Part 9

The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task. Yet it was accomplished within three days--which means that large enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its possibilities had not been anticipated long in advance and planned against.

The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his very active assistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the moving-day task that confronted them. To pick up a huge New York department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks--almost an even mile--was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it--a plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.

The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day. The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown--stock and fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue--to Thirty-fourth--from the old store to the new--and the empty wagons returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen, and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the 6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told quietly:

"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."

But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Saturday, as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for the entire forty-four years of its life, instead of but a mere twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step forward safely taken--and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of its existence.

In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York; one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord & Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable & Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's, first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's--one by one these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York. Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months and for years--in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our participation in it, when the Government was very glad to make use of their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of Macy's old-time competitors downtown who failed to join in the uptown movement, but three remained--Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they have occupied for almost half a century.

The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Saturday afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories walk its spacious pavements. The Eden Musee, that paradise for youth of an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the town. That part of New York today is all but dead--inside of twenty years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pass in the big town ere now.

In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The construction of the two modern railroad terminals--the one in Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second--has created in the district that lies between them what today would seem to be the permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings nearly 60,000 folk--transients and commuters--the other almost 100,000, into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third Street two decades ago, so has Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a thoroughfare of surpassing importance.

By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business going forward in great strides]

Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his daughter--as was his frequent wont--from the simple little old red-brick store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.

"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he. "A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future business heart of this wonderful city."

It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that the success of their enterprises depends.

Today

I. A Day in a Great Store

The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however--from three of the morning until four--when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train; the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.

Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiter and the cook in the Firefly lunch wagon which has stood in the busy Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six there is real animation in the broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.

All this while Macy's has stood dark--save for the few yellow and red lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated. Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol. There are miles of corridors to be paced--the night walking of the Macy watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to Erie--millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing must be disturbed. And in order that the owners of the store may sleep in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.

Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof. The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-half hours of hard endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping job. There is at the best a vast litter--and yet a litter that cannot be carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny article of great value--a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.

Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out--not even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.

Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must come well in advance of its patrons.

In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of the minor executives--particularly those of the selling floors--make their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its selling or non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious about keeping an exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five thousand folk, there are not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.

Half after eight!

A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives--perhaps it is better to remember them as the specials--are closed, and new ones substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.

But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors--one in Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers and the junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour. Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in front of them. They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various posts in the store.

For fifteen minutes this rank and file--a miniature army it is--comes trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.

At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even the slightest particle of unfairness--one gains an increasing admiration for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this--the pressing of a button at that stairhead automatically orders closed the two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever translated at the employees' doors as eighty-forty-seven. And in cases of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven becomes the stroke of nine by the clock--in very extreme cases even later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation system.

From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the late-comers--out of breath as a rule and extremely embarrassed into the bargain--are herded into a special group and given special "late" passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes--when the tardiness percentages of the store have been running to unwonted heights--the group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one of his several assistants to receive these late-comers personally and individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that might even tend to such an end was abolished--completely and permanently.

In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family, we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the force in in the morning and out again at night--as well as in and out at different intervals throughout the day. Consider now that it is still lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon the floor. The non-selling forces as well--elevator-men, cashiers, all the rest of them, are at their posts. A doorman is told off to each of the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of nine.