they almost burned the tongue. The aroma from the bakery wafted up the escalators, drawing customers into the basement.

Date nut bread sandwiches with cream cheese were a favorite at G. Fox. And Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffins were a required treat at the end of shopping trips to Boston. Since the bakery closed in the early 1990s, baker John Pupek opened the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffin Co. in Brockton, which sells the muffins at Macy’s in Portland.

The Rise of Downtown Department Stores

With roots in 18^th– and 19^th-century dry goods stores, the department stores flourished because New England flourished. For a time, New England cities supported several of the country’s largest downtown department stores.

Providence merchant Benjamin Thurber in 1766 founded the oldest, Gladdings. The store’s bunch of grapes insignia therefore became the longest continuously used trade sign in American history.

Yankee merchants also founded Jordan Marsh and R. H. Stearns.  Eben Jordan founded Jordan Marsh in 1841, and then R. H. Stearns founded his eponymous store in 1848.

Many department stores had immigrant roots. Gerson Fox, who opened G. Fox in 1847, was German Jewish, as was William Filene, who founded his namesake business in 1881. Forbes & Wallace founder Andrew Wallace was born in Scotland, and Worcester’s Denholm & McKay founder William Denholm was a native of Dundee.

Bon Marche

The rise and fall of Bon Marche in Lowell, Mass., typified the fate of  downtown department stores.

Lowell native Frederic Mitchell opened his first store on Merrimack Street in 1878, displaying merchandise on draped packing cases so the millworkers would eye it as they passed by. As a result, millworkers flocked to Bon Marche on the day the ghost walked – payday.

During the world wars, Lowell’s mills churned out munitions and textiles to clothe the troops, and Bon Marche helped with the war effort. During World War I, Bon Marche collected peach pits for gas masks, and sold war bonds and stamps during both wars.

After World War II, Bon Marche went back to its main marketing proposition by offering deals that couldn’t be beat and rock bottom prices. The store furthermore had a big rock sticking out of the basement floor, a glacial erratic too large to remove during construction.

When Lowell struggled, so did Bon Marche. By 1976, Bon Marche turned into a Jordan Marsh, and by the 1990s, the building had no tenants.

The high water mark for Boston’s downtown department stores probably came in 1956, when  it had seven department stores at Christmas: R.H. White, Gilchrist’s, R.H. Stearn’s, Raymond’s, Kennedy’s, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s.

Suburban Flight

It would be the last Christmas for R.H. White’s, the first victim of the middle-class flight to the suburbs.

Then after 100 years in business, Raymond’s declared bankruptcy in 1972 and killed off its spokesman, the swamp Yankee Uncle Eph.

Subsequently in 1976, Gilchrist’s, one of the big three in Downtown Crossing with Jordan’s and Filene’s, closed 134 years after it opened.

R. H. Stearns, which had towered over Boston Common in a landmark building for seven decades, shut its doors in 1978.

Kennedy’s then closed in the early 1980s, having grown from a small men’s store in 1892 to a fixture of New England retailing.

Jordan Marsh became a Macy’s in 1996.

And finally Filene’s, the last to give up the ghost, became a Macy’s in 2006.

Memories

Memories of the great old downtown department stores live on, though, in tissue-wrapped ornaments tucked away in Steiger’s boxes or childhood Santa photos from Sage-Allen.

A typical sentiment expressed on the Forgotten New England site: “To mourn the loss of the Bon Marché Department Store in Downtown Lowell is almost like mourning the loss of a beloved grandparent.”

A Springfield resident posted on the Department Store Museum site that nothing could replace her beloved Forbes and Wallace. “My mother and I shopped that store ‘til the bitter end of July of 1976. Broken Hearted over the tearing down of that retail mecca! Nothing can replace my beloved Forbes and Steigers stores! Nor the magic of then-downtown Springfield, Mass!”

How we miss those downtown department stores.

Special thanks to the Department Store Museum and Shopping Days in Retro Boston.  This story about downtown department stores was updated in 2022.