Christmas Eulogy
My son and I were trimming our Christmas tree yesterday when, at some point during the ornament hanging, I looked down at the collection of odd boxes in which the ornaments were stored and saw: Marshall Field's.
My God, I thought. That's closed. It was open for so much of my life. And now it's closed. I once bought Christmas trimmings there. I've outlived it.
I am so old, I thought. I have shopped in department stores that have ceased to exist. I have passed through the aisles of Marshall Field's, Carson Pirie Scott, B. Altman, Stern's. I don't know if I ever went to Gimbel's before it went kaput. Probably, maybe, as a teenager. I remind myself of my Wisconsin aunts, who used to regale me with tales of their long-ago visits to Milwaukee-based, one-time-powerhouse stores like Schuster's and T.A. Chapman's.
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5 comments:
As a native Chicagoan I still can't quite believe that there is no Marshall Field's anymore. I also can't believe that when Macy's took it over they could not have, at the very least, retained the Marshall Field's name. Same with Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn. Maybe it was a legal thing. But I still have trouble believing Macy's couldn't have made some arrangement to keep the old names.
where was Wannamakers? Philly?
Wanamaker's was closed by the time I got to NYC.
Wanamaker was both Philly and NYC. The NYC one was in two connected buildings, one of which still stands and has K-Mart in part of it. The Philly Wanamaker, which was a glorious store, was, last time I saw it, converted into an office building with a portion of it serving as Lord & Taylor. The other great NYC loss was B. Altman & Co. where CUNY Graduate Center now is.
I remember shopping at A&S, Bamberger's, and Ohrbach's. My mother held onto her charge plates from those stores for years after they'd closed.
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