Lost: An Incredible Emporium

It's hard to believe that I could go home with a hard cover novel that cost no more than my weekly allowance. I still have a handsome cameo brooch my grandmother had bought in Italy and had set in red gold by the jewelry department.

I was an inveterate animal lover with very little discriminatory sense. I could go up to the fifth floor Pet Department and buy a tree toad and meal worms with which to feed it, the terrarium to house it, moss and small plants to decorate its artificial habitat. Or it might be a pair of white mice that I brought home. Those I remember in particular because they quickly learned to raise the door of their cage and escape. My mother was in constant fear of vacuuming one of them up, once it had gotten gray with city dirt from scurrying around loose.

Wanamaker's The Store of New York, 1916

The remaining floors in that building had the clothing departments we all expect to this day, as well as yard goods and sewing notions. The fifth and top floor housed a very nice restaurant, the beauty salon, a small theater where marionette shows were offered several times a month, and the pet department. The toy department seemed like a fairyland.

The building across the street was joined to the Tenth Street store by an enclosed bridge on the second floor and where you could shop to furnish your apartment or country retreat, if you had one. They sold pianos: grand, spinet, or upright; upholstery fabrics, draperies, and kitchen appliances. Everything that our family needed, except for standard groceries and alcohol, could be found at Wanamaker's. Gift items, gourmet treats and fancy chocolates, musical instruments other than pianos, sporting goods and evening clothes, waffle irons and radios were at hand. There was mass-produced and one-of-a-kind art, gift items, radios and phonographs … and on and on.

Thinking back on it, I can’t figure out how Wanamaker's stayed in business during the Depression. The store had an enormous staff, whose livelihoods doubtless depended on it for many years. The inventory was huge and so diverse, and the clientele within Manhattan would seem to have been so low on discretionary funds, it amazes me to think that they didn't close the store until the nineteen fifties.

I realize now that the New York store was a less impressive and opulent version of the original Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. The organ was smaller, the rotunda not so like a cathedral, but it was still over a million square feet. The art exhibits and musical events were less lavish, but in our lower east side neighborhood, they knocked the socks off a large number of immigrants and others who would never have experienced a much culture without that incredible emporium. It constituted another world for me, and a necessity of life for my parents.

I wish something like Wanamaker's could be created someday when we can look for beauty, utility and art for art's sake in a commercial venue — when we no longer need all our resources for trying to save our species and our planet.

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Lost: An Incredible Emporium

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