Macy's announcement a belated nod to the fall of downtown shopping

ST. LOUIS • In September 1922, Famous-Barr proudly opened a new two-story parking garage on Seventh Street, near its bustling department store. It cost $200,000 to build and could hold 400 machines, as cars were known then.

Who could have known the accommodation also was the seed of destruction for shopping downtown?

When Macy’s downtown closes as planned in August, it will mark only the formal end of the department store trade in the central business district. Customers steadily deserted downtown years ago for the ever-widening ring of shopping centers, enclosed malls and “lifestyle centers,” somebody’s idea of a catchy name for contemporary strip malls.

But until cars and suburbs reshaped daily life, a trip downtown to shop was a combination of necessity, adventure and social event. Converging streetcar lines disgorged eager shoppers onto crowded intersections.

In the boom years after World War II, three big department stores ruled the downtown roost — Famous-Barr at Sixth and Olive streets; Stix, Baer & Fuller at Seventh and Washington Avenue; and Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney at Olive and Ninth streets.

The stores hosted fashion shows, visits by movie stars, cooking and decorating schools, even book-discussion clubs. They fed customers with hot dog stands, reasonably priced cafeterias and sit-down restaurants with china and tablecloths. Famous-Barr was famous for French onion soup.

At Christmastime, the stores competed for big-eyed children and their parents’ wallets with elaborate wonderlands featuring Santa Claus himself, who always managed to be in all three stores at once. Sidewalks were jammed with gawking families drawn to big window displays — electric trains rushing through landscapes, mechanical elves hammering toys and reindeer bobbing.

Holiday music blaring from outdoor speakers competed with police whistles and the racket of traffic. It was all commotion. Then, gradually, it wasn’t.

Scruggs was the first to tumble, closing its downtown store in 1967. Stix, acquired by Dillard’s in 1984 and renamed, followed in 2001. Famous-Barr became Macy’s in 2006.

There has been a department store at the Macy’s location since 1913, when the owners of the Famous department store bought the William Barr Dry Goods Co. to form Famous-Barr. It moved into the brand-new Railway Exchange Building, which covered the entire block of Sixth, Locust, Seventh and Olive.

The Barr company dated to 1849, when it opened on Market Street about where the Gateway Arch is now. Famous opened in 1870. After fire destroyed its store at Broadway and Morgan Street (now Convention Plaza) in 1892, Famous was rebuilt by a partnership led by David May, a German immigrant who got his start in Colorado mining camps.

Famous-Barr had grown to cover 13 floors of the Railway Exchange by 1939, when the May Department Store Co. spent $700,000 — $11.7 million today — to air-condition the entire store. The company promised the system would provide the soothing power of 600 tons of melting ice daily.

The May Co. rode the postwar exodus with new Famous-Barr stores — Clayton in 1948, south St. Louis in 1951 and Northland shopping center in Jennings four years later. Today, Macy’s downtown covers only three floors of shopping space, and quiet ones at that.