USA > Rhode Island > Rhode Island : three centuries of democracy, Vol. II > Part 52
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In the instance of Providence the naturally westward movement of population was accelerated (I) by the steep hill rising almost abruptly to the east and thus discouraging extension in that direction; and (2) by the inviting plains and plateaus and low hills to the west reached easily by crossing a narrow fordable river, which later was bridged. The move- ment of the business centre westward was indicated so early as 1835, by the larger number of banks west than east of the river. As new banks were organized after 1835, with the excep-
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tion of the Bank of Commerce, on Market Square, locations on lower Westminster Street and Weybosset Street were chosen. The Bank of Commerce moved twice in the twentieth century, first to the Turk's Head Building, and later to new quarters at Westminster and Orange streets. The Providence Bank also left 50 South Main Street, its second location, after being there for more than a century, removing first to the banking house of the Mer- chants National Bank, which it had absorbed, and then into its new building on lower West- minster Street. Except branch banks located east of the hill by trust companies, and except the Blackstone Canal National Bank, the Providence Institution for Savings and the People's Savings Bank, all banks were west of the river in 1930. The Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company, after establishment east, removed west of the river to an imposing banking house, which later was replaced by the monumental office building fronting on Washington Row. Even the Providence Institution for Savings had built a modern banking building between Aborn and Empire streets, and maintained a branch bank in Olneyville.
Lawyers lingered in the upper stories of banking houses and mercantile establishments east of the river, near the courthouse, until new office buildings rose to the westward; the legal profession generally scarcely ventures west of Dorrance Street in the modern city. The Gladding store was removed from Cheapside in 1878 to the Brownell building, opposite the Arcade on Westminster Street, and again after the turn of the new century to the corner of Westminster and Mathewson streets. J. B. Barnaby opened a retail ready-made men's cloth- ing store at 15 South Main Street in 1852, removed to the corner of South Main and College streets in 1869, and again to the Dorrance building, at Westminster and Dorrance streets within another twenty years. Tilden & Thurber, Providence retail selling agents for the Gorham Company, located first on lower Westminster Street west of Exchange Street, and removed later to a new building at Westminster and Mathewson streets. Callender, McAus- lan & Troup, canny Scotchmen, located their dry goods store, a small establishment out of which grew a vast department store, on Westminster Street east of Union Street in 1866, selecting what was to be for years the heart and centre of the retail shopping district. After 1850 there was little doubt that the business district lay west of the river with the majority of the population, the retail shopping section being east of Dorrance Street, with the Arcade central.
The jewelry factories were moving westward by that time; most of the iron and steel establishments also were west, although the warehouses along South Main and South Water streets had, in some instances, been converted into manufacturing buildings, and new struc- tures were erected there because of convenient access to wharves for supplies of coal and ore, and for the shipment of the product. New types of buildings were rising, mostly semi-fire- proof structures with brick walls, averaging five stories in height. The interior construction was principally of wood, with heavy hard pine and massive oak beams and pillars carrying the weight of floors and roof. The early buildings were constructed usually with the first floor several feet above street level and reached by flights of steps. In the instance of the Dorrance Building, when the lower floor was brought to street level, thus to invite customers in directly from the street, and also to permit the construction of show windows for the display of goods, an interior cellar wall was built, paralleling the outer wall, for the purpose of carrying the weight of the new floor. The building was gutted by fire in 1890, the flames starting in the basement and spreading until only part of the walls remained standing, while at the height of the conflagration the picture resembled that of a foundry chimney with fire rising fifty feet above the cornice. A mystery as to the failure of the water poured into the cellar to reach and extinguish the flames was solved by the discovery of the inner wall of masonry, which held the water between itself and the outer wall. The first iron front building, marking
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the introduction of structural steel, was the Barnaby Building at Westminster and Union streets.
In 1876 the descendants and successors of Cyrus Butler, who had achieved the Arcade a half-century earlier, built the Butler Exchange on the site now occupied by the Industrial Trust. The four fronts of the Butler Exchange and the interior framework were principally of iron and steel, and the building was rated as fireproof. It was six stories in height, thor- oughly "modern" for the period, and, like the Arcade incorporated a covered passageway from Westminster Street to Exchange Place. At the end of the century the Union Trust Company reached the then farthest west for banks* by placing its counting room facing Dorrance Street. The knell of lower Westminster Street as the city's central retail shopping district had been tolled when the street railway company, by rerouting its car lines, made Dorrance Street, instead of Market Square, the centre of the municipal transportation sys- tem. The larger dry goods establishments were already by that time west of Dorrance Street, and lower Westminster Street was settling down to the quiet respectability and dignity of a financial and commercial district, with the shopping crowds further west and Westminster and Union streets the exact centre.
Other factors contributing to the transformation were the removal of the Post Office from lower Weybosset Street to the east end of Exchange Place, the building of the City Hall on Dorrance Street facing east on Exchange Place, the Dorrance Street improvement, consisting in the building of a new straight and wider thoroughfare at right angles to West- minster Street, and the building of the modern railway station on a new site farther west. The old railroad station fronted directly on Exchange Place with the most convenient entrance and exit opposite Exchange Street and Washington Row, and thus near to Market Square. When the new station was built, the plans included arrangements for carrying tracks above the city highways, and the site was placed west and north of the old location. From the new station the ramps for passengers and vehicles favored Dorrance Street, and the shopping crowd from towns and villages along the right of way poured through the new highway. Dorrance Street itself became an important business street, the land at the corners of West- minster Street and Dorrance Street carrying the highest tax rate per square foot in the state. It should not be assumed that there were no stores or shops elsewhere in the city; as a matter of fact main thoroughfares, particularly those along which street car routes were constructed, were lined with shops, the number of which increased consistently with the growth of the city and the needs of the people. The discussion here is restricted to the development of the central financial and shopping section.
ADVERTISING METHODS-The number of merchants advertising their wares for sale in early newspapers was almost as large as in the twentieth century. Advertising methods were vastly different, however. Most established houses carried a small "business card" in the local newspapers, much as the same practice prevails in country towns and villages. The card might indicate the merchant's patronage of the newspaper as a desirable community enterprise quite as much as his expectation of attracting customers. The same advertising matter was printed repeatedly, sometimes over periods of years without change ; the printer's footnote guide lines, if he used them to check his patrons, frequently carried the letters "tf," which meant "till forbidden," and indicated a contract for advertising that was to continue until the advertiser ordered it stopped. In modern practice the advertisement of yesterday is as stale as the newspaper that carried it. The merchant has new bargains to announce, a fresh appeal for customers, every day.
*Except the High Street Bank.
R. I .- 58
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The older merchant enumerated usually a list of wares carried as regular merchandise ; the type was small, and the tendency was to use type to cover all the space bought. Hence the specification of items tended to be exhaustive. Even the name of the advertiser and his business were in small type usually. Printers carried few fonts of larger sized type, and the art of display by rules and layout was not practiced. Rhode Island newspapers resorted infre- quently to the practice of building large letters by combinations of smaller letters, which was the rule of some metropolitan newspapers which carried no display type even so late as the twentieth century. In the development of display advertising venders of proprietary and patent medicines, tonics and sarsaparillas, lotions, salves and ointments, pills and other pan- aceas were leaders in their efforts to catch the reader's eye and thus gain his attention. Med- ical advertisers were almost the first to extend their patronage beyond the local field, thus laying the foundation for national advertising in the twentieth century. Occasionally, but infrequently until after 1875, advertisements were illustrated by line drawings; otherwise illumination was limited to the small cuts made and sold by type founders and carried in stock by printers.
The advertiser seldom announced the price at which articles were offered for sale; the rule of uniform prices and the practice of selling by clerks who are not authorized to do more than wrap up and deliver articles to customers who tender the marked price in return are strictly modern innovations in merchandizing. The merchant himself and his few skilled clerks expected to match wits with the shrewdest customers, honors resting with the Yankee who made the best bargain. "Fire sales" were few, because most fires involved total losses ; and the "anniversary," "birthday," "consolidation," "reorganization," "closing out," "altera- tion," "must move," "dollar day" and other sales of modern times were not known. Street calling by bell ringers and drummers, and similar devices were in use well into the nineteenth century. The wooden Indian offering a bunch of cigars or leaf tobacco, characteristic sign of the tobacco shop, has departed for the happy hunting ground. Almost the last stood on Westminster Street in Providence, one near Eddy Street, one in front of Butler Exchange, and one below Turk's Head. They had resisted the raids of generations of college youth seeking adornment for dormitories. Gone also are the large glass urns filled with colored water and the wooden mortar and pestle which announced the chemist and apothecary. Even the three balls of the pawnbroker tend to become memories only. Other street signs that indicated occupations and service rather than the name of the owner or proprietor of a store have disappeared from business streets; the striped pole of the barber is now almost alone as the last lingering trade symbol. In Rhode Island a century ago it was otherwise; Henry Cogswell Knight noticed on Main Street, about 1812, "the signs of three leather workers almost contiguous to each other. The first obtrudes upon the eye a saddle, painted upon a swing board ; . . . the next soothes the mind with a milk white lambkin, carved and ele-
vated upon a pedestal; . . the last offers you a couchant reindeer with branching antlers. . . . On the left side an apothecary has perched over his door a purblind owl. . ... Near the market on Cheapside, you espy a purple cluster of grapes suspended over the door of an English goods shop. . ... Across the street and there is nature herself-a lion pounding in a mortar.
. Cross over the bridge and see what there is upon a pillar near the Post Office: ah! the Turk's Head-as very like the Grand Turk, I am told, as is the statue at India Point bridge like our good old Captain Washington. . ... Cross over into Weybosset Street ; . . .
. when now what think you I see? A neat little carved and gilded rhinoceros, cruelly suspended by his back before the doors of a grocer. You observe near the Post Office . . a suspended hive of bees . . . . above the door of a grocer." The Turk's Head, in stone on the façade of a tall office building, still frowns down upon the traffic policeman at the lower junction of Westminster and Weybosset streets; and the bunch of grapes has marched
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up Westminster Street with the steady westward movement of the trading centre from Cheap- side to Mathewson Street.
Marked competition in retailing ready-made clothing for men and boys produced ingen- ious advertising methods in Rhode Island. A firm that opened a large retail clothing store on Westminster Street in Providence, besides entertaining a host of invited guests, including public officers, announced that it would throw from the roof of the building overcoats and suits of clothing for men. On the day appointed the streets in the neighborhood were thronged by men who surged backward and forward in a great mass packing itself tightly into advan- tageous positions near the walls. Windows and roofs of buildings overlooking the streets were crowded by others, who came to see but not to participate in the scramble. The clothing was thrown as advertised, but little was carried away. As a garment neared the milling crowd it was snatched by outstretched hands, usually several to the garment, which was torn to shreds by rivals for its possession, as each sought to hold what he had and to gain more. A sleeve, the tail of a coat, or one leg of a pair of pantaloons -- this was the trophy and the usual reward of diligence. The firm obtained a handsome profit on new business if it sold only the garments necessary to replace those worn by the scrimmagers and torn in the struggle, from which many men came away stripped of outer garments or in rags and tatters. The same house later offered a thoroughbred racing horse as a prize for customers, each of whom received a ticket for a drawing. The horse, "Billy D," was shown in one of the store win- dows, attracting crowds daily. A monster squash was displayed and offered to the customers who guessed the number of seeds. Boy customers were rewarded by most of the Providence clothing merchants, and many boys obtained thus a sled with a winter overcoat, or a bat and baseball with a spring suit of clothes. The sleds were factory made, were painted in bright colors, and were preferred to the clumsy, crude and heavy sleds of home construction. Each boy with his sled became an excellent advertising agent as he displayed the sled to playmates and praised it in the name of the clothier. The bats and balls also were excellent in quality. Besides these staple toys, skates, watches, books, whistles, tops and other things to gladden the heart of youth were given away, and the boy who needed overcoat or suit always knew where he wished Dad to buy it. Eventually boys' clothing could not be sold at all unless the merchant offered a gift ; all merchants were giving so that none had advantage, and the prac- tice was stopped by agreement because it was no longer profitable.
The devices in use had demonstrated the value of advertising in building business, and the public newspapers began to reap the reward of recognition of their facilities for carrying the name of a mercantile house far beyond the limit reached by its business signs, and with the name the message which the merchant had for a possible customer. Yet there were some merchants who "believed in signs," as in the instance of a clothing house on Washington Row, which for many years displayed a painted picture of a boy prone in the familiar position for punishment across the parental knee under an upraised slipper, with the legend, "We give the boys fits!" The art of street advertising was in embryo, however, until the introduction of the incandescent electric lamp made night signs possible, and transformed the downtown business section of Providence into a miniature Broadway* or a reasonably good reproduction of Forty-second Street .*
Providence was still a one-street city half a century ago, its "main" street called West- minster. It was the night before Christmas, 1885, and a light fall of snow had covered the city with a white blanket. Westminster Street was scarcely lighted; it was dotted with gas street lamps placed at regular intervals. The yellow fish-tail lights cast each a circle of radiance on the snow; beyond was darkness. Shops were open, and their windows giving on the street were lighted by gas, which threw a bright glare on the snow immediately in
*New York.
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front. Late shoppers hastened hither and thither; now and then a horsecar or a sleigh jingled by, the bells making pleasant music. The snow relieved the darkness somewhat which prevailed otherwise in the shadows between the street lamps. The retail district reached along the street from the Great Bridge to the Far West of the Hoppin Homestead building, in which the house of Warren & Wood displayed "a complete line of crockery." All the leading drygoods, clothing, boot and shoe, hat, jewelry, haberdashery, tobacco and other stores faced the main street, except those in the Arcade. Shoppers carried their purchases, large and small, and many resembled Santa Claus with his arms full of bundles; house-to- house delivery was not a part of the standard service rendered by retail merchants; most of the business was done on a cash and carry basis. Good humor prevailed if only because of the holiday with its message of peace and good will. Here and there a group stopped at a street corner to await a horsecar, the latter identified as to line and destination by a colored glass disk placed before an oil lamp. Other prospective passengers walked through cross streets to Weybosset Street, although the lighted Arcade was preferred by most for this pur- pose, thus to reach horsecars moving from west to east. The car was heated in extremely cold weather by a barrel coal stove at one end, and there was straw on the floor to keep the feet of passengers reasonably warm. This was Providence only forty-five years ago-and Providence, two centuries and a half old, was the second city in New England. Our street corner, and off the horsecar we go into the blackness as we leave the gas or oil lamp at the corner, for the oil lamp with its three string wicks and faint glimmer was still in use on streets not piped for gas. Home at last we gather around the kitchen stove to warm hands and feet. The stockings, awaiting Santa Claus, are hung in front of the old chimney, which has been bricked up since the iron stove replaced the open fireplace. Good children are in bed, and it is time for older children also to nestle deeply in feather beds and draw tightly around them the pile of blankets and comfortables.
DEPARTMENT STORES-The dry goods stores had become department stores by 1885. An announcement relating to the largest in Rhode Island in that year placed "the total area of store and working room" at "nearly two acres." "The business is very extensive and branches wider every year," the account continued. "In its care and maintenance the services of about 300 persons are required. . . . . Carpets and upholstery are new departments, comparatively, and are remarkably full and complete." Another store, which had removed to a new loca- tion, was described as "fully alive to the changes of fashion and custom that come with the changing years, and . ... prepared to meet the modern demand for all the new productions that are introduced and added to their line of business. The house always carries a full stock of dry goods, in all the regular and staple lines of fabrics, of the best foreign and domestic makes, for the wear of either men or women, together with a select assortment of the best English woolen cloths for gentlemen's garments, cloaks, shawls, fine laces, hosiery, choice upholstery, and a full line of new and popular dry goods in the various departments." Yet another "acquired a wide popularity because it offered a larger variety of fine dress goods, silks and choice prints than that to which the people of Providence had been accustomed." Reconstruction of the front of the building "gave the store the two finest single French plate glass windows in the city. . . . Method is everywhere displayed in the arrangement of the goods, the division of the store into departments, and the management of the force of clerks and messenger boys, so that in the rush of making sales and delivering packages confusion and delay seldom occur." Another announced replacement of "cash boys," or messengers for carrying money to the cashier's desk and returning change, by "the railway system of handling cash." The latter consisted of carrier boxes in the form of hollow wooden balls, which rolled on and between pairs of rails. By an ingenious adjustment of weights the balls, returning,
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passed over or tipped gates which permitted them to drop into the home station box, the heaviest ball opening the first gate, and the lightest the last, the others in succession in the descending order of weight. Other systems, introduced later, included boxes forced through tubes by compressed air, and various types of boxes and carriers moved by endless cables. In most stores some form of counter cash register has replaced the cash and change carriers.
The dry goods stores in Providence gradually extended the number of departments, though none ever boasted, as did the proprietor of a metropolitan establishment, that he carried under a single roof every article that a customer might ask for. The following list of sixty-six departments in one of the largest modern stores in Rhode Island is suggestive: Men's cloth- ing, boys' clothing, men's shoes, men's hats, overalls, men's gloves and hosiery, shirts and neckwear, men's underwear and sweaters, trunks and bags, shoe repairs and reglazing, house dresses, women's garments, millinery, ribbons, veiling and corsages, infants' wear, muslin and silk underwear, corsets, umbrellas, women's hosiery, knit underwear, handkerchiefs, floor coverings, furniture and bedding, upholstery and draperies, house furnishings, china and glassware, pianos and player rolls, flannels and washdress goods, linens and bedwear, silks, dress goods, linings, leather goods, patterns, laces and dress trimmings, notions and buttons, toilet articles, pictures, petticoats, stoves and refrigerators, sheet music, boys' furnishings, talking machines, stationery and cameras, women's and children's shoes, optical goods, shoe findings, beauty salon, jewelry and silverware, wall paper, women's neckware, electric wash- ers, sewing machines, bicycles and toys, photograph studio, better dresses, furs, girls' gar- ments, women's sweaters, bathing suits and blouses, art embroidery, auto tires and sundries, radio and accessories, foot service (chiropody), circulating library, lighting fixtures. The house sells almost every article of clothing or ornament worn by men, women, boys, girls and infants; and everything needed to furnish a house and equip it with household machinery. Besides, it carries complete lines of paints and brushes, lawn mowers and garden tools, garden hose, screen doors and window screens, lawn furniture, seeds, evergreen trees and other shrubs, fruit trees and fertilizers. For beautifying those who live in the house it maintains a beauty salon and barber shop (patronized principally by women), and it sells toilet and laundry soaps and powders, razors and shaving soaps and creams, cosmetics, lotions, perfumes, pomades and powders. The salesrooms and offices occupy an entire city block, acquired sec- tion by section as the original quarters needed extension; the building is five stories high above the basement. Across one street is another large building used as a warehouse. This store is equipped with an elaborate soda-water fountain ; it sells candy in packages and chew- ing gum, and pipes, but no tobacco. Among departments conducted in rival stores, but omitted in this instance, are restaurant and cafeteria, books and periodicals, boats and canoes and sporting goods. Two grocery stores and meat and produce markets once included in department stores have been separated, and a drug store established in a department store was abandoned after trial.
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