Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [532]
Consistent with his previous experiments in retailing, Stewart encouraged customers to stroll at leisure around the selling floors, inspecting wares laid out on polished mahogany counters and marble shelves, everything clearly tagged with a set price and organized into separate “departments.” He instructed his sales staff, as always, to be helpful but unobtrusive and never to bargain. Above all, he continued to look for ways to make shopping agreeable to women of the propertied classes: by hiring handsome young men as clerks, by advertising aggressively in ladies’ magazines, by staging the first American fashion shows, and by locating a “Ladies’ Parlor” on the second floor featuring full-length Parisian mirrors.
Stewart’s store was a sensational success. Outside, private carriages jammed Broadway; inside, two hundred clerks allegedly took in ten thousand dollars a day, an unheard-of sum (a decade later, in 1859, sales topped nine million, almost twenty thousand dollars per day). Admiring newspapers paid homage to the owner as “Stewart the Great” or “King Stewart.” So did his competitors. During the 1850s one after another of them moved to Broadway—albeit a little to the north, to the five-block-long strip intersected by Canal, Grand, Broome, Spring, Prince, and Houston. Arnold, Constable opened a new “Marble House” facing Canal Street; its brass-buttoned, blue-uniformed porters opened carriage doors and held umbrellas over crinolined customers. Lord and Taylor opted for a palace of cast iron, an elegant emporium that opened a block farther north in 1859. There were other broad-gauged arrivals, such as Brooks Brothers and the Hearn Brothers, but specialized stores flocked to the strip as well. Badger’s ironworks cast a Venetian-style palazzo for E. V. Haughwout, an importer of silver and glass, who also manufactured fine chandeliers and handpainted china. Tiffany and Company, too, chose a Badger iron-and-glass front to show off its “diamond jewelry, watches, clocks, silverware and bronzes,” and assured would-be customers “that they may examine our collections, without incurring the least obligation to make purchases.” Cheny silks, Gunther furs, and W. and J. Sloane carpets were soon displayed in their own retail outlets.
By the mid-fifties throngs of “window-shoppers” were promenading up and down Broadway delighting (as Henry James later remembered) in the goods “heaped up for our fond consumption.” The street became an extension of the stores, a stage for the fashion conscious. Hundreds of people “spend their lives in sauntering through Broadway during fashionable hours seeing and being seen,” the Tribune observed. Most were smartly dressed women, all ribbons and silks and Parisian fashions, who formed “one sheet of bright, quivering colors,” though men were also in evidence, conservatively dressed businessmen as well as dandies with hornlike mustaches, kid gloves, thin trouser legs, and patent leather shoes. At night the effect was almost magical as gas lamps and illuminated store windows captured the streams of pedestrians in their glow and the colored lamps on carriages and omnibuses transformed Broadway into a river of light.
A PALACE OF CRYSTAL
After 1853 omnibus riders could continue north past Houston, past Madison Square, and out beyond the settled fringes of the city, toward the only structure in town that put Stewart’s emporium to shame. Journalist George Foster described the journey: “For some blocks we have been aware, by the accumulation of coffee houses, grog shops, ‘saloons’, peep-shows of living alligators, model-artists and three-headed calves, that we were approaching the newly discovered, Sedgwickean centre of the metropolis. ‘Fortieth street, Crystal Palace’—says the conductor, stopping the cars handily on the crossing.”
Two years earlier, in 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations had opened in London