Review

We read and thoroughly enjoyed Julie Satow's The Plaza, a history of the well-known hotel at the corner of 5th Avenue and 59th Street in New York. The arrival of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue promised another fine read by Satow centered on the history of high-profile department stores in the city and we were not disappointed. She writes that department stores have always been feminine domains and, in this story, writes a group biography on three women who successfully ran first-class department stores in their respective primes. Those three were Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Gerldine Stutz of Henri Bendel. Although ostensibly a "women's- book," I believe all readers will enjoy learning about these three women, how they secured their positions and the changes they adopted to make their stores successful. Hortense Odlum never thought about the decision to work or stay home as she was quite happy with a family life and that of a homemaker. But when her husband Floyd became very wealthy and had a significant investment in Bonwit Teller, he and his partners told her that the store was on the rocks and that they did not know what to do with it. The men asked her if she'd go to Bonwit's and wander around a bit and check it out. Knowing nothing about business or retailing, she went to the store, noticed a sad and morose atmosphere, shabby furnishings, tired saleswomen, empty racks, and insufficient/poorly-selected stock. She was hooked and dug in right away to fix Bonwit Teller. In one of her first changes, she moved the millinery department from an obscure corner of an upper floor to near the main entrance (hats were important in the 1930s). Hats were relatively inexpensive, impulse buys--and hat sales tripled as did overall sales. Geraldine Stutz arrived at Bendel's in 1957 at age 33. The store was in steep decline and had severe space limitations. Her first major move to turn it around was to revamp the long, narrow, and small main floor with high ceilings, turning it into a "Street of Shops" which became highly successful. Dorothy Shaver joined Lord & Taylor in the 1920s and right from the beginning, she told the store president exactly what she thought. The store was "too man-made" and that he had failed to "merchandise yourself into the heart of a woman." When she was put in charge of comparison shopping, she wrote that, rather than comparison shopping they should create a bureau of fashion stylists. It was the first iteration of what would be known as personal shopping. Lord & Taylor thrived under Dorthy Shaver, on the job from 1921 until she died in 1959. Bonwit Teller's Manhattan store closed in 1979, Bendel closed in 2019, and Lord & Taylor, opened in 1826, filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

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