Through the Children's Gate (30 page)

Some of the sequences were larksome and even obscene, and I worried that Luke would get the wrong impression. Other sequences had a more Joycean flow. Finnegans Terror Alert: “Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm, i got to wear my orange shoes again i like orange and yellow and pink and red its all a plot by saranwrap and duct tape mcm… we always shave duct tape… always.”

When the machine was set to take in whole sentences, I found, unsurprisingly, that the music of the world's mind was less monstrous than mundane. At the height of the terror alert, some remarks were crass (“if a womans breasts look like two oranges stuffed in a tubesock ill tell em”), others explanatory (“the plastic bags are to cover the windows incase of chemical or bio warfare”), still others darkly ironic (“damn if only the wtc used duct tape on the windows we wouldn't be in this mess”). Some people were eager for instruction (“they are saying the alert level is ‘High’ … is that orange, red, or purple??”), others eager to instruct (“I looked, duct tape and plastic sheeting don't have a product expiration date”). A few were truly panicky (“Does anyone know how to get duct tape glue off a dog??”).

No one, not even the machine or its makers, knew where any of this is coming from. The man with duct tape on his dog may be an anxious New Zealander or he may be the president of the United States. Even in moments of crisis, though, the music of the world's mind is remarkably constant: There is a steady bass line of lust (“I am naked, I like my naked butt”), a middle range of appetite (“I like smoked salmon”), and a high tremolo of keening anxiety.

The world, it seems, is ruled by sex and worry; mankind's two passions are to be safe and satisfied, at once upright and getting laid. Even when most of us are trembling on orange alert, someone somewhere
is trembling at the thought of sharing a chat room with a Swedish teenager unencumbered by shame or parents. When it started snowing again outside, the machine was snowing, too, as all that snow passed through all those millions of minds. Some people were indignant (“NE people are a bunch of pansies! Here in North Western Montana, we've been getting snow like that forever. You environmental pukes screwed up the East and now want to do the same out here. I think we need to put a pack of wolves in central park”), while others used the occasion to focus on the news that really counts (“I don't know, I would probably throw his butt out in the snow and take 60% of what he was worth. If you can't be honest and tell your spouse that you want out, then you deserve to have half of your possessions removed. You don't deserve to be murdered, but I suppose that is a risk you take when you make a fool out of your spouse”).

By the time I went back alone the following day, even the snow had passed out of the machine, along with all that orange, and the world was back to its usual muddle of fear (“When people refer to Israelis as Zionists …”) and appetite (“I am looking for a girl who wants …”) The false colors of the world are orange and yellow and red, the bright artificial colors of fear, the overstressed scarlet flush of the onset of Bitterosity. Leaving the Whitney for the slushy street outside, I felt that the inside of all of our heads had, for a moment at least, returned, like the city itself, to the world's true colors, gray and green.

T
he great department stores of New York now lie on the avenues like luxury liners becalmed in a lagoon, big ships in shallow water. All around them, the dhows and junks and speedboats of the new national retailing, Staples and Victoria's Secret and Banana Republic and the Gap, honk at them and insult their sisters and get in their way. (And the newcomers hunt in pairs, so that no Duane Reade appears without a Starbucks nearby, no Staples without a Victoria's Secret minding its rear, as though the urge to tickle your husband and the urge to buy discounted stationery goods, the urge to caffeine and the urge to Coricidin were twinned deep in the desire system of the brain.) Saks and Bergdorfs and Bloomingdale's, immense and slow, look down at them and try to continue on a stately course, but the water is ebbing from around their keels.

Our sense of this, our mental image of it, is real and grounded in what we read—just this summer, Lord & Taylor, whose New York store is the southernmost ship of the Fifth Avenue fleet, and which is owned by the May company, lost nearly four thousand employees and thirty-two sister stores and was sent back to dry dock to be remade, nothing left but its signature. “Lackluster upon lackluster” is how a Piper Jaffray analyst describes the department-store sector. The professional retail trade papers worry about the disappearance of the department store exactly as the theater people worry about Broadway. But the decline is also intuitive and grounded in what we feel about the city. As recently as the early nineties, when Bloomies almost fell and women wept, department stores still mattered; they mattered as talk
shows mattered then, as cable news matters now. One day we feel that something is big, and the next day we know that it is not. Without even looking at a receipt, we know somehow that the romance of the department store is fading, and we wonder what life will be like when it is gone.

Some of the department stores in town are in good shape—chiefly those that have been narrowly redefined as upscale clothing stores with small secondary lines in furniture and cosmetics. The seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman hums, the eighth floor of Saks sings, and there are few places that seem more entirely of Manhattan than Fred's at Barneys on a Saturday at noon. But we miss the big stores, because they defined a world, little duchies of commerce, with their faith in literal display: not the cunning and Duchampian show windows of a Simon Doonan but the things themselves shown as the things themselves, these shirts, these ties—the wooden escalators and crowded elevators, and the ghosts of elevator operators wearing small hats and announcing, “Notions.” (There is a beautiful, forgotten song in the old Johnny Mercer show
Top Banana,
sung in the elevator of a department store, listing the contents of the floors as though they were poem enough: “Third floor rat-traps and radios, cheesecloth, cupcakes and cameos / Fourth floor peanuts and piccolos / leftover ushers from Loews.”)

Lord & Taylor still gives one a sense of the department store as it once was, a last lingering resonance of the old dispensation. It is not a very distant world. The first floor of the store, at Thirty-eighth and Fifth, is laid out sweetly and expectantly, all mirrors and cosmetics; the salespeople in the Clinique department look serious in their white coats, as though actually about to attempt something cliniqual. There are no divisions, no urgency, no one spraying perfume—it is a ground floor seemingly arranged by the hand of God for displaying goods. There are striped men's ties placed like salmon fillets and men's shirts hanging like partridge. There are hats. The store plays the national anthem at ten o'clock every morning. On the sixth floor, the restaurateur Larry Forgione has opened a new café, complete with wine by the glass and a sweeping panoramic view of sturdy ladies’ coats. The chowder is tasty, the wine decent. But there is something about Forgione
himself—someone who has become a brand without ever quite having been a name—that extends the sense of a time warp, another era of hope. The old Lord & Taylor implies a rhythm of time, of women's time, in particular, a pace not slowed but purposeful and expansive: It takes a morning and lunch, or tea and an afternoon, to make a survey of the place, shopping as a setting out rather than a dropping in.

At last, up on the tenth floor, in the men's department, one can find an awe-inspiring demonstration of the sheer numbing stasis that capitalism can achieve—for it is insensitivity to the immediate pressure of the market that separates big-ticket capitalism from the rug bazaar and the vegetable stall. Capital slows down the market and places it within the shell of The Firm, firm in every sense, so that things can linger after their appeal to the market has passed. The brand names are Jack Victor and Grant Thomas, name brands that are neither really names nor really brands, and seem to set off the commercial logic of brand-naming in a twilight zone of pure performance: No one wants to wear Jack Victor slacks, but there they are, hanging in poignant rows, their creases abjectly offered. It is a kind of installation piece: the department store as an abstract exercise in naming and branding and display, without commercial urgency and, mostly, without customers.

T
o understand the department store's decline, you have to go back to the department store's founding, according to Richard S. Tedlow, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a lot on retailing. “The department store began in an era of a hub-and-spoke transportation system for cities, before the automobile,” Tedlow says. “In Chicago, for instance, the large downtown department store, Marshall Field's, became in and of itself The Brand. And for a store like that in, say, 1870 or 1880, the competition was basically mom-and-pop shops. Department stores were a new mode of retailing. They became destinations—they became places where you shopped not solely for procurement but for entertainment.”

At the same time, Tedlow explains, the nature of the transaction
changed. Before that, shopping was still done by barter, with each party expecting to be cheated. Department stores had fixed prices. The phrase “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back” was radical, introducing a new kind of merchandising. As Tedlow says, “The department stores were one of America's first commercial institutions of trust. They worked to take your mind off price.”

For over half a century, in New York particularly, department stores presided over everything from Thanksgiving Day parades and patriotic lectures to Cubist exhibitions. John Wanamaker was one of the greatest merchants in America, and his store at Astor Place and Broadway, which had an entrance hall and an art gallery and was said to have more windows than the Empire State Building, was the model and master of the department store as a civic-seeming institution.

Historians of retail will tell you that it was Wanamaker, more than anyone else, who transformed the department store from a place where women bought stuff to a place where they simply and necessarily went, the way people had once wandered into and out of church. With the usual acceleration of New York retailing, the zone of the stores moved uptown with astonishing speed: The cast-iron Ladies’ Mile of department stores, between Eighth and Twenty-third streets and between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, reigned for a generation before it was replaced by Fifth Avenue farther uptown. But the continuity of purpose, and even of names, was there.

Tedlow dates the beginning of the decline to the period just after World War II, when what seemed at first to be a great gift to the growth of the department store—the mall—first appeared, in places like Minneapolis and Kansas City. The spatial arrangement of the department store within the mall, he thinks, helped spell its doom. “Malls depended on being anchored by two department stores, one at either end,” he says. “What's in between those two stores? Small stuff at first. But eventually, there's a Gap, a Limited, a Banana Republic. By going out to the malls and anchoring them, these department stores created traffic for a great many specialty stores that otherwise would have had a hard time creating any demand—essentially because they couldn't afford the advertising, which is a necessary cost of doing business in a department store. The boutique businesses could attack
the department store from the safety of the shadow of the department store. What has replaced the department store is the mall itself, which now plays the role of amusement place and social center.”

Another revolution in retailing began with sharp competition in price, making Wal-Mart by far the biggest retailer in the country. Then came the heavily advertised national boutique brand, bringing a Victoria's Secret and a Gap to every mall. The department stores fought back by attempting to re-create the mall environment of boutiques within each store. But, by bringing in the boutique, by building the idea of the brand, they created an appetite for true brands. A Bloomingdale 's filled with boutiques is not so much a brand of its own as a street filled with boutiques—which, sooner or later, it comes to resemble.

In other cities, the department store died from under nourishment, from white flight and the death of the inner city. The great Philadelphia Wanamaker's sickened and shrank until it lost, at last, everything but its eagle; it stays on as a minor satrapy of the May empire, ironically rebranded as a Lord & Taylor. In New York, though the physical infrastructure was changing all the time (by the sixties Wanamaker's was merely a memory attached to a mixed-use block), the cultural infrastructure held on. For a period that some now think was a historical bubble, the old patterns of retailing persisted, partly because zoning codes made it hard for the large discount stores to get in, and partly because it was difficult to break down New York shopping habits. When the new retailers arrived, they did on the streets what they had done in the mall. The precincts of New York retailing, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Soho, became, as many people noted, mall-like themselves, with a predictable range of national boutiques and a predictable effect on the department stores, which continued to “make” the neighborhoods and continued to lose market share. (You have to look at Ninth Avenue from Fifty-seventh to Thirty-fourth, or Lexington from Sixty-eighth on up to Ninety-sixth, in order to see what the old environment was like, distinctive and one-off, puppy stores on the first floor, dance studios above, and stores that specialized in Sea-Monkeys neighboring stores that specialized in reggae recordings or kosher pastry.)

Closing a circle begun a century before, the cast-iron palaces of the old Ladies’ Mile became home to Bed Bath & Beyonds and Old Navys and giant Barnes & Nobles. The new retailing had arrived, until at last, just a few years ago, a Kmart showed up on Astor Place, occupying space, with an irony harder than iron, in the original Wana-maker's. It is a grim place to visit, with its fluorescent glare, its vast area marked but undivided, as though made for surveillance, its anti-theatrical insistences: The stuff is here, and the stuff is as cheap as we can make it, or so these orchestrations suggest. The choice is now between Kmart and Prada, and the institutions that joined them together are finished. We've gone from shopping through trust to a culture of discounting and edge, and edge is the one thing that seems to baffle the department store.