Sweet memories

A copy of the book Remembering Marshall Field's just came into my possession. It's from the ubiquitous Images of America series, published by Arcadia Publishing and written by Leslie Goddard. Like all the books in this series, there's no body of text to speak of; words illustrate the photographs, not the other way around. That aside, the photographs are terrific, and even though most of them were taken before I was born (hard to believe), they made my life flash before my eyes.

Nostalgia is a double edged sword; handled correctly it can help us reflect upon our lives, remembering especially the happy times of our past and keeping alive the people and places that made us who we are. On the other hand, if we fall under it's grip, nostalgia can stick us into the past and not let us out. Sometimes the more past we accumulate, the more we want to stay there.

Field's at Christmastime, c. 1977

I wrote that last paragraph much for my own benefit as I don't want to believe the past is actually a better place to be than the present. But looking at the pictures in this book make it really difficult.

In case you don't know, Marshall Field's was a department store whose flagship occupied an entire city block right in the heart of Chicago bounded by State Street on the west, Randolph and Washington Streets on the north and south, and Wabash Avenue on the east. Business was so successful that the company built an annex building to the south to house a store devoted exclusively to men. That men's store alone by today's standards would be considered enormous but back in the day, it paled in comparison to the big store across the street. Even though State Street at one time was the home to at least a dozen big department stores all of them with Chicago roots, Field's was the grandaddy of them all. It alone captured the heart and minds of visitors to this city, as such it was an indelible symbol of Chicago. Marshall Field's was to Chicago what Higby's was to Cleveland, Dayton's was to Minneapolis, Wanamaker's was to Philadelphia, Filene's was to Boston, and Macy's was to New York - only much more so.

Those names are only memories now, save for Macy's, which today exists in name alone. The economics of the retail business have changed drastically over the past century, and department stores, at least the great downtown ones, are dinosaurs struggling to survive in the days of strip malls, big box stores and the internet. The few that survive are either very high end stores like Nieman-Marcus and Bloomingdales, or have been absorbed (like Field's) by huge corporations of which there are about three in this country. But even these are struggling big time and in a way it's a small miracle that there are any department stores left. Reluctantly I say that Marshall Fields as a mere shadow of its former self as a Macy's store, is better than having nothing at all.

The other day my mother, wife, children and I found ourselves inside the great State Street store formerly known as Field's, (most life-long Chicagoans still refuse to call the place by the "M" name). My mom reminded me of our days together when I was a child, and Saturdays meant going to the Loop, lunching at any one of the number of eateries all gone now, and ending up at Marshall Field's. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent accompanying her while she did her Saturday stopping, I'd be a rich man today. But my reward would always be a trip to the fourth floor where they had the toy store. It's hard to imagine these days how magnificent that place once was. Half of the entire fourth floor, that is, one half of an entire city block, was devoted exclusively to toys. It was not a toy warehouse like a Toys 'R Us, but a place that was put together with as much creativity and care as the rest of the store which was dedicated to adults. The book has several photographs of that very special place from my childhood, but it also has something even more special. There is a reproduction of a little block print found perhaps in an early catalog (the book doesn't say), which spells out what could be the mission statement of the store's toy department, founded in 1912. It reads:

Toys do for children what literature and art do for their elders-supply the mind with images and develop breadth and activity of thought.

Imagine finding that written at your local WalMart or Target. You certainly won't find it at Macy's/Field's stores anymore which (with the exception of a brief, failed appearance of FAO Schwartz), stopped selling toys on a large scale decades ago.

If Marshall Field's put that much effort into the selling of toys back then, imagine what the rest of the store was like. Old Marshall Field himself coined the motto of his establishment when he told his staff to: "give the lady what she wants." My mother who considers herself an expert on such things, talks about the old store's commitment of service to their customers. "Service keeps getting worse and worse these days" she says, but I always remember her complaining about how the service used to be better; in fact I recall her saying that forty years ago.

Yes, life was always better in the good old days, they even felt that way back in the good old days. Looking at all the wonderful pictures of the Marshall Field's store of bygone days with a critical eye, one begins to notice a few unsettling things. In very few of the pictures, and none of them made before the seventies will you find a person of color, not the customers, nor the staff. With its Gilded Age opulence and style, Marshall Field's reflected its time; it was a place exclusively for upper middle class white people, or in our case, people who strove to become that.

Realistically of course, the good old days weren't all that good. Two World Wars, a Great Depression, the lack of equal rights not only for minorities but for women, were facts of the past we wouldn't particularly choose to re-live. Not to mention polio, smallpox, TB, and other horrible diseases that had yet to be eradicated, and scores of other facts of life that we no longer have to deal with. Even during the "golden years" of my childhood, the Vietnam War, race riots, the disintegration of American cities and the crumbling of other worthwhile institutions, are all things few of us want to revisit.

That's the thing about the past, it's certainly a nice place to visit, but none of us should want to live there. That's not to say we can't learn from the past, especially from the things they did better back then. I have a cousin who comes from the marketing world. When I expressed my objection about the parent company of Macy's converting Marshall Field's into another Macy's, he assured me it was a prudent business decision. It's important he said, that they shore up their corporate image, including replacing the traditional Field's green with Macy's red. It was all a matter of looking at the big picture he said.

I'm not convinced. These are things stockholders like to hear. While they may be pleased, I'm not sure the customers are. For years Marshall Field's took measures to insure their success by nurturing their customer base by providing the best possible service. The care they extended even to the toy section was not frivolous, they were catering to their future customers. It worked well for generations, and it worked for me. Until the store became a Macy's, I was a regular customer of Marshall Field's. Today I can't say I no longer set foot in the place, I go there mostly these days to use the bathroom. But I can't for the life of me remember the last time I actually bought something at Macy's.

I don't think I'm alone.

The new face of State Street

In lavishing praise upon the big box chain Target for their plan to open a store in Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, the former Carson Pirie Scott Building on State Street, Mayor Daley in his typical "there you have it" fashion said this:

"State Street's not just State Street,....It's Michigan Avenue, it's Wabash, it's Dearborn, it's Wacker, it's Clark, it's Roosevelt Road. It's all of it. It's not -- it has to be more than just one street, and that's what it is. I mean, everything's connected."

Now I'm not entirely sure exactly what he was getting at, but one point I'm able to gather is that he feels State Street is no longer the State Street it once was.

The Huffington Post in their story about the new Target posted an on-line poll asking their readers the following:

How do you feel about Target moving in?

Great! More convenience, low prices, what could be wrong?

Terrible. Another giant corporation draining the character from our city.

I didn't vote because I could have easily chosen both options.

Those of us long time Chicagoans still think of State Street as special, the heart and center of our city, the street of (among other things) grand department stores, perhaps the greatest concentration of them anywhere in the world. We once proudly boasted that the intersection of State and Madison Streets, the location of the Carson's Building, was the busiest intersection in the world. Back in the day, State Street was definitely NOT Roosevelt Road, Wacker Drive, Michigan Avenue, or any other street in Chicago or anywhere else. State Street was State Street, period.

As for the building, it was the pinnacle of the career of Louis Sullivan. It was also The Master's swan song as never again would he see a commission as grand as this. Two magnificent curtain walls flanking a beautiful rounded bay and a highly ornate but not over the top arcade express all that Sullivan and the Chicago School of Architecture stood for. It is arguably the greatest building in Chicago.

Target on the other hand, is the epitome of automobile culture, of one stop, no frills, in and especially out convenience shopping. It symbolizes the suburban shopping strip, the vast wasteland located in Anywhere, USA. And it symbolizes a culture that cares only about corporate image and the bottom line, little if any at all for local history or culture.

I should know. Hardly a week goes by when I am not to be found at the local Target. As for the experience of shopping there, well I'll just say I simply cannot afford to pay for a pleasant shopping experience, so I shop at Target. In other words, I'm just as much to blame for this sad state of affairs as anybody else.

We have to face the fact that the State Street of our childhood is gone and is not coming back because the era of the department store is also history. Like me, most people love to wander around them and reminisce about the great department stores, but they prefer to spend their hard earned cash in the places where it goes the farthest. Volume is the name of the game and the big boxers have turned low overhead, sophisticated distribution models, and marketing into an art form. No company without their vast resources can possibly compete with them.

Which is precisely why I'll be buying my milk, toothpaste and paper towels at the new Target on State Street when it opens sometime next year. It will be convenient for me as it is smack dab between work and the train. I won't have to drive to the one in our neighborhood so often.

The building, now officially called the Sullivan Building, has undergone a massive restoration which began in 2006, ironically the same year that Carson's (as it is known in Chicago) announced it was leaving. Most noticeable is the reconstruction of the original cornice, the collumnade and the facade of the top floor. Save for one temporarily boarded up window, never in my life, and probably not since it was built at the turn of the last century, has the building looked so good. It has also been empty for the past five years. As we saw in the case of Block 37 a couple of blocks away, the city believes that something, anything in fact is better than vacant space in the heart of the Loop. Having spent some time in the new behemoth development (I can't bring myself to call it a building) that occupies the entire Block 37, I would have to say, well, maybe something could be said for nothing.

That's not to say I think that the Sullivan Building should remain vacant, not in the least. I think that if designed properly, the new store that the company in a departure from their traditional business model is billing as an "urban Target", will be a welcome addition to the Loop. These days after all, the Loop is a heavily residential neighborhood. I've often asked myself: "where do all those people shop?"

That said, while it will serve those of us who are already there, it's hard to imagine that a Target store would be a big draw to bring people into the Loop. Ideally I think it would have been better to have something a little more special, a destination, say like what Marshall Field's used to be. On the other hand it could have been much worse, it could have been a Walmart.

My biggest fear like everyone's, is that in their zeal for corporate identity, the Target folks will destroy the character of the building. Goodness knows the company has splattered their unavoidable logo everywhere possible, as Edward Lifson pointed out a few years ago on his blog. One only needs to look two blocks to the north to see what happened to the aforementioned late, great Marshall Field's store. While the company that bought it (ironically from the Target company), had the sense to leave the Field nameplates in front of the building, they have done everything possible in the name of corporate identity to destroy the character of the old Chicago institution by removing practically every vestige of the Field's legacy.

Now it's true that as a department store, Carson's was no Field's, neither as a store nor as an icon. Frankly I don't know many people who even miss it. It's also true that Sullivan designed the building to be a retail store, not an art museum, a school or anything else. It is entirely appropriate that it should continue to function as such. But the building is special and I would urge the brass at Target and their designers to downplay their "image" as much as possible, and let the design of the great building take center stage. They now have in their possession of one of our city's crown jewels, let's hope they don't mess it up.