Bed bath and beyond nyc windows#

The amazing thing about The Big Store is that it only dazzled New York a short time. So great was the jam inside the store that few of the visitors saw anything, except the general details of the vast floors, beautiful floral trophies sent by friends and mercantile houses to the heads of departments, the word вЂWelcomeвЂ™ blazing in electric lights over the main aisle of the ground floor.вЂќ вЂњWhen they had satisfied their curiosity, they found that 20,000 persons had joined them, and that they were hemmed in.

вЂњThe crowds around the store half an hour before the opening time, 7:30 oвЂ™clock, numbered probably 5,000 men, women, boys, and girls, and they were for a little while interested in the unveiling of the show windows,вЂќ wrote the New York Times a day later, on September 13, 1896. Opening day, as you can imagine, was a madhouse. But this was the Gilded Age, and ostentatious displays still appealed to consumers. New York in 1896 was just three years out of the Panic of 1893, which crippled the economy.

Shoppers could get off the train and walk into a second-floor entrance, without having to descend to the gritty street shadowed by train tracks. Siegel-Cooper even had its own exit on the 18th Street stop of the Sixth Avenue El. The tower over the marble-columned entrance bathed Sixth Avenue in electric light, and the basement had its own power station. Steel-framed Siegel-Cooper was quite technologically advanced for its day. вЂњThe quintessential New York experience was to buy a five-cent ice-cream soda and sit beside the fountain, taking in the pageantry of fashionably attired women making their shopping rounds,вЂќ wrote Francis Morrone in Architectural Guidebook to New York City. Women were the buyers for their families, after all, and the stores and restaurants of Ladies Mile were acceptable places for them to go when they were not in the company of men. The fountain in the center of the store gave rise to the phrase вЂњmeet me at the fountainвЂќ-which New York ladies did, in droves. More than 120 departments run by 3,000 employees offered everything from ladiesвЂ™ fashions to a grocery store, dentistвЂ™s office, a pets department, several restaurants, and a bicycles department (this was the 1890s, after all, and wheelmen and wheelwomen had taken over the city). Nicknamed вЂњThe Big StoreвЂќ for, well, obvious reasons, Siegel-Cooper boasted 15 and a half acres of selling space inside a Beaux-Arts building on Sixth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets.

Bed bath and beyond nyc windows#

You could say that Gilded Age New York perfected the idea of the department store-a multi-floor, massive commercial space designed to dazzle consumers with sumptuous windows and fashionable displays and put the latest must-have goods within reach of the growing middle-class.Д«ut even New Yorkers who shopped (or at least window-shopped) emporiums like Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, and MacyвЂ™s along Ladies Mile were blown away by the cityвЂ™s first Siegel-Cooper store, which opened in September 1896.