• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7857 0

to spend on clothes and recreation. The setting had its drawbacks, especially given the power wielded by male foremen, but the factory girls, partly by virtue of their massed numbers, were seldom pliant and docile. Indeed a high-spiritedness characterized the shops at first, with much socializing and bantering, to the point where some bosses complained that “men are considered more reliable and more easily managed.” Employers soon began to impose stricter discipline—Brooks Brothers, for example, forbade all conversation—and as conditions worsened, turnover soared.

Factory production, in turn, increased pressure on small employers, who responded by lowering piece rates, forcing seamstresses to work ever faster and ever longer; fifteen-to-eighteen-hour workdays for seamstresses became common in the 1850s. And machine work proved just as taxing as hand sewing; it simply shifted the strain from arms to hips, while the jarring mechanisms generated altogether new nervous disorders. The Shirt Sewers and Seamstresses Union spoke out against the Singers, but they had come to stay.

PALACES OF CONSUMPTION

As production of commodities soared, local retailers began to adopt radically new marketing techniques to increase the volume and velocity of sales. The vanguard of this revolution was the department store, and the man who introduced it to New York was dry-goods merchant Alexander T. Stewart.

This slight, taciturn man with sandy-gray hair and whiskers, who had done so well during the Panic of 1837, came to realize that retail merchandizing was not keeping pace with the boom-era surge in industrial productivity. Even in larger shops like Brooks Brothers or Lord and Taylor, stock turnover could be glacially slow. According to time-honored custom, each prospective customer who came through the door was engaged by a clerk, and prices, rather than being fixed, depended on the outcome of leisurely dickering. It was Stewart’s genius to see that if he wanted to sell more goods, and to sell them more rapidly, he would have to sell them differently.

As early as 1832 Stewart, like Arthur Tappan, had advertised “regular and uniform prices”—an inspired tactic, as E. L. Godkin remembered half a century later, which made Stewart popular among female shoppers by “delivering them from distrust of their own power as hagglers or bargain-makers.” Over the next dozen-odd years he perfected his appeal to women with periodic price reductions, special sales, auctions, and canny advertising that depicted his establishment as “the most desirable place to which ladies can resort.” It was reported in the newspapers that he even sent salesmen outside to deliver “eulogies on silks, laces, and french muslin” to preferred customers while they sat outside in their carriages, “which must have won their hearts.”

Stewart’s most famous innovation, however, dates from 1846, when he opened a cavernous new store on the east side of Broadway between Chambers and Reade streets. The former site of Washington Hall, headquarters of the Federalist Party, this was now a prime retail location—close to wholesale clothing manufacturers, rail and ferry terminals, fashionable hotels, sumptuous private residences—and Stewart built accordingly. Instead of adhering to the Greek Revival style, he erected a magnificent Italian Renaissance palazzo, five stories tall and sheathed in dazzling white Tuckahoe marble. Its street-level facade, supported by great cast-iron Corinthian pilasters, boasted fifteen huge plate-glass windows. The interior, airy as well as opulent, was organized around a large circular court covered by a domed skylight. Nothing remotely like it had ever been seen in New York before; well-traveled residents knew it had no equal in London or Paris, either. People began to call it the “Marble Palace.”

Stewart’s Marble Palace on Broadway and Chambers Street, 1851, the pioneer department store in the United States. Fifteen years after it opened, Stewart moved to larger quarters uptown and turned the building into a wholesale outlet and warehouse. It still stands, having