The Denver Dry Goods: Where Colorado Shopped with Confidence

process.

Introduction

THE END OF AN ERA

No one can claim to live in the civilized world if he doesn’t have a big department store across the street from where he works. If I wanted to, I could walk over there in 45 seconds, buy a new suit, shirt, tie, socks and shoes, and be transformed into someone really important-looking almost as fast as Superman could get in and out of his phone booth. I’ve always told myself I’d do that silly trick someday when I had the money, and now it appears I’ve let another one of the downtown Denverite’s delights slip through my fingers.¹

WE’VE COME TO SAY GOODBYE

The Denver to Close—residents of the Mile High City woke up to this shocking Denver Post headline on Saturday, January 31, 1987, although most had heard the sad story on local television and radio news broadcasts the night before. The paper used its largest headline type, normally reserved for major events, such as wars and assassinations, to announce the previously unthinkable demise of a Colorado institution (and one of its largest advertisers). For the front-page photograph, the editors chose a poignant image of sixty-two-year-old housewares department employee Millie Krause wiping tears away after news broke. The Post had long maintained a close relationship with The Denver Dry Goods Company (simply The Denver in its last decades). It was not entirely coincidental when, seeking larger quarters after World War II, the paper chose to build its new plant diagonally across the intersection of Fifteenth and California Streets from the store, simplifying the daily delivery of advertising materials (in that predigitized era, when such proximity was crucial). The Post’s archrival, the Rocky Mountain News, favored a similarly matter-of-fact (and equally devastating) headline that day: May D&F consolidation to eliminate The Denver.

The Denver’s advertising department prepared this farewell message to run in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, but May Department Stores Company executives would not permit its publication, fearing customer backlash. Jim O’Hagan collection.

Most Coloradoans knew both stores well. May-D&F and The Denver were as much rivals as the two newspapers, and both claimed to be the dominant department store in Colorado. Their boastfulness ignored the popular Joslin’s, a chain that bested both The Denver and May-D&F in sales; a notch below them in the unofficial hierarchy of Colorado stores, Joslin’s was perceived as less elegant in both décor and image. May D&F, although created by a 1957 merger, was actually the older store, its predecessor, Daniels and Fisher, having been founded in 1864, just six years after Denver’s birth. Parent company May Department Stores Company of St. Louis had deep Colorado roots as well. David May founded what would become a national chain when he opened a store in a wood-framed canvas tent in booming Leadville in 1877, selling Levi’s and longies (red woolen underwear) to silver prospectors and fancy ball gowns to their ladies after the jackpots rolled in. By contrast, The Denver Dry Goods Company was a relative newcomer, birthed in 1894, after the city for which it was named had already become a major regional metropolis.

The news of The Denver’s closure hit the city hard, seemingly yet another nail in its coffin. How different the mood was in early 1987 from what it had been a decade or so earlier, when the city was enjoying the greatest boom in its history. Seemingly every other week in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought news of a new downtown skyscraper here or a new shopping mall there. Denver was being transformed, thanks in large part to a spike in oil prices; boosters called the city the Houston of the north, with major new buildings named for energy producers like Amoco and ARCO and speculative office buildings filling up with satellite offices of Fortune 500 companies. The arts flourished, too, with the opening of a new performing arts complex and a new history museum, and high rates of philanthropic giving (as a matter of course, both The Denver and May-D&F were frequent donors). The beloved Denver Broncos (the Orange Crush) even went to the Super Bowl for the first time in January 1978. It did not matter that they lost that game; the point was that Denver was finally a major league city, in many senses of the term.

Then, as had occurred repeatedly over the city’s history, Denver’s economy, too dependent on one extractive industry (gold or silver in the nineteenth century, oil in the twentieth), crashed when the price of crude fell. Building projects were canceled and recent arrivals began leaving. Longtime Denverites assumed the city would eventually come back, as it always had done, with its institutions mostly intact. It was only necessary to ride it out, and in fact, Denver would do just that, investing public money on a series of projects (a new convention center, a central library and an airport) that kept the metropolitan economy afloat when private industry struggled.

One institution would not remain intact, however: the city’s beloved eponymous department store, The Denver. Completely unrelated to Colorado’s boom-and-bust cycle, the department store industry was undergoing a national transformation as it struggled to keep consumers from shifting more and more of their spending toward a new type of retailer born in the 1960s that by the 1980s had become the default choice for many budget-conscious households: the discount superstore, as exemplified by Walmart, Target and Kmart. Some of this shift was driven also by a multi-decade wage stagnation that effectively shrank the potential market for department stores. To combat these threats, executives looked for ways to scale up, growing larger through mergers and buyouts. May Department Stores Company, already one of the nation’s leading operators, was one of the biggest buyers of other chains, and in August 1986, it reached an agreement with Associated Dry Goods of New York City, parent of The Denver, as well as Lord & Taylor (New York), J.W. Robinson’s (Los Angeles) and nearly a dozen other regional names, on terms of a buyout.

When the merger news broke, May announced to Colorado shoppers (and indirectly, political leaders) that both May-D&F and The Denver stores would remain in operation and continue to compete with each other as they always had done. The new owner gave hints that The Denver might be repositioned as the more upscale of the two chains, creating a clear differentiation, leaving May-D&F to more directly compete with rival Joslin’s for the broad middle of the market; this notion was amplified by newspaper articles quoting retail analysts, most of whom thought shifting The Denver’s merchandise mix in a more designer-oriented direction would make sense. Perhaps May executives were sincere in making these projections, and Colorado’s weakened economy prevented them from making good on them. Or perhaps they were just trying to ensure the Federal Trade Commission, charged with protecting consumers from higher prices brought about by reduced competition, would not try to prevent the merger or force them to sell The Denver to a rival. Whatever May’s motive may have been, the news of The Denver’s closure after more than nine decades hit the city hard.

THE HEART OF DENVER

This book is not a sad story, but it does have an unhappy ending, which is why it begins with the end in this introduction—so the reader will not dread it later. The tale begins with pioneer merchants coming west seeking their fortunes, makes a brief detour through insolvency and then rolls on for decades, through most of the twentieth century. During that time, successive generations of Denverites boarded streetcars, drove carriages, rode buses or steered automobiles to Sixteenth and California Streets, which intersection, thanks to The Denver Dry Goods, became the busiest corner on Denver’s main shopping street. In many ways, Sixteenth and California, and the store itself, embodied the heart of Denver, much more than the elegant Civic Center flanked by the state capitol and the City and County Building, the magnificent Municipal Auditorium, the vast City Park or any other facility built by the citizens to beautify their city. Those were ornaments, nice to visit on occasion or show off to out-of-town relatives, but The Denver Dry Goods was part of their daily lives.

The store had rivals for Denverites’ affection, of course. The chief of these was Daniels and Fisher, running a full block along Sixteenth between Lawrence and Arapahoe Streets and boasting, in its magnificent twentyone-story tower, the tallest building between Chicago and the West Coast when it was built. Until 1958, when the First National Bank overtook it in height, it was the most prominent element on Denver’s skyline. But as beloved as that store was, over time it lost steam, thanks partly to its location in lower downtown, an area that gradually became seedy, more run-down with each passing decade. In its early decades, Daniels and Fisher was the nucleus of Denver shopping, with near neighbors the May Company, the Golden Eagle and Appel and Company providing a reason to patronize that section of Sixteenth Street. Momentum began to shift, however, when, in 1905, May moved uptown to Champa Street, halfway between the two powerhouses Daniels and Fisher and The Denver Dry Goods, and over the course of subsequent decades, central Sixteenth Street, anchored by The Denver, became the main draw.

McNamara Dry Goods Company (The Denver’s predecessor, the story of which is told in chapters 1 and 2) found itself in a largely residential area when it moved to Sixteenth and California Streets in 1889, with wags joking that it was out in the country. By the early 1900s, however, it was clear to the city’s smaller and younger merchants that its siting, so far from the city’s once-dominant retail zone at Larimer and Lawrence Streets, had been a visionary move. The vast and growing Denver Dry Goods exerted a gravitational pull, like Jupiter on its many moons, and it was soon joined by Merritt W. Gano and Company (later partnered with William D. Downs, as Gano-Downs), A.T. Lewis and Son, the Neusteter Company (an important rival to The Denver Dry Goods for the trade of the city’s upper crust), menswear purveyor Cottrell’s, shoe store Fontius, stationery and bookseller Kendrick and Bellamy and many others in this newly fashionable section of Sixteenth Street. Even as late as the early 1950s, when national chain J.C. Penney and Company wanted to plant a new six-story Colorado flagship, it chose the corner diagonally opposite The Denver Dry Goods, because trade at The Denver was brisk and it hoped to garner some of that traffic.

A trip to The Denver was a special occasion. Neighborhood shops might be fine for mundane purchases like socks or underwear, but when a new Easter suit, a new set of best china or a fancy dress to wear to a daughter’s wedding was required, Sixteenth and California would beckon. Upon entering, the shopper was greeted with what the store claimed was the longest department store aisle in America, running four hundred feet from the Sixteenth Street door, past glass counters full of perfumes and cosmetics, past banks of elevators, under the store’s famous clock, all the way to another door at Fifteenth Street. The store’s tone, while busy, was dignified; instead of a loudspeaker, a system of bells alerted employees to where they were needed. Shoppers may never have quite grasped what the bells signified, but store staff, following strict codes for dress and behavior, certainly did. Patrons, too, took their dignity seriously, with suits and hats (often Stetsons, sold by the store in great volume) for men and white gloves worn by women and girls. Throughout the store, floor upon floor, were departments for every sort of item imaginable, from books and stationery to expensive furs; from notions and fabrics to formalwear; from the smallest spoon to the largest dining room suite; and from cowboy suits for the junior Davy Crockett fan to actual saddles, tack and other items used by real working cowboys. The Denver had it all, and in the basement, nearly every department was replicated with budget pricing.

When it was all too overwhelming, when shoppers just couldn’t try on another dress, they could always head upstairs to an institution inside an institution: The Denver’s Tea Room. Located after 1924 on the fifth floor, the tearoom was both a refuge and a place to see and be seen. It became such an integral part of downtown Denver that on most days, the majority of its two thousand or so diners weren’t shopping at all but had come to the store for the express purpose of having lunch and greeting people (what today would be called networking). The Denver even had a special express elevator to the tearoom, so the city’s