Holiday Windows Brighten a Bleak Retail Scene, but How Long Will They Last?
But the rise of Walmart and other discount chains in the mid-1960s, Ms. Whitaker said, “drove a stake into the heart of the downtown stores.” As shoppers focused on price above all else
and old-line stores moved to the suburbs, she added, “The department stores dispensed with just about everything — the displays, the decorations, the free gift wrap and alterations, the free delivery.”
It now seems ironic, Ms. Whitaker continued, that department stores were once criticized for overcommercializing Christmas with their window displays.
The window displays and holiday traditions “were never overtly commercial,” said Jan Whitaker, the author of “Service
and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class,” and other books about department stores.
Mr. Cohen said he got “all kinds of grief” from executives at Federated Department Stores after he spent over $100,000 to renovate the holiday windows at the flagship Lazarus department store in downtown Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1990s; at the time he was chairman
and chief executive of Lazarus, then a division of Federated.
Tiffany Bourre, a spokeswoman for Hudson’s Bay, the parent company of Lord & Taylor and Saks, assured me the sale of the Lord & Taylor building to WeWork would not affect the window displays in the future, and
that the company was committed to the store’s “rich history” of holiday traditions.
So when I heard a couple of months ago that Lord & Taylor was selling the Fifth Avenue building
that houses its flagship store to WeWork for $850 million, my first reaction was alarm: What would happen to the Lord & Taylor Christmas windows?
She said that the holiday windows and light show at Saks would continue “for years to come.”
Hudson’s Bay does not break out the cost of the window displays, but they are expensive.
“The department stores created a magical sense of occasion,” she said.
