Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [21]
Another Chicago sandman is Jacob Sensibar, a former Indiana farm boy and founder of Construction Aggregates Corporation, the firm which moves more earth than any other in the world. Sensibar has filled in half the land on the lakefront, including much of the Outer Drive, and many of the present beaches. His company has also changed a twenty-million-ton sand dune into a six-mile beach in Los Angeles; scraped out twelve million tons of Coney Island ocean bottom and used it as fill for the New Jersey Turnpike; and reclaimed the two-thousand-year-old Lake Huleh Marshes in Israel, to provide farmland capable of feeding 100,000 persons.
There are dozens of such success stories. But somehow it is still the retail merchant that we think of first when we talk of commerce. And probably no other mile-long stretch anywhere has produced more titans of merchandising than Chicago’s State Street.
Massachusetts-born Marshall Field, the most illustrious of all our merchandising magnates, took over his first fledgling store from Potter Palmer toward the end of the Civil War. With nothing much more than a passion for quality and the slogan, “Give the Lady What She Wants,” Field and his partner, Levi Z. Leiter, made the store internationally known – and the Field fortune grew into one of the greatest in the world. The firm’s holdings include a number of large clothing mills, one of which was once managed by Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges. And it was Field’s money that built the Merchandise Mart, which Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the President, bought shortly after V-J Day. My boss is the great-grandson of the founder. But Marshall Field IV, although the largest stockholder in the store, is less occupied with retail merchandising than with his publishing interests, Field Enterprises, Inc., which I will discuss in a later chapter.
It is not generally known, but one of the Marshall Field organization’s largest suburban shopping centers, Old Orchard in Skokie, got its name in an unusual way: Hughston McBain, former board chairman of the store, happened to mention to Mrs. Stanley Field, wife of the executive committee chairman, that construction was ready to begin but a suitable name had not yet been found.
“Why don’t you call it Old Orchard?” she suggested.
Recalling that this name had been a tradition in the area, McBain said, “It’s a marvelous idea. You must be a student of Chicago history.”
“Not exactly,” said Mrs. Field. “You see, when Stanley came courting me in Baltimore, years ago, my father just couldn’t seem to remember the name ‘Field.’ So he called him ‘Mr. Orchard.’ You’d really be naming the center for him.” (And, of course, McBain did.)
The Marshall Field store also figures prominently in the success story of its famous competitor, Carson Pirie Scott & Company. Samuel Carson, John Pirie, Robert Scott, and Andrew MacLeish together had operated stores in several locations, but it was not until 1904 that they could gain a permanent foothold on State Street. And then it was only because Field’s president, John G. Shedd, arranged for these enterprising partners to meet with the proprietor of a firm about to go out of business down the street at State and Madison – and refused to leave until the deal was consummated.
Shedd later explained: “A top competitor is of great value. We all gain when there are good merchants on State Street.”
(The brother of Bruce MacLeish, chairman of Carson Pirie Scott’s executive committee, is the poet-playwright and former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish – “the one who got away.”)
Goldblatt’s, begun by four brothers, Maurice, Nathan, Joel, and Louis, on West Chicago Avenue with five hundred dollars, was almost wiped out early in its history. The original store grew up around a vacant lot, which separated two wings of the building. When construction men began digging in the lot, one wing of the store – its windows snapping like pistol shots – crashed down in a shower of rubble. As the brothers rushed out to sift through the wreckage