Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [752]
Many mercantile establishments fled the venerable East Side slips. South Street would remain the port’s ground zero, but wholesalers, express companies, packing-box firms, and dry-goods commission merchants set up shop on the West Side near the freight depot. Economical and efficient cast-iron warehouses, equipped with the newest in freight elevators and “modelled after the sumptuous palaces of Italy,” went up due west of City Hall and then north to Canal, and on into today’s SoHo. These new warehouses—over two hundred went up in the Fifth Ward alone in the postwar decade—quickly filled with midwestern farm staples, New England manufactured products, and luxury goods from Europe and East Asia.
Other wholesalers followed the dry-goods giants. The city’s hardware district had migrated from upper Pearl to Chambers by 1877, and the iron shops from lower Broadway to Washington and West. Only the leather-goods traders remained in their ancient territory: the Swamp (bounded by Beekman, Gold, Frankfort, and the East River). Workshops too tagged along. Processing and consumer-finishing manufactories flourished, finishing goods that moved in and out of the warehouses. Extra loft space was turned over to pieceworkers making boxes, notions, artificial flowers, or cigars.
LADIES’ MILE
The spread of warehouses and factories bumped fashionable retailers from Broadway below Houston northward toward Union Square. A. T. Stewart had pioneered this transition during the war, when he shifted operations from his Chambers Street Marble Palace to his New Store at Broadway and 9th Street. Now competitors overleaped him, spilling into Union Square itself and pressing on toward Madison Square.
Some department stores opted for Broadway. Arnold Constable remoored itself just north of Union Square, on Broadway at 19th Street in 1868, and Lord and Taylor soon resettled a block farther uptown, in an ornate cast-iron five-story structure, replete with steam elevators fined out with divans and plush carpets.
Others preferred Sixth Avenue, well serviced by horsecars. At 14th and Sixth, Rowland Macy expanded his original shop by taking over adjacent stores and adding departments rapidly. Macy, a close friend of P. T. Barnum, used his talent for publicity to draw clientele, producing thematic exhibits and fashioning elaborate Christmas extravaganzas that featured a store Santa and illuminated window displays, introduced in 1874. His competitors used architecture as publicity, erecting gigantic palaces of consumption. Majestic cast-iron frigates lined Sixth by the 1870s, including Hugh O’Neill’s Byzantine-style building, domed and painted yellow and burnt umber, along with Altaian’s, Best, and Stern Brothers, the latter a two-hundred-foot-wide, sevenstory monster on 23rd Street.
In the wake of these frigates sailed the sloops and schooners of retailing. Many moved into the basements and parlor floors of Union Square mansions and brownstones, none more than twenty years old, but vacated now by wealthy families fleeing north to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. Silversmiths, dry-goods stores, confectionery shops, F. A. O. Schwarz, and W. and J. Sloane were among the newcomers. Tiffany’s purchased the Church of the Puritans, demolished it, and in 1870 had Kellum put up a cast-iron palace that boasted a storage vault where the affluent could leave their plate and jewels during the summer Saratoga season.
R. H. Macy’s store, corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, from Devorkin, Great Merchants of Early New York. (The Collection of Macy’s)
The cast-iron arcades and glass show windows attracted armies of shoppers, mainly women. Broadway and Sixth were choked with female-filled victorias, landaus, broughams, and coupes during afternoon hours, and the sidewalks thronged with elegantly attired women, promenading and perusing the windows. So emphatically female an area was eventually dubbed