When Downtown Department Stores Spelled Christmas

Posted by Wayne G. Barber

Generations of New Englanders remember fondly the glorious downtown department stores at Christmas. Those great retail palaces brought magic to the holidays with stunning window displays, conversations on Santa’s lap and walk-through enchanted villages.
Christmas was a carnival of color and light and motion at the great department stores, and the holiday season brought out the best in them. They were at once arbiters of quality and fashion, makers of dreams, vibrant elements of city life and landmark consumer paradises. A trip to a department store often marked a milestone. There we bought a back-to-school outfit, a wedding dress, a new suit for the first job.  And at Christmas, the trip to the downtown department store meant – well, Christmas.
  During the heyday of Downtown Crossing in Boston, carolers serenaded shoppers atop the Filene’s marquee, a giant manger scene loomed above Summer Street at Jordan Marsh and three large gold bells swayed with the Christmas music. A Boston newspaper reporter in 1956 waxed elegiac about the scene: “Gay Christmas music on the streets and in the stores added to the spirit and helped brighten the mood for the intrepid shoppers,” he wrote. “Store windows, a kaleidoscope of color, added to the gay splashes of varied hues on Christmas-wrapped bundles. Everything was bright and cheerful and sparkled in the sun.”

Under the Shepard’s Clock

It was the same on Congress Street in Portland, where Porteous boasted ‘lavish and delightful’ Christmas decorations of colored lights, thousands of yards of greenest evergreen and ‘truly fascinating show windows.’ In Hartford, a Christmas village with historic Connecticut buildings built to scale rested atop G. Fox’s marquee, and for several years the store windows featured Christmas paintings from the Wadsworth Athenaeum. I have fond memories of Berk's Department Store in Pascoag, R.I.and McCarthy's in downtown Woonsocket, R.I.The three great Providence stores on Westminster Street – Shepard’s, Cherry & Webb and Gladdings – decked themselves out for the holiday, and if you got lost you waited for your parents under the tall, neon-lit Shepard’s clock.
Today, the great Providence Shepard’s store – once the country’s largest -- is used by the University of Rhode Island. The Porteous flagship store on Congress Street is the Maine College of Art. Sage-Allen in Hartford was converted to luxury apartments. Jordan Marsh’s Enchanted Village is now at a Jordan Furniture store in Avon. What remain as department stores are invariably Macy’s.
For roughly 50 years, from the 1920s to the 1970s, downtown department stores transported customers from their everyday cares. They were places with vast assortments of merchandise that put flesh on our admittedly materialistic dreams. The stores sent buyers all over the world to bring back wares that would wow customers. Filene’s opened a Paris office in 1910, which established its reputation as a fashion authority and stocked its high-end French Shop.
That was just one of many at Filene’s flagship store, designed by the great Daniel Burnham. There was ‘Young Breed,’ ‘Varsity Shop’ and ‘Junior Gown Shop.’ There was a special repair department, back when broken merchandise was repaired rather than replaced. Filene’s was known for its Lilly Pulitzer clothes, Kimberly knits, its ski shop, its cruise shop, its Oxford shop and its fine men’s clothing. And the basement! Filene’s paid 10 cents on the dollar for leftover merchandise from stores like I. Magnin. Bargain hunters were rewarded with the thrill of the shopping hunt with end-of-season luxury goods at a fraction of their original prices -- with labels and original price tags still intact.
Items purchased at the great department stores sometimes took on special significance.  Such was the case of a handkerchief from R. H. Stearns, a 10-story emporium that offered simple elegance to little old ladies from Beacon Hill.
A woman told the Department Store Museum that she had met a handsome sailor on the Boston Common in 1958. “We went for a walk on Tremont St. I was having a sneezing attack from Hay Fever. My sailor friend went into RH Sterns and purchased a fancy lace hankie for me. I kept the hankie for over 50 years. We rediscovered each other in 2011 and just married this past April 2012. I gave him back the hankie. He couldn't believe I kept it all these years. The hankie is still in good shape and just as beautiful as the day he gave it to me.”

Customer Is Always Right

You were treated like royalty in those great retail palaces, but perhaps no store treated customers better than G. Fox. Its motto: The customer is always right.

Good employers

The great department stores treated their employees well, with employee cafeterias, on-site nurses, paid vacations and sick days and benefits. Auerbach promoted minority employees at G. Fox well before it was the norm. Edward Filene encouraged the company’s union and instituted profit-sharing. His brother Lincoln stood at the door on Christmas Eve and shook the hand of every Filene’s employee.
As a result, department store employees could be fiercely loyal. A Cherry & Webb employee drowned during the Hurricane of 1938 while trying to rescue the store’s furs in the Providence store’s basement.Source: New England Historical Society Special thanks to the Department Store Museum and Shopping Days in Retro Boston for this story. This is an update of the 2013 version of the story.