Saks Global, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, is on its way to financial restructuring in the wake of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that would enable the company to pay its bills and keep its New York stores open.
Even so, these woes are the latest warning flag about a kind of retail business that a million fancy boutiques can’t replace: department stores, which are a civilizing and democratizing influence on urban life.
Retail economists disparage the country’s surviving department stores as “dinosaurs,” a perception that’s grown since online shopping dealt a staggering blow to bricks-and-mortar retailing. But when Lord & Taylor closed its Fifth Avenue flagship in early 2019, I lamented not only losing its absurdly discounted $39 Perry Ellis jackets on the sixth floor, but also the emporium’s “welcoming civility that softened the city’s rough edges.”
Manhattan, once home to over a dozen department stores, is down to five full-size ones — Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Nordstrom and Bergdorf Goodman — and a smaller Bloomingdale’s Soho satellite. (Although Printemps on Wall Street is often called a “department store,” its 55,000-square-foot size is a postage stamp compared with Macy’s 1.25 million square feet.) Several Macy’s branches survive in the outer boroughs, including a drastically shrunken one in Downtown Brooklyn.
The roll call of the long-departed includes Gertz, Korvettes, Alexander’s and May’s. More recently, we lost Barneys, Henry Bendel and a short-lived Neiman Marcus at Hudson Yards.
New Yorkers should worry about the futures of our dinosaur holdouts. They’re majestic even in decline. They welcome all walks of Big Apple life — and if crowds on Macy’s sprawling ground floor can seem like an extension of the subway station below, I’m fine with it
Department stores are as inclusionary as boutiques are exclusionary. No uniformed guards stand in door fronts to scare off shoppers whose looks they don’t like, as they do at stuffy boutiques on Madison Avenue and East 57th Street. Bathrooms are open to everyone. Restaurants such as Cafe BG at Bergdorf Goodman and L’Avenue at Saks appeal equally to serious shoppers and those “just looking.”
A department store conveys abundance, variety and prosperity. I experienced my first taste of their magic as a child, at the holiday-season model-railroad display on the eighth floor of A&S in Brooklyn. Lionel and American Flyer trains zipped through tiny villages and mountains that seemed to go on forever.
Many decades later, my fantasy lies in racks of $5,000 Armani jackets. But I still witness a touch of the old-time thrill in kids’ eyes widened by the sight of festive lights in today’s department stores.
These retail havens also have a mysterious aura that insulates them from outside chaos.
When I was caught up in the Puerto Rican Parade day mayhem of June 2000 — when troublemakers from outside the city crashed the event — a friend and I found refuge inside Barneys at Madison Avenue and 60th Street. We guessed that rioters who broke other nearby windows would respect the fashion temple’s boundaries — and they did.
Barneys later fell victim to rampant mismanagement. Saks and Bergdorf Goodman appear to have dodged the bullet for now. But all department stores are imperiled — less by changes in shopping habits than by the temptation they offer to real estate companies that would love to replace them with supertall condo towers.
Dissident shareholders of publicly traded Macy’s Inc. and investors in privately held Saks Global salivate over their properties in plum Manhattan locations. How simple it would be to raze the bricks and mortar and build palaces in the sky for vagabonding billionaires.
The stores’ owners have turned back the challenges — so far. Macy’s dropped a proposal, announced six years ago, to build an office tower on top of a smaller Herald Square flagship. The land beneath Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue is owned not by the store’s parent company but by a Bloomingdale family trust — which severely limits redevelopment potential. Nordstrom, not tower-developer Extell, owns its 320,000-square-foot store on West 57th Street and, presumably, would have no easy way out if it ever wanted to leave.
But Lord & Taylor seemed destined to last forever, too. It’s now a Google office location with a ground-floor food hall on the way. Alexander’s on 59th Street, where I would pick up clean socks at the last minute during my single days, is the site of a Bloomberg office tower. Neiman Marcus lasted barely a year after it swaggered into Hudson Yards with seven glam shopping floors and a half-dozen fancy restaurants.
Enjoy our dinosaurs that hold out against the odds — while we still can.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
