You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway, particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to the south. This much is known today.
And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a great new store building—in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by two hundred feet—in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and two basements beneath)—in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the present store.
Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say to him:
"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred. We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail building—high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land, but a good long jump ahead of them."
After which the architect would call for his young men and their draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his department-store.
But his problem in this case is not white paper—at least white paper undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the east end of the Macy plot—a building far too good and far too modern to be "scrapped"—in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two decades past.
It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms, and the like. A good feature, this section—which occupies almost the exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater—but tremendously in the way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the west.
A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem—and perhaps the greatest of all—lies in the fact that it must be carried forward while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load of its traffic is reached—those fearfully hard weeks that immediately precede the Christmas holiday—the workaday routine of Macy's must not be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the merchant has given his final release, and another—infinitely harder—thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the while it must lose none of its efficiency.
Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new Macy store—Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden—have not permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is not an architect's way.
They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly, sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there, everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most of its fellows across the land.