Made In America by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781409095699
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2009-11-15T10:00:00+00:00

12

Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America

In 1846 an Irish immigrant in New York named Alexander Stewart opened a business on Broadway called the Marble Dry-Goods Palace and in so doing gave the world a new phenomenon: the department store. Never before had a single enterprise tried to bring together such a range of merchandise under one roof. The business thrived and soon it covered a whole block on Broadway and had a staff of two thousand. Even that was not enough, however. In 1862 Stewart relocated to an eight-storey building near by, and renamed it A. T. Stewart’s Cast-Iron Palace. It was, and for many years would remain, the largest retail operation in the world.

In its wake came scores of other similar emporia – Field, Leiter & Co. (later Marshall Field) in Chicago, Jordan Marsh in Boston, John Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Hudson’s in Detroit, R. H. Macy’s, E. V. Haughwout’s and Lord & Taylor in New York.

We don’t know when people started calling them department stores. The term isn’t found in print until 1893 (in Harper’s Magazine), but, as so often, the context makes it clear that it was already widely used and understood: ‘They [Brooklyn stores] compare favourably with the best and largest department stores of New York.‘1

What is certain is that department stores transformed the shopping experience for millions of urban Americans. Palace was scarcely an exaggeration for these new establishments. They offered not only an unprecedented range of goods, but also levels of comfort, luxury and excitement previously unknown to consumers. Three things made this possible: the development of cast-iron architecture, allowing the construction of more open interiors, the arrival of the safety elevator, giving stores the option of expanding upwards, and, above all, the increasing prosperity of Americans.

Compared with previous retail establishments, these new bazaars were airy and spacious and marvellously self-contained. Almost from the start they boasted restaurants, tearooms, rest-rooms and other conveniences, eliminating the need to go elsewhere for anything. As early as the 1850s, Stewart’s emporium was entertaining shoppers with fashion shows and organ recitals. You could, as millions remarked in wonder, spend a whole day there. But what truly distinguished department stores was that they were the first grand commercial enterprises that were open to everyone. In the words of Émile Zola, they ‘democratized luxury’.2 A secretary or clerk might live a lifetime in a city and not once enter a swanky hotel or restaurant, never see the inside of a concert hall or opera house, or venture into a fashionable milliner’s. But such a person could experience something of the same intoxicating whiff of elegance and possibility in a department store, and mingle on equal terms with what was known in the business as the carriage trade, those wealthy enough to arrive in their own conveyances.

Department stores offered millions their first look at wonders of the age like the passenger elevator (the world’s first permanent safety elevator was installed in the Haughwout Department Store in New York in 1857), electric lighting, public

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