Shop talk: New York has it all

New York offers vintage boutiques, world-famous revamped department stores and street stalls — plus the January sales, says Sarah Turner

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Sarah Turner

9 January 2013

Next to a shop offering that most modern innovation, hand-crafted popcorn, I form an orderly, slightly earnest queue outside a redbrick tenement building in New York’s Lower East Side. In the 19th century, when the tired, huddled masses left Ellis Island, most of them ended up in this dirt poor, densely packed part of New York.

Since 1992, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has traced all the inhabitants of just one of the buildings, 97 Orchard Street, and last month its basement opened for the first time.

Leaning against a wooden bar, with brass instruments and pint glasses decorating the walls, I learn that a German-style tavern offering infant-friendly Kinderbeer kicked things off in 1871, followed by a kosher butcher and a Depression-era auction house selling off stock from bankrupted businesses before Sidney’s lingerie shop added a touch of intimacy in the 1970s.

This industry was replicated in all the shops in the street, while hand carts lined the pavement outside, all of them attempting to power up the American Dream with added hustle.

These days, shopping in the Lower East Side is less survival, more porcini cheddar popcorn. Small is stylised here, but at the same time that the Orchard Street butchery was going strong, entrepreneur Rowland Hussey Macy was fine-tuning the behemoth of New York shopping — the department store.

Founded in 1858, the novel concept of fixed prices and money-back guarantees took a while to take hold — takings for the first day totalled just $11.08 — but Macy’s powered onwards and upwards.

Taking over a whole city block on 34th Street in 1902, it became part of the New York landscape, introducing the city’s first Santa and acting as the setting for Miracle On 34th Street in the process.

These days it’s part of the city infrastructure thanks to the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, sponsors the Fourth of July fireworks, and is part sentimental icon (the rickety wooden escalators are much loved, even if they break down), part hard-nosed commercialism, with heavily marked discounts.

Compared with the jewel-box department stores of Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman in 5th Avenue, Macy’s has always gone for the expansive approach. With more than two million square feet of retail opportunities over 11 floors, it’s long been famed as the largest department store in the West (although there’s now a store in South Korea that’s apparently twice the size).

It’s an essential New York tourist stop and more than 20 million visitors a year walk out of its doors with everything from a Macy’s branded tote bag, apron, Christmas tree bauble or teddy bear, although it is starting to move away from its “pile ’em high” mentality.

The new shoe department has just opened on the first floor, with every style from sleek stilettos to sturdy sneakers, all tastefully laid out in the world’s largest shoe department (we’re back in that competitive territory). Alongside is a posh new Starbucks Reserve café, serving champagne alongside single estate coffees.

Downstairs, Louis Vuitton and Gucci are taking up residency, and on the sixth floor there will soon be a restaurant with views of the Empire State Building.

But head into the fashion departments and you can still find what Macy’s does best — good fashion, heavily discounted — with Levi jeans for under $50 in every colour, every style and every size.

In the old days, immigrants from Ireland were tossed across the Atlantic by boat. I flew on the British Airways service from London City Airport, touching down in Shannon to clear US customs there and emerging at the domestic terminal at JFK.

My hotel, too, is a cut above the cram ’em in tenements. The admirable Soho Grand dates from 1996 but minus a fin-de-siècle motif — double height ceilings, Art Nouveau-style murals and a cheerful, party-minded vibe.

Shopwise, here on West Broadway — surrounded by Victorian warehouse buildings — it gets a bit more expensive, from the perfect all-American biker boots at Frye on Spring Street to carefully curated avant-garde fashion at If on Grand Street. Next door to the hotel is Treasure & Bond, a micro-department store set up by luxury retailer Nordstrom. Its profits from shoes made out of Tyvek (the crinkly material used by courier companies) and candles that take scents way beyond jasmine and lavender go to New York-based charities. Philanthropic? Yes. Useful? I’m not sure.

More fun, and cheaper, are New York’s modern hand carts — street stalls selling everything from iffy art to jewellery and gifts including babygros with the logo of (now closed) CBGB — powered by entrepreneurially minded out- of-work actors and artists. The most original selection can be found in Nolita, across Broadway from Soho.

And then, just to come full circle, you head off to Brooklyn. This has, as Manhattan’s shopping fiends will tell you, some of New York’s most exciting and innovative shopping. And what do I find here but Dry Goods, which opened last year.

With its American-made rugs, jam-making kits, sturdy leather bags and denim overalls made by the same Tennessee firm since 1913, plus a sterling collection of clothes brushes, it’s a careful recreation of the sort of general stores that were once a staple of the Lower East Side.

Details: USA

British Airways has three nights at the Soho Grand, with business-class flights from London City Airport from £2,739pp room only, ba.com/newyork.

British Airways current sale fare from Heathrow to JFK £408.79, subject to restrictions, ba.com/sale

Hotel Week NYC runs until January 20, offering discounts of up to 50 per cent, njfpr.com

Frye, thefryecompany.com

Treasure & Bond, treasureandbond.com

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, tenement.org

Macy’s, macys.com

If, ifsohonewyork.com

Dry Goods, drygoodsny.com

nycgo.com

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Details: USA