How History Was Made by Panes of Glory
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, Saks, Barney’s, Bergdorf Goodman: A December stroll past department store windows along Midtown streets leaves no doubt of what is historically true: New York is the capital of Christmas.
My favorite windows this year are at ABC Carpet & Home at Broadway and 19th Street, in the building that once housed W. & J. Sloane, the legendary 19th-century carpeters. White and gold dominate in frosted windows with lots of artificial snow and on chandeliers made of a dizzying variety of recycled materials. The window at the 19th Street corner features a big tree dripping with tinsel, and white and clear glass ornaments. It is all like a found world of crystalline forms, with more than a passing bow to Joseph Cornell.
Macy’s offers two sets of window designs: On 34th Street the theme is “Miracle on 34th Street,” with lovely oldfashioned narrative tableaux. On Sixth Avenue, however, a “tree” theme — Tree of Love, Tree of Friendship, etc. — is rendered with outsize figures, loud sounds, garish colors, and video screens.
Seeing those windows is enormously difficult, and I could never jockey to within fewer than three people from the window. Macy’s does not appear to have personnel directing the line for viewing — as Lord & Taylor does. Lord & Taylor, the oldest still extant Manhattan department store, has for many years been the most renowned for its windows (though they are lately outdone by the sheer opulent chic of Bergdorf’s).This year L&T doesn’t disappoint. Old postcards set the themes of the period windows, which also make use of actual family photos — an affecting touch to complement the store’s trademark detail and nostalgia.
Nostalgia is appropriate, for the department store, the modern newspaper, gaslight, plate glass, and the cult of Christmas all emerged as interlinked phenomena at the time of the Civil War. New York may even have invented the true department store. When the Irish immigrant merchant Alexander Stewart opened his store at Broadway and 10th Street in 1862, the dry-goods store had definitively morphed into the department store more or less as we know that form of retailing today. Stewart’s 10th Street store was the beginning of “Ladies’ Mile,” the city’s great district of department stores that stretched north to 23rd Street. Lord & Taylor at Broadway and 20th Street, Stern Brothers on 23rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues (in the building now housing Home Depot), and B. Altman & Co. on Sixth Avenue between 18th and 19th streets (in the building that’s now the Container Store) were some Ladies’ Mile highlights.
The stores often had cast-iron-supported street walls that, with newly affordable plate glass, allowed show windows of unprecedented size for the display of merchandise — and the rise of the pastime we call “window shopping.” Gas lamps illuminated show window displays at night, casting a warm glow onto previously murky night streets of central business districts.
The earliest mechanized Christmas window displays were most likely Macy’s in the 1890s, when the store was still at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. By then the store had been purchased from Rowland Macy by the brothers Isidor and Nathan Straus, and the two great Jewish merchants may have been more responsible than anyone for the department store Christmas pageantry we take for granted today. They moved Macy’s to Sixth Avenue and 34th Street in 1902, and the store sponsored its first Thanksgiving Day Parade, complete with Santa Claus, in 1924, by which time all department stores felt it de rigueur to have mechanized displays.
At the around same time, printing presses went to producing a few thousand whole newspapers per hour from producing only a few hundred — a true exponential increase. Papers like the New York Sun and the New York Herald that adopted new technology as soon as it came to market had soaring circulations, like nothing in the history of publications, and with them a new business model based on advertising sales. The big advertisers, then as now, were department stores — the era’s other business that had gone to a volume model of sales. Among the stores’ — and papers’ — constant promotions (e.g., R.H. Macy & Co.’s famous “red star specials”), one came to make or break the annual bottom line: Christmas.
Saks Fifth Avenue’s windows this season feature rosy-cheeked “snowflake people” with giddy expressions and lots of pink. Barney’s has an Andy Warhol theme. Bergdorf’s has typically stylized, stylish, and sophisticated windows comprising, in ravishing tableaux with moving figures by the sculptor Alexandra Limpert. The windows present themes such as “Harmonize,” “Enlighten,” and “Recollect,” a self-help litany for enjoying the holidays in New York.