Annie's Diary 1906 August 14th

August 14 – Thursday

We spent the morning and most of the afternoon in visiting the big stores of New York - O’Neil, Adams, Siegel and Cooper, etc. Our first trip on an escalator was made in Siegel and Cooper’s store. After riding on it from the ground floor to the top, we were ready to try something else.

After dinner Cousin Nelson and I took a long stroll out Riverside Drive and then walked around by Grant’s tomb and Columbia College.

Historical Notes:

Siegel-Cooper & Company Dry Goods Store: A late addition to Ladies' Mile, this eclectic Beaux Arts store was built by a European trained firm for the entrepreneurs Henry Siegel and Frank Cooper. Siegel came from Chicago, where his attitudes towards marketing and retail had been shaped by his encounter with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition which inspired him to use monumental architectural expression to attract customers to his store. Composed of a steel frame clad in many rich materials (marble, yellow brick, terra-cotta, bronze and copper) the block-long six-story building had architectural details that recalled the grandeur of ancient Rome. Viewers riding in the El would be privy to a highly ornamented row of second floor shop windows, which surmount the broad shop windows of the ground floor and its monumental triple-arched entrance.

The store was prepared for 190,000 visitors a day, and employed 8,000 clerks and 1,000 drivers and packers. In addition to the usual vast array of merchandise of department stores then and now, Siegel Cooper had a telegraph office, a long-distance telephone office, a foreign-money exchange, stock-trading services, a dentist, and an advertising agency. This grand department store was the first on Ladies' Mile to boast free samples and demonstrations, air conditioning and an extensive range of merchandise under one roof. In the center of the lobby was a circular fountain where jets of water cascaded over concealed multicolored lights into a marble and brass statue of The Republic, a copy of one Daniel Chester French had designed for the Chicago Fair. "Meet me at the fountain" soon became the saying all over New York. Advertising played a major role in attracting customers, who were drawn from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey by the promise of such things as colored ostrich plumes at 19 cents.