Farewell to elegance

 

Marshall Field & Company
State Street, downtown Chicago

Lunch at Neiman Marcus has always been a special treat for me. That demitasse of consommé and the popover with strawberry butter. I once tried to make that and ended with globules of butter floating unattractively in strawberry jam. Clearly, I need the restaurant.

I’ve been doing some research lately on Helen Corbitt, the cook—she never called herself a chef—who oversaw Neiman’s food service from 1955 to 1969 and elevated the food to world class. Inevitably I’ve read a lot about Stanley Marcus and the whole history of that specialty store. So, when the corporations that now own Neiman’s announced almost a year ago that they filed for bankruptcy protection, I felt sad for the demise of yet another of the few bastions of elegance I’ve known in my life.

Years ago, I had a Neiman Marcus charge account, had my hair cut in their salon, dined in Fort Worth Zodiac frequently. For several reasons, I’m not so much of a customer anymore, but Neiman’s will always represent elegance to me. And I find the store’s history as a family business fascinating—sort of the ultimate success of a mom-and-pop store. It was founded in the first decade of the twentieth century by salesman Herbert Marcus and his sister, Carrie Marcus Neiman, and stayed in the family under the legendary Stanley Marcus until the 1970s when Mr. Stanley stepped down as chairman of the board. A series of leveraged buyouts saw it change owners frequently, and my unsubstantiated guess is that prices went up while quality went down. No more the philosophy that any sale was only a good sale for Neiman’s if it was a good sale for the customer. The whole atmosphere changed, and to me became less welcoming.

I’m grateful Fort Worth still has Neiman’s—in a new location, yet—and I can go have a demitasse of consommé and a popover with my chicken salad for lunch. But it isn’t the same. Somehow, I feel quality has become crassly commercial.

I don’t think any such heavy thought occurred to me when Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. was purchased by Macy’s in 2003 and essentially disappeared. I remember, again, a sense of sadness. I last lunched at the original store with a friend in the ‘90s, and we found the famous Walnut Room, the classic upscale restaurant, a bit shabby. Perhaps elegance doesn’t always last.

But that store on State Street was my childhood playground. My dad, a physician, had his office on the seventeenth floor of the Marshall Field Annex, and you could go under the Wabash Avenue from store to annex. I could roam the store at a fairly young age, and as a teenager, I’d ride the “IC” (Illinois Central commuter train) downtown to Field’s by myself. I could lead you blindfolded to every department in the store, though I was especially fond of the teen apparel section and the restaurants. I liked The Verandah better than the Walnut Room. Then again, I knew where in the budget basement they sold hot dogs and something called a chocolate frosty.

When I wrote The Gilded Cage, about Bertha Honoré (Cissie) Palmer and her husband, Potter, I delved a bit more into the origins of Field’s. The store traces back to a dry goods store on Chicago’s Lake Street, opened in 1857. It went through several iterations, a longtime partner, and at least two devastating fires, before it finally became Marshall Field and Co. in 1881 and later moved into its twelve-story, opulent headquarters at State and Randolph just after the turn of the twentieth century. Want to learn more? Read What the Lady Wants, by Renee Rosen.

Obviously, I learned a lot more about the Palmer House from my research for my novel, The Gilded Cage. Potter Palmer arrived in Chicago in the late 1840s. By the time of the Great Fire, he was a successful hotelier and had just built the Palmer House. It was totally destroyed, but the plans had been saved in an underground vault, and Palmer rebuilt, adding more luxurious detail as he went. Like Field’s store, the hotel catered to the wealthy, fulfilling their every wish from fresh flowers throughout daily to the silver dollars embedded in the floor of the world-renowned barbershop. From writing about the hotel in the late nineteenth century, I felt like I knew it well.

Truth is, I don’t remember ever going to the Palmer House all my years in Chicago, but in late 2016 my four children and I went to the city so I could show them where I grew up. Naturally, after The Gilded Cage, the hotel was high on my list of places to visit. We had lunch there one day and took the historical tour—it’s the only hotel I know of with its own museum inside and a historian on staff. We craned our necks at the ceiling murals and exclaimed in awe over everything from the 24-karat gold Tiffany chandeliers to the souvenir ashtrays in the museum. Want to know more about the Palmer House? Read The Gilded Cage. The hotel also figures in my most recent cozy mystery, Saving Irene.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, for better or for worse, and elegance is being replaced by comfortable casual, but I will always miss these grand old dames of the past. Next on my list is the Drake Hotel, which as a child I considered the epitome of elegance. My four kids and I stayed there on that visit to Chicago, but I will not go back lest I jinx it. It too was fading just a bit.