For a century, department stores — real department stores, the ones built by local families, that dominated city centers and could take up entire blocks — ruled downtowns the way they ruled the holiday season. They felt like part of a city’s infrastructure, as much a part of the urban fabric as the parks and the libraries.
Shopping hasn’t vanished from American life, of course, and smaller-scale department stores still exist, mainly inside malls. But there was something about the downtown department store that can’t be captured at a mall, let alone a website. It functioned as a crossroads of urban life, a quasi-public space that blurred class divisions and proudly saw itself as part of the city around it. The downtown department store strove to be a civic institution as grand and as original as an art museum or public library — an ambition hard to detect in their latter-day descendants at the malls or the chain discount stores that now drive holiday retailing.
Behind all those columns and marble counters, though, department stores were always more fragile than they looked. “Even in the best of times it was all the industry could do to hold its own,” said Richard Longstreth, a historian at George Washington University, who traced the rise of the great American department stores in an appropriately lavish book, “The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960.”
Today, as older Bostonians still think back to the Enchanted Village in Jordan Marsh, the surviving department stores keep a hand in holiday celebrations: Macy’s, whose parent company bought Jordan Marsh and closed Filene’s, has its name on the “enchanted trolley” that Mayor Thomas M. Menino rides through Boston to attend tree-lightings. In the eyes of Longstreth and other historians, it’s only appropriate that we connect Christmas and department stores so closely: Even in their heyday, it turns out, they needed the holidays as much as the holidays needed them.
