Barry Hannegan: 'We were treated to a nice but utterly redundant store'

Sunday, August 10, 2003

The announcement of the impending closing of Lord & Taylor's new Pittsburgh department store reopens old and hardly healed wounds while ripping open some new ones.

	Which way up for Downtown? The announced departure of Lord & Taylor rattled the retail outlook for the Golden Triangle. We asked four observers to assess the impact and look forward. (V.W.H. Campbell, Jr. Post-Gazette) Related articles Jake Haulk: Let the market decide Rob Pfaffmann: Think big by thinking small Eve Picker: Shoot for the stars Barry Hannegan: Not-so grand illusion

The loss of the great banking interior to the dubious requirements of retail operations was and will remain one the grimmest episodes in the continuing failure of the city and its establishment to recognize and value our communal heritage. A space on a par with the foyer of the Carnegie Music Hall or the Commons Room of the Cathedral of Learning was taken from us.

There was hope that we might receive in return a much-needed enrichment of the city's and region's dreary, monotonous retail scene and a bulwark against the continuing decay of the Downtown core. Perhaps not a fair exchange for the bank interior, but at least something, rather like a bankruptcy settlement of 11 cents on the dollar.

We were given an agreeably glitzy new interior, a little claustrophobic but elegant and finely lighted. Conditioned by more than four decades of shopping in Lord & Taylor's Manhattan flagship store, I anticipated a welcome improvement to the limited, predictable and boring wares generally offered by the dwindling pool of Downtown retailers. What I found after several abortive shopping expeditions was just more of the same, indeed, more of the identical. In casual conversations over the past three years, I have gradually discovered that Lord & Taylor did in fact establish a new shopping tradition here -- to view merchandise in the atmosphere of the new store and then cross the avenue to buy the same item at a lower price at Kaufmann's.

I do not know if the market researchers of May Co. did their work too well or too poorly. Did they see in our overall consumer practices such an overwhelming preference for the tried and true, the middle of the road, the conventional product that they believed a cookie-cutter approach to stock should ensure success? Did they take the time and trouble to determine if there might be a special niche within the Downtown retail situation, a void, that the new store should undertake to fill? Since such an approach would have required special buying and tailoring of stock, the sort of responsibility that in-house managers and buyers once attended to, it would appear that such customizing was not thought worth the effort, and we were treated to a nice but generic and utterly redundant department store, and a rather small one at that.

Nor did the May Co., I suspect, understand that in being a party to the destruction of a much-loved Pittsburgh landmark, they brought down upon their project a curse. It was created out of a painful sense of loss and a fierce resentment of the "Let them eat cake" attitude very nearly explicit in the various statements and attendant behavior of the city government, of Mellon Bank and of the May Co. itself when the sale and conversion of the building were announced.

And so for three years we enjoyed the illusion that we had an upscale, New York-type department store in Pittsburgh. Lord & Taylor understandably traded on that fiction, all the while denying the community what might have been a truly needed, heavily patronized shopping venue. The surviving fragments of the bank interior might have taken on a new value, solid and high, that might have salved the persistent sense of loss. We are told that there are few words so sad as "might have been"; infinitely more melancholy is that which was and was great, that which is gone and cannot be again.

Barry Hannegan is a landscape historian and former director of historic design programs for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.

E-mail this story   Print this story