CULTURE
Marshall Field's:
The Gray Lady Bows Out
By Dave Jones
It just isn’t the same since…
Since when?
Since when was it that we all seem to say "it just isn’t the same”?
I went walking around the State Street Marshall Field’s store before it closed wondering about that.
Actually, considering the condition that the State Street flagship store was in the day I walked through– nearly all of the famous green logos removed from the cases and walls, and seemingly half the first-floor exhibition space canvas-draped with the alien red-star Macy’s– it’s hard now to imagine the glory days of Chicago’s once-reigning shopping emporium.
But I remember them. Even in such a starkly spare and skeletal form, I remember this mercantile fantasy kingdom. I remember what a perennial treat it was to be bundled up on the El or in the family car to pay a visit to the Marshall Field's store on State Street.
But when did that memory die? When was it that those special, clockwork trips to Marshall Field’s became less regular, less delightful, less special?
Some people might point to the 1960's and the appearance of suburban shopping malls with their satellite versions of the downtown store. With Marshall Field's expansion into our suburban malls, there wasn’t the same need to head downtown to that mysterious citadel of commerce.
Occasionally, of course, it was necessary to visit downtown to see the real Santa Claus, or peruse the bridal galleries and wedding registries that were only kept there. But if all you needed was a new pair of shoes or socks, the mall did just fine.
Was it in the 1970's that department stores became un-hip? Their merchandise couldn’t compete with the cool new specialty shops, boutiques, and denim-for-all-occasions fashion shoppes that were sprouting up like weeds all over town.
My wife maintains the Marshall Field’s buyers never did find their way out of this conundrum of styles. The palette and marketing niches were just too confusing. The owners settled for middle-of-the-road, mediocre knock-offs of fabrics that weren’t all that beautiful in their original forms to begin with, and reaped the benefits (or losses).
The 1980s? This is when America discovered catalogs and toll-free telephone shopping. Value-shopping cognoscenti dragged more and more friends along on larkish treks to mini-mall discounters like TJ Maxx and Filene’s. (And who could even find the State Street Marshall Field’s store anyway -- with that goofy asphalt State Street Mall our city fathers erected to try to suburbanize” the shopping experience.)
The 1990's? It wasn’t only the stockbrokers among us who were beginning to learn new words like Amazon and eBay. What was left of brick-and-mortar shopping, as a beleaguered institution, seemed much more worried about superstores like Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Costco and Target rumbling on the suburban horizon.
Clearly, money was being made in retailing. But nobody knew how to make it out of Marshall Field's flagship store in Chicago.
Our beloved Marshall Field’s was in play, traded among the department store chains like just another brand. (Marshall Field himself, of course, had sold the original family brand to the highest bidder back in 1978. So he and the family could have cared less.)
It was somewhere in the 1990's that I first began to think that Marshall Field's just might never “be the same.”
I was looking for a wallet. Just a wallet, nothing especially fashionable or brand-conscious. But a wallet similar to the wallet I’d been carrying for several years and now worn out. The Men’s Department at Marshall Field’s downtown seemed like the perfect place to find such a simple, basic item.
As it happened, the clerk at the display counter allowed that he was working a department of the store with which he wasn’t all that familiar. He said he’d been working most recently in rings and tie tacks and cufflinks. And it certainly showed: His hands, splayed out impressively on the glass top of the display case, were a dazzling display of sparkling rings and flashy links. “Let’s see what we can do about finding you a wallet,” he said.
This we did -- he and I -- walking around and around the cases, with him showing me many different styles of wallet in all sizes, brands, types, kinds, and exotic material-content-fabrications (from rare lizard skins to indestructible artificial mesh-weaves). But none bore any resemblance to the old brown wallet I had shown him.
After 20 minutes on our frustrating quest for simplicity, we walked back over to the station at the counter where we first started our search. He spread his magnificently bejeweled fingers over the countertop and said,“I guess it’s possible they just aren’t making that kind of wallet anymore.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I peered through his fingers, trying to get a peek at the wallets on the shelf below his hands. “Could I see that one down there, please?” I asked him. Sure enough, when he lifted his hand, the wallet was a near-perfect new version of the old, beat-up model I was hoping to replace. “That’s it,” I said, “I’ll take it.”
I’m not sure if Marshall Field’s clerks of that era were working on commission, but this young man seemed more pleased to be rid of a problematic, time-consuming, low-margin paying customer than he was in solving a problem and making a sale.
“Well,” he said, smiling and handing me the trademark green paper sack with the wallet box inside, “you learn something new every day.”
This is not quite the “Give The Lady What She Wants” credo of the original Marshall Field's. As it is boldly imprinted on the store’s official seasonal Greeting Card, circa 1900, the store employees’ mission was to move heaven and earth to help a customer acquire the purchasable object of his or her dreams.
No stone unturned was the gist of the mission statement. By the late 1970s, after Marshall IV’s sale of the franchise, a customer might have to ask a clerk to move his stones to even get a chance to see the thing he wants to buy.
Walking around the scuffed, scratched white tile floors and badly worn maple-plank on the upper floors, I found it hard to think back to the“glorious” past.
The photos on the archive walls by the ghostly plain and empty Walnut Room depict a place where ruffled, ladies-in-waiting stand by to attend to the customer's each and every whim.
Jeeves-type gentlemen’s clerks stand at attention in a soldierly row across the hall, knowing what kind of wallet to recommend along with what monogram to embroider on it and the next order of pocket silks and handkerchiefs we will need.
Strangely enough, the Boom-Boom era of the 1950s is a fulcrum point for determining when Marshall Field’s started the long slow slide into “not what it used to be.”
When I think back to that pivotal era, and what the stores looked like in their busiest seasons – like enormous, bustling Frank Capra movie sets – I'm reminded of an elderly parent, once boisterous and grand and vital, now sitting out his or her days in a quiet corner of a nursing home. Like me and my memories.
I remember all of the day-to-day shopping I used to do at the old, now-abandoned Marshall Field’s outpost store in downtown Evanston in the 1950s and 60s. School clothes. Blue jeans. Personal furnishings. Room decorations. Picture framing. Housewares for holiday gift-giving. Fancy delicatessen foods and Frango mints… All manner of things needful and accessible, Field’s is where kids like me went to look for them first.
Because, as a matter of fact, in those days it seemed like we always would find those things there. This was in no small part thanks to the amazingly wise and helpful assistance of always-busy and all-knowing sales staff they employed.
As I remember them now, each and every clerk in the store was the archetype of somebody’s mother. The store was full of these women, all dressed up in woolly skirts or jumpers, with high-collared white blouses and bookish cardigan sweaters closed about the neck with tasteful pearls or brooches. They all had reading glasses perched on the ends of their noses . They all smelled wonderful, like they’d recently been taking their break near the perfume counters.
These definitive Marshall Field clerks, these handsome women were all of our moms, and they knew everything, and they could help us all find anything our ur sensible little allowance-bound hearts might desire. They knew what we were about, what we might be wanting and could likely afford to spend. And if there was any funny business going on with us around that store, they knew how to reach our own mothers and fathers at home as well. This Marshall Field’s was our training ground for entering the one great marketplace in life: the world of ethical commerce, and these women knew how to take us through our paces.
In the years since, our moms started taking better jobs, perhaps as lawyers or bankers or CEOs, and the clerks got younger and younger, and less worldly-wise.
Shopping at a department store became a lot more challenging than just asking somebody’s mother to help us find what we think we might need.
So, yes, it’s changed. “It isn’t what it used to be,” and neither are we.
Sitting at a table in the Walnut Room, just for a moment, resting, this one quiet moment in the Marshall Field’s State Street store felt a lot like sitting with a senescent parent in a nursing home. All the frills and fanfare of a life fully lived have been shipped out and taken away. We now have just those few heyday photographs and illustrations hanging on the wall nearby.
Bring on the famous, vortical marketing excitement of Macy’s, because whatever we have left here is aching with collected emptiness and quiet. That’s how sad Field’s feels today. Just like sitting in the nursing home, I have the guilty, passing thought that Macy’s can’t come soon enough.
