Pittsburgh: Macy's plans to close Downtown store

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I hate to see the old downtown department stores go away.

Macy's plans to close Downtown store

By Chris Fleisher
Monday, July 13, 2015, 10:39 a.m.
Updated 14 minutes ago

The city will lose the last of its major retail destinations and a stalwart of holiday celebrations when Macy's closes its downtown store to make way for a radical makeover of the historic property.

Cincinnati-based Macy's announced Monday that it sold the building for $15 million to Philadelphia developer Core Realty, which plans to remake the iconic 13-story property into a mix of hotel space, retail and high-end apartments with a rooftop pool, tennis courts and gardens.

Macy's departure comes 10 years after the retail giant purchased the building and marks the end of a more than century-long run with a department store as its anchor tenant.

Pittsburghers who once could buy every item on their holiday shopping list at Macy's and its predecessor, Kauffmann's, now will no longer even enjoy the famous Christmas window displays that were a mainstay of the season.

[femmocrat]

1. Sad.... I remember seeing the windows when I was a little girl.

I never got that attached to Macy's though. I loved Kaufmann's and went into "mourning" when it closed.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Used to go shopping there as a girl when it was Kaufmann's.

[happyslug]

3. There goes the last wooden escalators that I know of

I remember them as a teenager in the 1970s and took my nieces on them when they were in Grade School. Nosily, narrow but with wood "steps". These were only on the top floors and Kaufmann's made an effort to keep them working even as those floors became less and less used starting in the 1980s.

Kaufmann's started to go down hill in the 1980s, when they closed down two of there three "Bargain Basements" floors. Then Kaufmann's slowly took things out of their top floors and tried to make the Downtown Store like a Suburban store. The problem was it did not work. Most shoppers to the Downtown Store wanted in and out during they lunch break, not the slow shopping "experience" that the Suburban Mall Stores catered to. As late as the 1990s you went to down town Kaufmann's to get things the suburban stores did not carry. The down town store had more of any one item AND more items and geared for people on the go.

You can see Kaufmann change in the 1980s and 1990s as its owner, May's Department Store, concentrated in its growing number of suburban mall stores. Those were viewed as the high profit centers, the Down Town Stores were high profit only because the stores were paid for and thus the only cost to operate the store were taxes and utilities.

Kaufmann and now Macy's have been on a long death march, mostly do to their refusal to see such large stores as fundamentally different from suburban stores.