Elegy from the Department Store: How these once great department stores document our memories today

I I never thought that one of my favorite places to have lunch would be the men’s department at Nordstrom in Toronto. I don’t know how the American owners came up with the idea of ​​opening a chic cafe on the second floor of the Eaton Centre store, in close proximity to high-end men’s clothing, but it was a unique place for ladies to have lunch. There was a bar and booth seating, a friendly server, and good food and drink. When the conversation died down, you could turn your attention to the suits, sweaters, and swim trunks that surrounded you.

Usually, when I was eating fish tacos or burrata and tomatoes, I would say, “Nordstrom never got the memo that department stores were going out of business.” By that, I meant that we were in a store with wide aisles, knowledgeable staff, and carefully curated merchandise. It reminded me of the department stores of my childhood.

Obviously I was wrong about Nordstrom and the memo, at least in Canada. By the end June 2023, Nordstrom had closed all 13 of its Canadian stores. It wouldn’t have made much difference to the end result, but I regret not eating there more often.

Ironically, the department store, although full of life in its heyday, was born out of death. One of the little-known facts I discovered during write a book about grief One historical tradition is that department stores arose from the 19th-century belief that mourners needed to dress in black immediately after a death. In the 1840s, the Grande Maison de Noir in Paris’s most elegant quarter introduced something new under the sun: everything in one place for the bereaved, from hearses to black-bordered stationery. In London, so-called mourners’ warehouses followed, offering ready-to-wear black clothing and everything else mourners needed. It wasn’t long before non-mourners realized the advantage too: instead of going to one shop for an umbrella, another for gloves, another for boots, and a third for clothes, you could get everything conveniently under one roof. The department store was born.

And now, less than 200 years later, the sun is setting on these grand, permanent-looking buildings. In Canada alone, we’ve lost Eaton’s, Simpsons, Woodward’s and Morgan’s, among many others. Of their prominent counterparts, only The Bay, Holt Renfrew, Saks and Simon’s remain standing. The department store’s decline has most recently been attributed to the pandemic, and before that to the growth of online shopping and the financial squeeze department stores have experienced. the middle class. Since the recession of 2007, the declining purchasing power of the middle class has made discount chains like Winners more attractive thanPrice department stores.

But in their heyday, department stores were worlds unto themselves, vast commercial centers, bazaars and meeting places. Today, people shop online on their laptops and wear pajamas. When department stores were king, you had to look as presentable as possible while shopping because you were guaranteed to meet people you knew. Or people you might want to meet, as in the case of the 2015 film Carolwhere a beautifully dressed, wealthy woman in the 1950s begins a romance with a salesman in the toy department.

The opportunities for the department store staff were not just romantic. Bartocci’s, the New York store of the 1950s in Brooklynteaches his young Irish saleswoman some valuable lessons about the New World in the 2015 film. Not only is the shop elegant (mostly shot at Birks’ flagship store in Montreal), but it also shows the heroine the freedom that a big city and anonymity can offer. and the democracy of the capItalism. No matter what your budget or ethnicity, if you can afford the item of your choice, it’s yours. That was an important message for both the store’s customers and its employees.

For many women, department Shops had a lot to do with their Mothers. I remember mine hoisting me up onto the high stools in the pattern department. While she picked out patterns to sew, I leafed through the catalogs that were almost as tall as me and made up stories about the children and their mothers who showed off the finished dresses on their pages.

As I followed my mother from department to department, I learned how she shopped: always with her hands first, feeling the fabric before moving on, always starting with the clearance shelves. No one in my family ever understood why you look at the regular price shelves before looking at the sale shelves.

Beyond the goods, the shops were proud on its educational and artistic values. Woodward is in Vancouver, also famous for its huge food counter and $1.49 days, had a test kitchen that provided cooking tips and recipes to its customers. Sibley and Lyndsay & Curr in my hometown of Rochester, NY, opened shoppers’ eyes to the wider world by hosting “festivals” showcasing products from faraway places like India or Mexico. Sibley’s also held fashion shows in its top-floor restaurant. It was there that a teenage model and not very prominent member of the “teen Board” that I had my brief experience on the runway.

The most lucrative season was, of course, Christmas, and stores went out of their way to accommodate. I have a picture of myself, perhaps three years old, sitting on Santa’s lap at Sibley’s, putting my chubby hand on his as I told him what I hoped to find under the tree. Canadian stores rose to the occasion; Eaton’s even organized Toronto’s Christmas parade until the early 1980s. The stores’ most magical Christmas gifts were their Christmas windows. Designers and artists across Canada spent months designing and creating elaborate windows with moving figures, lights and music reminiscent of Renaissance Christmas, the Twelve Days of Christmas, fairy tales, ice skating parties and other winter themes. Eaton’s, which was notorious for closing its curtains on Sundays (until 1968) to ensure that no one could enjoy window shopping on the Sabbath, made no exception for its Christmas windows: they were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning. Nevertheless, the crowds were so great that in 1945 the city asked Eaton’s to shorten the opening hours of its Queen Street store because of the traffic it was hampering.

When it came to combining trade and culture, few places can compete with Eaton’s College Street Store, also in Toronto. The building’s 1930 Art Deco style, from the main entrance to the smallest fixtures, was an aesthetic delight. Inspired by Lady Flora McCrae Eaton, daughter-in-law of Timothy Eaton, the seventh floor housed a restaurant, the Round Room, a cafeteria and the 1,300-seat Eaton Auditorium. A 15-year-old pianist named Glenn Gould made his debut there in 1947.

In many ways, the department stores of my childhood reflected a certain cosmopolitanism, as well as the affluence and innocence of the ’50s. A family story involves an ad my parents read in the newspaper one morning over breakfast. B. Forman, Rochester’s fanciest department store, had just received a shipment of calfskin handbags in four styles for $6.95 from Italy. After my father left for work, my mother took me to Forman’s and picked out one of the styles, a pouchlike bag with a drawstring top. I can still remember the fleshy smell of the calfskin. The saleswomen at Forman’s had to wear black dresses, which made a big impression on me as a child. My mother gave the black-clad saleswoman her Charge-a-Plate, the forerunner of the credit card, and the saleswoman took it. She came back with a big smile and said, “Mrs. Ashenburg, I hope I’m not spoiling your lovely surprise, but your husband came in on his way to work and chose exactly the same model!” Neither she nor, apparently, my mother had any doubt that the handbag was for his wife and not someone else. We thanked the friendly saleswoman and left empty-handed. Fortunately, my father came home that day with the handbag in a Forman bag.

SHopping around makes you hungry, and when I asked people about their memories of department stores, several mentioned the treat at the end of a morning or afternoon of hunting and gathering. For one friend from Ottawa, it was lunch as a child at the long-defunct Murphy-Gamble’s. A cup of soup and four tasty tea sandwiches were served on a combination saucer/plate, and the presentation was as entertaining as the food. For a Vancouverite, it was Woodward’s famous strawberry Shortcake. For the people of Toronto, the ultimate treat was the legendary Arcadian Court Restaurant in Simpsons.

Rochester had a quartet of department stores close together at the main intersection of what we called “downtown.” McCurdy’s was far from our favorite, but my mother and I ended every shopping trip with a visit to the soda bar on on the first floor. We parked our Bags on the floor between the chairs and the counter and ordered their vanilla layer cake with whipped cream Rosettes and decorations. My mother drank coffee with it. I was convinced that there was no better cake in the world.

Which brings me back to eating at Nordstrom’s cafe. Like department stores in general, it was a place to see and be seen. As much as I’d like to, I can’t deny my complicity in Nordstrom’s failure. It’s a telling irony that my local Winners is housed in the posh former Eaton’s College Street space, and I buy far more things at Winners than I ever did at Nordstrom. Since everything is “on sale” at a discount store, I could excuse the family’s preference for clearance items. But I’m sorry it turned out this way.

I never would have believed that the cafe’s days were numbered when I took my 19-year-old granddaughter to the Nordstrom cafe on her last visit and she called it “very cool.” I’m glad she got to have that experience, but I wish she could have experienced these impressive but lovable institutions in their heyday.

A version of this article appeared in the April/May 2024 issue under the headline “Elegy from the Department Store,” p. 88.

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