It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had been moving steadily uptown—shrewd observers used to say at the rate of ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been slow and dignified—relatively at least. With the coming of the new subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty, forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small, smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek—there remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue. It seemed incredible that such a huge investment should be thrown to the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.
Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than any of its competitors. True it was that the firm had builded for its own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it. Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however, stood upon leased land—the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well, each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.
The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual title to the valuable site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded. Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or efficient planning of the building had been quite out of the question. The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well, against such a handicap.
THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street
gave but faint promise of its present importance
The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to slide backward—would have been a precarious experiment, to put it mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious—the dangers of the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.
With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street—the site of the present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south, threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad—the McAdoo Tubes had not then come into even a paper being—was crossed at acute angles by an even more important street—New York's incomparable Broadway—and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania Station was to confirm it—for all time.
In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad, in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing—and using them very well indeed.