That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again, both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And what it gave to the store in esprit-de-corps—in the thing which we have very recently come to know as morale—cannot easily be estimated.
In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents, which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased many at a time—never more than two or three. He was a financier and did not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.
To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon her return she was astounded to find that a glass toilet set, which she had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction for one hundred dollars!
V. The Store Treks Uptown
With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil. Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final completion—in 1904—was already being anticipated. I am referring to the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square, where it again turned abruptly—north this time—into Broadway, which it followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.
Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad, which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan. Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now two parallel trunks—the one on the east side of the town and the other upon the west—and the now isolated link of the original main line in Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to Times Square and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.