Sing To the Fallen Eagle

It was a Philadelphia institution. It was one of the grandest department stores in the American Northeast.  Its central atrium had one of the most famous organs in the world.  In that same atrium, every December, was the Christmas fountain and light show, as much a Christmas tradition in Philadelphia as the Rockefeller Center tree in New York.  It wasn't just a part of Philadelphia; it defined Philadelphia. 

As of the end of this past March, the John Wanamaker department store, having been branded as a Macy's for over a quarter of a century, is no more.  Urban department stores are going out of style and have been going out of business for some time now, as the closing of Lord & Taylor in New York recently demonstrated.  Apparently fewer people want to go to Center City Philadelphia to shop, not even in a store big enough to occupy a whole block.  Most of the stores in Center City are small-time chain stores, no different from the stores you'd find at the shopping malls in the suburbs (which have their own problems these days). 

Shopping isn't the experience it used to be.  People used to dress in their Sunday best to go to the great urban department stores of yore - even on a Thursday afternoon.  Finding that right outfit or accessory was serious business.  You could have a fashionable, satisfying lunch at a department store eatery, even in suburban locations; Strawbridge and Clothier, another lost Philadelphia department store, had a restaurant in its suburban Bucks County location, and as a kid I'd go there with my mother for lunch.  They had the best chocolate pudding there, always served with dollop of whipped cream.  Now the old-school department store is pretty much confined to a theme park on West 34th Street in Manhattan.    It's been eliminated elsewhere, the old urban department stores in other cities reduced to either a generic Macy's or an empty hulk of a building that just sits there unloved and unwanted, like the old Bamberger's building in Newark, victims of Internet shopping and discount marts.  Then there are other empty hulks like the old J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit, which were just plain demolished.

At least the Wanamaker building won't suffer the same fate.  The former department store, an official historic landmark, where a large eagle sculpture once stood in its atrium, when Philadelphians would say to each other, "Meet me at the Eagle," is now a mixed office and retail building, which includes such elegant establishments as . . . a gym.

Pathetic.

I don't know if I'll go back to Philadelphia, my father's family's hometown, any time soon.  The corporate interests who have taken over America seem to be content with homogenizing most of our cities to the point where there's nothing special about them.  As for my father's family's hometown, there's nothing Philadelphia about it. 😞 

Oh, DeJoy!

Louis DeJoy is the new Postmaster General of the United States.  And that's not good.

DeJoy is a Trump donor and a Republican Party hack who is likely to do more harm than good to the United States Postal Service, which has been losing money and has been getting closer to possible bankruptcy.  Although he serves at the pleasure of the U.S. Postal Service's board of governors, he acts like he serves at the pleasure of the President, something no Postmaster General has done since the post office went from being a Cabinet-level department to an independent agency in 1971.  And Trump has repeatedly called the post office a joke, calling for the Postal Service to raise rates on packages since his arch-rival Jeff Bezos' Amazon firm, which would pass the costs onto the consumer.

Although President Nixon's push to have the post office pay its own way and be weaned off taxpayer support has largely been seen as a qualified success, to say the least (the very least), one good thing about the Postal Service being a separate agency is that the executive branch has no direct control over the agency anymore.  This means that, up to now at least, the White House has never had one of its cronies in charge.  Before then, there were numerous examples of that.  President Benjamin Harrison give the job to Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker, who showed favoritism toward Republican postal employees and banned a Tolstoy novel from being sent by the U.S. mail - on obscenity grounds - because he couldn't get a big enough discount on copies for his department store.  Wanamaker also ordered postal uniforms from a company he had a financial interest in.  (I still love his store [now a Macy's], the most beautiful edifice in all of Philadelphia.)  I need also mention Lawrence O'Brien, a Postmaster General from the 1960s who was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson.  O'Brien's background was in real estate and public relations. A former director of the Kennedy and Johnson presidential campaigns, O'Brien is best remembered as the Postmaster General who canceled postal contracts with railroads, which relied on them to keep their passenger trains going, and had the mail delivered only by air and highway transport.  The result?  The decline of passenger trains in the United States.  This led President Nixon to nationalize intercity rail transport and create Amtrak, but O'Brien's idiotic move led to many passenger rail routes across America bring terminated.

Oh yeah, O'Brien went on to become the commissioner of the National Basketball Association.  I fail to see the connection between mail and sports.

DeJoy's background is in logistics, but he has no direct experience with moving the mail.  And as a Trump loyalist, he can be expected to carry out various "reforms" that can cripple the Postal Service more than any presidentially appointed Postmaster General did back when it was called the Post Office Department.  Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing voting by mail at the same Trump - and, likely, DeJoy - are trying to stop it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

(Although, if DeJoy intervenes with the U.S stamp program and gets rid of some of the more trivial stamp subjects the Postal Service has embraced of late - stamps for ice pops, pickup trucks, and, being issued this week, hip-hop - ! - I won't be offended.)