My grandmother had two great loves: my grandfather and the department store Lord & Taylor.
Every time we passed the retail palace — either in Midtown Manhattan or on Long Island, where she lived — she would blow a kiss in its direction. “Mi amor!” she’d proclaim when someone uttered its name. She shopped there, ate there (delicate tea sandwiches and tart, creamy frozen yogurt) and socialized there. She may have preferred the bathrooms at Bergdorf’s, the designer duds at Bloomie’s, but Lord & Taylor was her place.
“If I could have married a store, I would have married Lord & Taylor,” she would tell me in her native Spanish. I’d laugh and tell her she was “loca.”
My grandmother’s ardor may have been extreme, but I understand it better after reading Julie Satow’s new book, “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion” (Double Day, out Tuesday).
As Satow tells it, the 20th-century department store — whether in New York City, San Francisco or Main Street USA — offered American women more than shopping. It was a safe haven, a playground and even a place of empowerment: a ladies’ paradise where women could congregate, experiment, and even earn a living away from men.
“These establishments were truly female-centric worlds,” Satow writes, “where women were freed from many of the societal constraints they faced outside the store.”
Satow mentions many women in her incisive history, including mannequin maker Adel Rootstein and African-American bank owner Maggie Walker.
But she focuses on three main trailblazers: Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel.
Hortense Odlum never wanted a career in business. She was happy as a wife and mother to two boys, living in quiet Forest Hills, Queens.
But in 1933, at the beginning of the Great Depression, her husband acquired the declining department store Bonwit Teller and he asked his wife to improve it. (Mr. Odlum was also having an affair, and needed his wife distracted.)
A year later, Hortense was running the place. She had increased sales figures 27%, and in her second year she doubled them. In 1938, she racked up $9.5 million in sales (or $197 million today) — breaking the store’s record.
Hortense turned Bonwit Teller into more than a store, but a brand. She commissioned a female employee to pen a novel about a shy shopgirl turned glamorous Bonwit Teller buyer.
“Polly Tucker: Merchant” arrived in 1937, along with a Polly Tucker clothing line “for the young career girl” and a Polly Tucker scholarship for employees to take night college courses in any subject of their choosing. (One recipient, a bellhop, used the funds to go to Columbia Business School — and ended up president of Bergdorf’s.)
While Hortense revived Bonwit Teller, a young go-getter named Dorothy Shaver was making a name for herself 20 blocks south at Lord & Taylor, turning it into a haven of deco design and American style.
She championed homegrown talent during World War II, when most department stores were still hawking copies of Paris originals.
Shaver — chic in all black and always clutching a cigarette — launched the careers of such pioneering female designers such as Elizabeth Hawes, Claire McCardell and Clare Potter, who prioritized sportswear, clothes that their customers could work, play and live their large lives in. (She also installed a toy room where moms could drop off their children while they shopped.)
Shaver also fought to elevate fashion into the realm of art, showcasing clothes alongside avant-garde painting and sculpture. Forget Anna Wintour, it was Shaver who orchestrated the merging of the then-scrappy Costume Institute with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Then in the 1960s, a 32-year-old Glamour editor namedGeraldine Stutz took over the sleepy Henri Bendel, which would influence retail for decades.
Bendel’s peddled not only fashion, but treasures from far-flung locales such as Burma and Japan. It also had a hair salon — where Stutz often held staff meetings while getting a pedicure —and a pilates studio. Her well-heeled clientele could stay there all day, and they would.
Of course, while these stores did offer women countless opportunities, they weren’t exactly bastions of feminism — or inclusivity. Stutz famously would not stock anything larger than a current size 6.
Bonwit Teller, meanwhile, held “Tonic Sessions,” where customers could pay to attend talks by the store’s employees, with titles like “how to dress to please husbands” and “how to slim down a size.” One year, the event included a contest to find “America’s ugliest girl”; the winner got a trip to New York City, a new wardrobe, a consultation with a dietitian and even — welp — a nose job.
Still, it’s hard not to feel a tinge of nostalgia for the days when stores treated their customers like royalty and their employees with respect.
Eventually, malls, discount chains and finally the Internet would kill off all but a few of America’s grand department stores — including in New York.
Bonwit Teller was destroyed to build Trump Tower, while Victoria’s Secret’s Les Wexner bought Henri Bendel and transformed it into a cheap, tawdry simulacrum of itself before it shuttered in 2019.
And Lord & Taylor, the apple of my grandmother’s eye, closed all its physical locations in 2019. Its once fabulous flagship is now a WeWork.
