Holiday Windows Brighten a Bleak Retail Scene, but How Long Will They Last?<br />But the rise of Walmart and other discount chains in the mid-1960s, Ms. Whitaker said, “drove a stake into the heart of the downtown stores.” As shoppers focused on price above all else<br />and old-line stores moved to the suburbs, she added, “The department stores dispensed with just about everything — the displays, the decorations, the free gift wrap and alterations, the free delivery.”<br />It now seems ironic, Ms. Whitaker continued, that department stores were once criticized for overcommercializing Christmas with their window displays.<br />The window displays and holiday traditions “were never overtly commercial,” said Jan Whitaker, the author of “Service<br />and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class,” and other books about department stores.<br />Mr. Cohen said he got “all kinds of grief” from executives at Federated Department Stores after he spent over $100,000 to renovate the holiday windows at the flagship Lazarus department store in downtown Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1990s; at the time he was chairman<br />and chief executive of Lazarus, then a division of Federated.<br />Tiffany Bourre, a spokeswoman for Hudson’s Bay, the parent company of Lord & Taylor and Saks, assured me the sale of the Lord & Taylor building to WeWork would not affect the window displays in the future, and<br />that the company was committed to the store’s “rich history” of holiday traditions.<br />So when I heard a couple of months ago that Lord & Taylor was selling the Fifth Avenue building<br />that houses its flagship store to WeWork for $850 million, my first reaction was alarm: What would happen to the Lord & Taylor Christmas windows?<br />She said that the holiday windows and light show at Saks would continue “for years to come.”<br />Hudson’s Bay does not break out the cost of the window displays, but they are expensive.<br />“The department stores created a magical sense of occasion,” she said.
