Part 25

Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of Manhattan--still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare exotic perfumes--and Heaven only knows what else beside--may little dream of the changes that a tomorrow--

Tomorrow--what business has a book such as this to be talking of tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret in advance?

We have seen between these covers quite a number of things--some of them passing odd things--yet classified among the factors of good business, according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add another--the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter, Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.

More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had been planned as the largest single department-store building in the United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building, changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy there--everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the larger non-selling departments of the enterprise; and two or three years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big building--adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of floor space already existing.

Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable: the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago.

And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.

Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy. But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third Streets.

The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually. Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.

True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or another.

The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in 1910--but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its prosperity--the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore & Ohio and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.

You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway, particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to the south. This much is known today.

And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a great new store building--in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by two hundred feet--in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and two basements beneath)--in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the present store.

Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say to him:

"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred. We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail building--high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land, but a good long jump ahead of them."

After which the architect would call for his young men and their draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his department-store.

But his problem in this case is not white paper--at least white paper undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the east end of the Macy plot--a building far too good and far too modern to be "scrapped"--in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two decades past.

It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms, and the like. A good feature, this section--which occupies almost the exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater--but tremendously in the way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the west.

A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem--and perhaps the greatest of all--lies in the fact that it must be carried forward while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load of its traffic is reached--those fearfully hard weeks that immediately precede the Christmas holiday--the workaday routine of Macy's must not be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the merchant has given his final release, and another--infinitely harder--thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the while it must lose none of its efficiency.

Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new Macy store--Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden--have not permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is not an architect's way.

They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly, sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there, everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most of its fellows across the land.

This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership, Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.

It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business, they must be brought together.

Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the traffic streams of the shoppers.

Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of Thirty-fourth Street.

These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking, three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400 will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth, or last selling floor, of the present store.

When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.

The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store itself.

"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."