But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square! There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so far back from the elevated railroad as not to be bothered by its noise or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious, puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York town, were doomed to an early disappearance.
The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting searches into its land-titles were made. Some three hundred feet back of Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster & Bial's, extending all the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was quite large enough for the new Macy's—with the possible exception, perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago—the Pekin and the Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street and, for the time being at least, out of business.
The Macy plan did not go through to a final culmination, however, quite as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For, remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner. The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000—a stupendous figure in that day.
The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster & Bial's. It was the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street—a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the small corner was $250,000; an astonishing figure for such a tiny bit of land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any price for it that he saw fit to ask.
While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's price—and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter immediately upon his arrival.
A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city, decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own investment in that street was too great and too recent to be jeopardized.
Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep to the possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it. The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be underestimated.
In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.
Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-space. Without hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the huge theater of Koster & Bial—about twenty thousand square feet of ground space—which enabled it to place its mechanical departments (engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it turned its attention to the gentleman from Chicago. It leased him the premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never again appear on the buildings of that site.
With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district, were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building represented the last word in department store design and construction. Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, it was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest expedition, and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would be required fourteen passenger elevators, ten freight elevators and seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted, too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which the step upon which the passenger rides is held continuously horizontal. In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel cleats at right angles to it.