Author and historian Leslie Goddard’s fascination with department stores runs in the family. Her grandfather was a department store lifer, working first for Marshall Field’s then Carson Pirie Scott. Her stepmother and father-in-law both worked at Montgomery Ward. For her Bohemian immigrant grandmother, it was The Fair or bust, the thrifty retailer whose storefront at Adams and State was taken over by Montgomery Ward in 1957.
Goddard already had plenty of personal experience to draw upon for her 2022 book, “Lost Chicagoland Department Stores.” Now, the Elmhurst History Museum is displaying an exhibition based on her book — up just in time for the holidays.
“People had a real identity with these stores. They were a huge part of people’s lives,” Goddard says.
The Elmhurst exhibition is modest, taking well under an hour for visitors to zip through. But the objects on display will delight nostalgists: credit cards from Montgomery Ward, old Sears catalogs and an animatronic Marshall Field’s Christmas window from 2004, depicting a scene from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” There’s even a sniffable Frango mint display.
Exhibits curator Sarah Cox says the Elmhurst History Museum was able to build “Lost Chicagoland Department Stores” entirely from its own collection and Goddard’s, who had also amassed collectibles and other artifacts during her book research. She finds it remarkable, and telling, that so many museum donors hung onto their department store ephemera.
“We had so much that I really only got a loan from Macy’s of the animatronic figurines and the ornaments from the old Walnut Room (Christmas trees),” Cox says.
The all-in-one business model of department stores was preceded by mail-order catalogs, which dominated the market at the end of the 19th century. Mail-order companies could fulfill orders and ship them within days to urban and rural customers alike, much to the chagrin of mom-and-pop country stores. Chicago, at the nexus of the country’s rail lines, was an obvious home base for those retailers. Aaron Montgomery Ward issued his first mail-order catalog in 1872; Richard Sears followed him in 1893.
Chicago was well-poised to become a department store capital for the same reason. When the Great Chicago Fire struck in 1871, the city’s rebuilding boom paved the way for the grand State Street department stores. The Fair was the first to open, in 1873. No less an architectural eminence than Daniel Burnham designed Marshall Field’s, with its now-iconic grand granite pillars, massive clocks and Tiffany glass mosaic ceiling. Louis Sullivan was likewise commissioned to design the Schlesinger & Meyer building at Madison and State, immediately recognizable by its intricate cast-iron entryway; it was later taken over by Carson Pirie Scott in 1904.
“In no other city has the department store gained the same hold on the people as it has in Chicago,” declared The Arena magazine in 1897. “The Chicago department stores are larger, more numerous, and transact more business than do those of any of the eastern cities.”
Though Chicago’s many department stores certainly vied for customer attention, in the prosperous inter- and postwar years, State Street was able to support them all. The tycoons at their heads became the city’s richest men; their philanthropy, in turn, shaped the cityscape in ways hard to imagine today. In a video included in the installation, Marshall Field V compares his namesake to a fin de siecle Jeff Bezos, when really, he looks like Ebenezer Scrooge in comparison.
The stores’ mutual windfall was helped, in part, by self-selecting customer bases. Marshall Field’s exuded luxury, with its palatial flagship store and pampering customer service; “give the lady what she wants” — Field’s variation on “the customer is always right” — became an internal motto. Meanwhile, Goldblatt Bros., between Jackson and Van Buren, angled for working-class shoppers. Carson Pirie Scott fell somewhere between them, mimicking the attentive customer service and expansion strategies of Marshall Field’s but without its claims to decadence. An early ad for Carson’s, printed shortly after it settled into its home at Madison and State, self-identified it as a “Store of Compactness, Convenience, Comfort and Good Merchandise.”
The Elmhurst History Museum’s exhibition duly explores the way department store shoppers fell down along class lines. But race — unexamined in the exhibition — was just as crucial a factor. Goddard’s book acknowledges Marshall Field’s history of hiring discrimination and mistreatment of Black shoppers during its heyday. In 1952, the company defended its exclusionary hiring practices to Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, writing that Black salespeople would “negatively affect the character, atmosphere and flavor” of the store. The commission ruled against the company, but Traci Parker, author of the 2019 book “Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement,” found that over the next two decades, Black employees at Field’s were still underrepresented among its workforce. What’s more, Black Field’s employees tended to work non-sales floor — ergo, less visible — roles at the store. Carson’s, by comparison, led the State Street department stores in integrating its staff and early on opened locations in shopping districts frequented by Black shoppers.
The exhibition does attempt a brief, birds-eye view of the department store’s demise. Postwar prosperity petered out; the wealth gap yawned and yawned. Bargain retailers gave the department store a run for its money. The exhibition posits shopping malls as their successor; even that feels quaint, now that the American mall is also an endangered species.
State Street, of course, is still bustling, but department stores are no longer its anchors. Now the internet is a consumer’s one-stop-shop — a boomerang back to the mail-order companies of yore. Of the stores from State Street’s golden age, only Macy’s, in the former Marshall Field’s, remains a department store. The building which housed The Fair and Montgomery Ward was demolished in the 1980s, and the former Sears and Goldblatt’s buildings were both sold off to Robert Morris and DePaul universities, respectively, in the ’90s. And to teens and college students in the Loop, the ironclad former Carson’s is better known as — yes, really — “Goth Target.”
Goddard’s niece, Gen Z herself, is too young to remember when Macy’s was Marshall Field’s. But when Goddard asked her about her favorite holiday memory, her reply was immediate: eating under the Great Tree in the Walnut Room.
“That’s an amazing thing, given that I’ve also spoken to women in their eighties who would say the same thing,” Goddard says. “So many people did that over so many decades and are still doing it to this day.”
“Lost Chicagoland Department Stores” runs through Jan. 28, 2024, at the Elmhurst History Museum, 120 E. Park Ave., Elmhurst; open Sun., Tues.-Fri. 1-5 p.m. and Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; admission free; www.elmhursthistory.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
