“Death of the Department Store” by Rosemary Hill is a short review of an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. As best as I can tell, having not seen the exhibit, it is not so much about the state of department stores today as it is about their entire history from the nineteenth century onward. They came into their own late in the 1800s as a time-saving and less-expensive alternate to individual boutiques for each item one might want to buy, and became a kind of mass third place, where people could go. In the US, the decline of the big city department stores started with the growth of suburbs after World War II and the subsequent opening of branch stores in suburbia, then continued with the growth of shopping malls (themselves now dying), the growth of online shopping, and finally the effects of Covid.
The glamor that Hill describes in the Parisian stores was, to some extent reflected, in US stores starting with those built in the 1890s. I’ll switch to New York, where I’m more familiar with the history: the first department store here was the A. T. Stewart Store of 1846 on Broadway, just north of City Hall Park. Here it is in 1903, converted to office space after Stewart’s had moved uptown:
It’s now the home of the city’s Department of Buildings. Stewart called the building “the Marble Palace” because the exterior is clad in Tuckahoe marble (not a great material in our climate) but New York stores didn’t have the kind of grand interior space that the Parisian stores had until, arguably, the Siegel Cooper Store opened on Sixth Avenue in 1896. That building, “the Big Store” was the largest department store in the world when it opened and it played into the glamor, at least on the inside:
The outside had a nice facade on Sixth Avenue, largely obscured by the elevated train and otherwise filled half the long block to Fifth Avenue with a loft-like bulk. Here’s a 1903 drawing where the neighboring buildings and el have miraculously vanished:
More tomorrow on the final evolution, architecturally, of the New York department store.
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