GLR September-October 2025

ESSAY The Ascension of the Retail Queen W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

E VERYONE FROM THE ASTORS to the gutter sweepers called it the Marble Palace, though that wasn’t its name. A. T. Stewart & Co. graced the east side of Broadway, the unfashionable side, the side where the merciless afternoon sun turned the sidewalks to griddles and sent New Yorkers scurrying to the shaded shops on the better side. De spite the store’s déclassé location, when the Marble Palace opened its doors in 1846, The New York Herald gushed at its elegance: “The walls and ceiling are painted in fresco, and the tinting and design are exquisitely chaste, classic, and tasteful— There is one large chandelier in the main hall, that is not sur passed in beauty by anything we have ever seen.” The ceiling was supported by fluted columns of glistening Italian marble, topped with ornate capitals carved into an intricate design of a cornucopia and a caduceus of Mercury, the god of commerce. This was no garish display of mercantile ostentation. “Its dec orations, in general and in detail, are of the most chaste and clas sic description. There is no gaudy gilding or tinsel show to disgust refined taste, but everything is ornate and elegant.” The focal point of the new emporium—one soon to be these balustrades, and looking up or down, the sight is brilliant and attractive,” wrote one critic. “Thousands of persons are scattered about the floors making purchases. Hundreds of clerks, salesmen, and cash boys are busy serving them, and the buz [ sic ] and hum of human voices under the vast roof sounds like the droning of a hive of bees.” That buzz could have been much louder. It was the custom in New York stores at the time for clerks and patrons to wran gle over the price of the items for sale, turning every hat shop in Manhattan into the souk of Algiers. Stewart found the prac tice gauche and unrefined, and in his Marble Palace he initiated a policy of fixed pricing. He knew what each item in his inven tory had cost him to acquire and how much the current market would bear, and he set his prices accordingly. But having banned vulgar haggling from his store, Stewart needed to find another way for his sales clerks to nudge reluctant purchasers. He decided to use sex. A contemporary business writer de William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail , and the forthcoming When We Found Each Other: Gay Men in 19th-Century America . copied by stores in Boston, San Francisco, and London—was an elegant central dome soaring ninety feet above a circular sales floor. When Stewart built a new store a few blocks away, near Astor Place, his signature dome was replaced by an even larger atrium, with five mezzanine levels enclosed by mas sive iron balustrades. “Leaning over one of

scribed it in more elegant terms: “He had noticed that the ladies, in ‘shopping,’ were given to the habit of gossiping, and even flirting with the clerks, and he adopted the expedient of em ploying as his salesmen the handsomest men he could procure, a practice which has since become common. The plan was suc cessful from the first. Women came to his store in greater num bers than before, and ‘Stewart’s nice young men’ were the talk of the town.” Fortunately for Stewart, it was easy in New York to procure handsome young men who liked to gossip and flirt. In the 19th century, the city’s population exploded, increas ing from 200,000 in 1830 to more than half a million in 1850. By 1870 that number had almost doubled. Clerks were the third largest occupational group in New York, drawn primarily from the ranks of newly arrived immigrants and strapping country boys fresh off the farm. They were young: In a sample taken from records covering the period 1850 to 1855, between sixty and seventy percent of the clerks were under the age of 25, al most all of them unmarried and living unsupervised in ram shackle boardinghouses. In the past, clerks had been primarily apprentices, starting at the bottom rung with a dream of even tually climbing to the top. But now there were not enough lad young man plunges into trouble and danger the hour he sets foot in the city,” one book warned. Perhaps the gravest danger lurked in the young man’s own boardinghouse: Evil company is often elegant, delightful, and fascinating; and inexperience cannot escape the coils of the gilded serpent. What is greatly to be deplored is, that associates of this sort do not wait to be sought out, but make the first advances, and not unfrequently lie in wait for the new arrival. Unless the novice is on his guard against these seducers, he will certainly fall. Most deadly is the poison, when evil companions are under the same roof, perhaps at the same table, or even, by a wretched custom, in the same bed. Better to be chained to yel low fever or small-pox, than joined to a vicious room-mate. Clerks who managed to fend off their bedmate’s gilded ser pent might still become enmeshed in New York’s rampant sex culture, and for heterosexual men working in department stores, being familiar with the city’s brothels and sex workers could actually improve one’s chances of advancement. Stewart’s strat egy of employing handsome clerks to flirt with his customers was only one nod to the adage that “sex sells.” There were also ders to climb, and any young man hired as a clerk faced the prospect that he might not as cend much higher in his profession. The sudden influx of young single men living without parental control set off alarms and triggered a barrage of conduct books aimed at alerting young men to the dangers of city life. “The newly-arrived boy or

By the 1830s, male store clerks had become a recog nized subcategory of the labor market: they were the “counter jumpers.”

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