Long ago -- 145 years by company estimates -- a man named Rowland Hussey Macy opened a store in New York City.

Seven years earlier, Simon Lazarus, a rabbi who had immigrated from Germany, set up a men's clothing shop in Columbus, Ohio.

And, in a modern partnership involving a strategically placed hyphen, the two old names become one this week -- Lazarus-Macy's.

Whether this will impress shoppers in southwestern Pennsylvania is unclear.

"Macy's is a popular store in New York. It's famous for the parade, right?" Sarah Castelli, a Sheraden resident, said last week while shopping at the Downtown Lazarus.

Castelli likes the Fifth Avenue store. There's less merchandise than at the bigger Kaufmann's on nearby Smithfield Street, but the staff is friendly. She's aware that sales at the Downtown Lazarus have dragged, and speculated the name change could help. "Maybe ... more people will like the Macy's name," she said.

Maybe parent company Federated Department Stores Inc. believes that you can't go wrong spreading a little New York cachet around. Federated owns a lot of department store groups with regionally grown names such as Burdines, Rich's and Goldsmith's, and it's adding the Macy's name to all of them. Only its Bloomingdale's group is exempted.

"Everyone knows Macy's," noted Betsy Zeino, regional director for Lazarus stores in Pittsburgh and Columbus.

Zeino has been busy making sure the change goes smoothly. Already, Lazarus credit-card customers are receiving new Lazarus-Macy's cards. Effective Aug. 3, the new plastic will allow them to charge purchases in any stores that have Macy's in the name. Before, they were limited to the 40-plus Lazarus locations. The cards also will work at Federated's online store, macys.com (www.macys.com).

Store associates also start wearing their new name tags Aug. 3. Direct-mail advertising pieces already use the new name, and newspaper ads will be updated soon. Revamped store signs should be done by early next year.

Trying to combine the name change with tangible improvements, Federated has budgeted $100 million this year to bring store improvements to five markets, including Pittsburgh. Shopping carts already have arrived for Lazarus locations in South Hills Village, Monroeville Mall and Ross Park Mall, and customer-friendly price scanners are coming to some stores. Plans also call for additional seating areas.

Department store groups that haven't had Macy's in their names are expected to increase their assortments of certain home goods, jewelry and shoe lines that are closely associated with the Macy's division.

Company officials insist that they have no plans to eventually shift the whole chain to just the Macy's name, even though some retail observers believe such a shift couldn't hurt.

Even before the Downtown store opened, former City Councilman Bob O'Connor was pushing parent Federated to change its name to Macy's, saying the name would be a bigger draw than Lazarus, which came to the region only after Federated bought the former Joseph Horne Co. chain in 1994.

Pittsburghers have known Macy's for years, of course, either because they stopped in at the big flagship store in New York City or happened to catch the famed parade on television. Or maybe they saw a rerun of "Miracle on 34th Street," with its Macy's and Gimbels references.

Fewer may be aware the Lazarus family has its own claim to American history.

Federated's historic timeline credits Fred Lazarus Jr., grandson of the founder, with convincing President Franklin Roosevelt that changing the Thanksgiving holiday to the fourth Thursday in November would extend the Christmas shopping season and help the nation's business.

The prominence of the Macy's name may owe less to the founding family than to the Straus family that bought the department store in the late 1890s. It kept the name and built the business into a successful emporium.

Those who know the story of the Titanic may have heard the story of a dignified matron who declined to leave her beloved husband for a spot in one of the lifeboats. The husband was Isidor Straus, one of the family members who'd bought Macy's. He had retired and was returning from a European vacation with his wife, Ida.

Times change as do the names over the department stores, as South Hills resident Lori Mercurio is well aware. "We don't have Gimbels anymore. We don't have Horne's anymore. You grow up with these places. "The only thing we still have is Kaufmann's.''

Even Kaufmann's, owned by St. Louis-based May Department Stores, isn't headquartered here anymore, a result of the Pittsburgh division's merger with the Boston-based Filene's group.

Mercurio doesn't think changing the names will matter much. She's more interested in seeing the various companies do a better job in coming up with different merchandise. "They must buy from the same vendors."