Shopping

With New York's emergence as a national commercial center, the buying and selling of goods became central to the everyday life of the city. People came from all over the country to shop at elegant department stores clustered along the Ladies' Mile on Sixth Avenue between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, while working-class neighborhoods offered lower-priced stores and traditional open street markets. When R. H. Macy's department store moved to Herald Square at Thirty-fourth Street in 1902 to take advantage of emerging rail and subway lines, customers complained that it was too far uptown. But other stores followed, and Herald Square became the center of New York shopping. The new Macy's was the largest store in the world; another, the Siegel-Cooper Company, advertised that it was "a city in itself." Throughout the city New Yorkers had the opportunity to buy, sell, or just look. The introduction of plate-glass windows for the display of merchandise replaced the traditional interaction of customer and merchant. Window-shopping, a new form of recreation, emerged, with implications for both how goods were advertised and the way of life of clerks and shop girls. The shop girls that fascinated Sloan also attracted the interest of the popular media. Magazine stories, newspaper accounts, and melodramas like Only a Shop Girl raised questions about the social status and moral integrity of young working women, while supervisors argued that well-trained shop girls made better wives. The scene is an excavation site for the new Macy Building at the corner of Broadway and 34th Street, New York. Filmed by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1902. This, and other movies, is available by searching the Library of Congress archives. Vivo video (:13)