Vicki Howard - April 22,

FROM MAIN STREET TO MALL

AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY

Series editors: Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird, Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and public policyunderstood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking but also the structuring presence of governmental institutionshas been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE RISE AND FALL
OF THE AMERICAN DEPARTMENT STORE

VICKI HOWARD

Copyright 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4728-2

In memory of David A. Howard, 19382011

IN 1947, crowds of Houston shoppers stood on Main Street outside Foleys new downtown flagship department store, waiting for the doors to open. With its buff-colored windowless facade rising high above show-window canopies that ran around the entire perimeter, the building must have seemed the pinnacle of modernity, marking Houstons place in the postwar national scene and signaling a commitment to downtown commerce and the future. Considered revolutionary and radical by contemporary observers, the six-and-a-half-story building (later expanded to ten) took up an entire city block and featured air conditioning to fight the southern humidity, a five-floor garage with store access by tunnel to attract suburban shoppers, and rapid-moving escalators for the seven million transactions it expected the first year. Today, almost seventy years later, much has changed. The buildingwhich became a Macys in 2006was recently shuttered and demolished, its owners opting to put up office towers instead of trying to resuscitate downtown Houston as a shopping destination.

Although not one of the early palaces of consumption that came to define mass retailing in major urban centers in the late nineteenth century, Foleys had a trajectory that was fairly representative of the life of an American department store. Originating as a small-town Texas dry goods operation in 1900, the store passed out of the Foley brothers hands to another family in 1917 and by the next decade was the largest department store in Houston, its new Main Street building offering some of the same amenities available in major urban centers like New York or Chicago. Shopping at Foleys, with its beauty salon, restaurant, and auditorium for special events or community meetings, could be an all-day affair in the 1920s and 1930s. Continued investment in downtown Houston after World War II put the store at the center of social activity and political change brought about by the civil rights movement. As a major commercial institution, Foleys was part of the vital fabric of this growing southern city. While other Houston stores relocated to malls beyond the I-610 beltway, Foleys flagship remained, even as the firm also ventured out into the surrounding suburbs in the early 1960s and across Texas in following decades.

FIGURE 1. In 1947, like other department stores across the country, Foleys invested in downtown, building a modern new outlet at Main and Lamar in Houstons central business district. Authors collection. Courtesy of Lake County (Ill.) Discovery Museum, Curt Teich Postcard Archives.

In 1947, Foleys was still a downtown store and a much-beloved local institution, yet like many other traditional or conventional department stores at the time, it was no longer independent. Two years earlier, Federated Department Stores had acquired it as part of an aggressive postwar expansion campaign led by the holding companys president, Fred Lazarus Jr. Foleys new building was the product of Lazaruss national vision, one still characterized by a commitment to downtown. More broadly, it was also a product of postwar corporate expansion, a force that would quickly Despite some past variations specific to the South and to Houston, Foleys was following a national trend.

In many ways, the rise and fall of Foleys is the story of the creation and transformation of the American department store industry. By World War I, a national department store industry was in place, consisting of individual merchants, department store executives, and their trade organizations. These figures shaped the cultural meaning of the department store and helped determine its economic trajectory. They also made decisions that refashioned downtowns, transforming their geography and affecting their vitality and symbolic resonance. Their decisions remade the commercial landscape, facilitating suburban sprawl for better or for worse.

With the postWorld War II expansion of massive holding companies and department store chains, region no longer mattered much. Massive mergers in the 1980s resulted in the loss of local nameplates across the country, in small towns, provincial cities, and even in major urban centers like New York and Chicago. After the 2005 megamerger of Federated and May Department Stores, Foleys and many others, such as Marshall Fields, Hechts, Strawbridges, and Filenes were rebranded as Macys and ceased to exist as local or regional nameplates. The experience of department store shopping became the same pretty much everywhere. Lost stores like Foleys became the subject of local nostalgia. Former shoppers remembered the Texas firm fondly, reviling the new, standardized Macys that took its place. Foleys was more than a department store to Houston, claimed a recent local historical society exhibition titled Foleys Department Store: Houstons Community Partner 19002005.

After a long good-bye lasting well into the postwar period, American department stores eventually parted ways with downtown. A few cities have successfully maintained their vital historic central business districts, most notably world-class cities such as San Francisco or New York, where a few traditional department stores like Nordstroms, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Downtown Philadelphias Market Street, once a leading shopping district and home to the famous Wanamakers, Lit Brothers, and many others, boasts only a single traditional department storethe national chain Macys.

For the most part, in the early twenty-first century, shopping does not mean going downtown to peruse the wares of these luxurious, multistoried palaces of consumption. Instead, in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas alike, it means driving (or shopping on the Internete-commerce sales in 2011 were $194 billion, or 4.7 percent of total sales; quarterly e-commerce reports in 2013 ranged from 5.5 to 6 percent of total sales). For a majority of the population, wants and needs are satisfied by a trip to a neighborhood or community shopping center or the nearest regional shopping center anchored by a discount department store chain. Power centers pull together several big-box stores, like Target or Costco, and category killers like Home Depot or OfficeMax, so called because of their ability to do in smaller specialty stores selling their line of merchandise.in the late 1980s, with the introduction of Wal-Mart supercentershypermarkets that included a full-service supermarketshoppers could fulfill all their needs, from food, pharmaceuticals, and clothing to garden supplies, furniture, and hardware, all under one roof, something once claimed only by the traditional department store. Today, department stores are no longer on the cutting edge of retail, nor are they major players in the lives of cities or even suburban commercial developments, as are these newer retail formats.