Turn the Lights Back On

Just when it seemed that the Christmas Light Show in the Philadelphia department store formerly known as Wanamaker's (the fountain part having been discontinued long ago) was as dead as the department store itself, there's good news for fans of the Christmas tradition throughout the greater Philadelphia area.  The owners of the John Wanamaker Building, which housed the onetime department store of the same name before it was rebranded as a Macy's and then closed in March 2025, announced that the central court of the building, where the light show was held, will host it yet again for this Christmas and for every Christmas in the foreseeable future.  And the eagle sculpture and the pipe organ are staying in place, too.

This is all good news for those of us with Philly roots.  But it got me thinking, especially since my trip to Europe earlier this summer.  I was in Paris, Berlin, and Munich, and I found each city to be as different from each other as possible, due to their architectural heritage, their iconic landmarks, their public spaces, and their nightlife.  But I realized something else - in none of these cities did I notice any department stores that made them unique.  Nor did I care.

When we think of Paris, we think of the Eiffel Tower, the grand boulevards, the cafes, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and the recreational amenities along the Seine.  When we think of Berlin, we think of the Bundestag, the Unter Den Linden, and the numerous museums on the island in the middle of the Spree River.  When we think of Munich, we think of the beer halls and the Marienplatz, along with the car-free streets that radiate from it.   (Inevitably, alas, we think of Hitler strutting through all three of these cities, but that's another post.)  We do not think of huge commercial enterprises defining these cities - i.e., department stores.  Department stores are a late-nineteenth-century innovation in Western civilization, and they were meant to be grandiose palaces of consumerism that celebrated opulence and convenience - so many classy products available in different departments under one roof.  By the late 1950s, American cities had become synonymous with the major department stores that dominated their central districts, and vice versa.  It was impossible to think of Philadelphia without Wanamaker's and Strawbridge & Clothier, New York without Macy's and Gimbels, Chicago without Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott, and so on.  Today all of these stores are gone, except for Macy's, which placed its name on the original Marshall Field's store in Chicago even as the Carson Pirie Scott store is a Target now.  

By contrast, European cities are more known for their cultural, not their commercial institutions.  Not too many Americans are likely to name a department store as one of the chief distinguishing characteristics of Brussels or Rome - if they can even name department stores in those cities.  True, London is famous for Harrods and Selfridge's, but it's unlikely that anyone naming London's distinctive landmarks will name either of those two stores.  But ask an American to name at least three distinctive landmarks of an given American city and, with a few exceptions - New Orleans, Los Angeles, Washington - one of those distinctive landmarks is likely to be a department store, even if it's a department store that went out of business years or decades ago.  Old-timers in the Detroit area will remember Hudson's, which was more colossal and luxurious than even Bloomingdale's.  But can anyone name any cultural or historic landmark in Detroit that would command the global recognition of an Eiffel Tower or a Big Ben?  (The Ford River Rouge factory is not an acceptable answer.)  Dallas is only known for two landmarks, and one of them is the gaudy Neiman-Marcus store.  The other is Dealey Plaza, and only because John F. Kennedy was assassinated there.     

In short, most American cities are known for commercial enterprises that mostly have not stood the test of time.  We've been acclimated to think of these stores as institutions in these cities and we have little to define these cities once these stores are gone.  Only a handful of American cities are known for cultural institutions and public spaces free of consumerist values, like New York, which is known for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for Central Park . . . but it too is known for a department store - the aforementioned Macy's, a once-unique store that is now located in just about every major city in place of the local and regional department stores that once thrived there . . . but not in Philadelphia anymore, and certainly not in Newark, where the chain took over and appended the Macy's name to the old Bamberger's store and closed it in 1992.  

What's so special about the Macy's in New York, the flagship store, when there are Macy's stores all over America now?  Probably the annual Thanksgiving Day parade, with its oversized balloons and its canned performances for the TV cameras in front of the store's entrance.  As for Newark, the Newark Museum and the cookie-cutter New Jersey Performing Arts Center - built to get to and leave from by car with ease, so you don't have to stroll downtown - are hardly big draws to a central business district so devoid of life in makes downtown Cleveland look like Carnival. 

So, if American cities have any future in this suburbanized, sprawling country, it's as cultural, not commercial, centers, which European cities have been for centuries, developing their art, culture and public amenities through all that time, and with the patronage of royalty and aristocracy.  American cities mostly developed for commercial reasons, and art museums and opera companies only came later, and so there's little if any rich history that defines American cities the way it defines Rome or Athens.  There's no ancient Philadelphia to speak of, no medieval Cleveland, no Renaissance Minneapolis, no Tudor Atlanta . . . honey, there ain't even a colonial Chicago.  

I'm glad that the Wanamaker Building in Philadelphia is keeping its Christmas light show.  But after having walked down the boulevards of Paris at night,  seeing for myself why it's called the City of Light, with the lights twinkling on the Eiffel Tower and all the bright illuminations along the sidewalks, it made me appreciate all the more what makes Paris Paris - and how much trouble our own cities are in when there's little that makes them distinctive.  Urban planning critic James Howard Kunstler once said that there is no reason why Cleveland, Detroit, and Harlem can't be as spiritually gratifying as Paris.  He was wrong of course, for too many reasons to explain in this already long blog post, but the biggest reason is that cities in the U.S. were never built to inspire our humanity (except Washington, which proved to be a spectacular failure in that regard), and were only meant to transact business in.  

Which explains Newark.  Now a nine-to-five city of insurance and utility transactions, it offers little else after hours because of suburban flight that was all about plain damn money.