Fulton Street mayhem and the fall of A&S

Everyone knew it was coming; police brass, having distributed a memo cautioning
merchants, would conveniently remove their officers from view. One year,
as the youthful mob assembled in Albee Square, I stood across the street
with two cops, watching the almost military precision of the riot’s
organizers. When the signal was given for the mob to march, the officers
glanced at each other, then quietly walked toward Livingston Street —
out of sight.

At least once, the riot began inside the old Mays department store, with
bandits looting merchandise and robbing customers. Mays responded by suddenly
shutting down, throwing onto Fulton Street thousands of bag-toting shoppers
in a recipe for chaos.

That year, the pandemonium was over rather quickly, but not before the
thugs invaded Abraham & Straus, where the pickings were of a higher
calibre. While some of the goods would undoubtedly end up beneath sticky-finger
Christmas trees, others were immediately sold on the street, within a
block or two of A&S.

Eventually, police did arrive, sirens blaring, and ended the disturbance.
I remained vexed by the scene’s incongruity, shamed by what I had
witnessed.

• • •

For a long while, Fulton Street was Brooklyn’s crown jewel. As late
as 1978, when The Brooklyn Papers began publication, it was home to A&S,
Mays, Korvettes and Martin’s, the grande dame of Brooklyn department
stores.

Although not as elegant as the “white glove” Martin’s,
A&S was unique, Brooklyn to its core. Even after local owners had
ceded control to Ohio-based Federated Department Stores, A&S remained
a leader in the borough’s civic affairs; but the times were changing.

My advertising director, Kevin Dunn, accompanied me to a meeting with
the store’s new advertising/marketing director. A&S did advertise
with us now and then, running civic-booster stuff, which was fine as far
as it went, but we were pushing for “retail” ads, the kind that
would turn our readers into shoppers.

While we were well prepared with demographics, numbers and all sorts of
tempting deals, it would be for naught. Our conversation was better than
cordial, but the bottom line was this: the ad boss at A&S hated being
in Brooklyn (and as the years passed we realized that most everyone at
the top of A&S would rather be somewhere else). She described how
the store had to send a limousine to bring her from Manhattan to Fulton
Street for her job interview and how, now that she worked there, she’d
park her car in a lot a couple of blocks away (the A&S garage, adjacent
to the store, was just too dangerous, she said); holding her “heart
in her hand,” she’d race to retrieve her vehicle at day’s
end.

We’d never convince her that Brownstone Brooklyn was an A&S market.

A&S wanted out, and began expanding, unsuccessfully, beyond New York.
Rival Macy’s, however, fared even worst and went bankrupt, after
which A&S’ parent, Federated, aquired Manhattan-based Macy’s
and moved what was left of the A&S corporate staff from Fulton Street
to 34th Street, and converted the Fulton store to a Macy’s.

Continued next week.