The Selfridges Story: The Making and Unmaking of Harry (or Several Lessons in Cultivating Customer Satisfaction)

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Local history, Retailing history, Travel

“People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”
~ HG Selfridge

⊹⊹⊹ ⊹⊹⊹ ⊹⊹⊹

Before I ever visited the UK I wasn’t at all familiar with Selfridges. I knew about Knightsbridge and Harrods and its preciously preserved pedigree all right…we’ve done that! My first time in London I was on a bus travelling (make that crawling) down Oxford Street heading towards the West End when I was enlightened as to the existence of the second-best known upmarket London department store. As the bus idled stationary I spotted a sign in front of a building that said ‘Selfridges’, my first thought, I remember, was “strange name!”…but when I think about it now I vaguely recall that I had previously heard the name Selfridges, but without inquiring further at the time I sort of formed the literal impression that it was a store as the name sounded that “sold fridges”, ie, a purveyor of domestic white goods! So when I did eventually get my beak inside the store’s doors at 400 Oxford Street I was surprised to see lines and lines of (pricey) fashion wear, shoes, accessories, skin care products, bags and more – but not one refrigerator in sight! (in its time it has apparently sold most everything!)

Even without visiting Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street store, you may well be aware of it or of its US-born founder Harry Gordon Selfridge thanks to the recent ITV television series Mr Selfridge (first aired in 2013). The series was a period drama about the flamboyant, visionary retailer and the interactions that take place around him in his eponymous London department store✱.

A Marshall Field blueprint for London
Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge initially earned his business ‘spurs’ working for Chicago department store Marshall Field & Company (right), this segued into him purchasing his own department store in Chicago. In hardly any time at all the mercurial Selfridge abruptly re-sold the business, making a quick profit and retired to play golf. In 1906 while holidaying in London, Selfridge sensed a new retail opening for his entrepreneurial talents in the British capital. For £400,000 he purchased land and surrounds for a novel custom-built, mega-department store in the then unfashionable, western end of Oxford Street [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

“The American Invasion of London”
The London press was not initially warm to the notion of the American’s incursion into the world of London commerce. The City’s daily and drapery trade press described it as an “American Invasion of London” [Lawrence]. Selfridge’s loud in tone and bombastic approach to selling the project didn’t help in endearing him to the newspapers (described in some publications as being “aggressively big in scale”). Selfridge’s efforts to make the store a reality were driven by an unwavering vision: creating a “monumental retail emporium” was in his eyes the key to elevating “the business of a merchant to the Dignity of Science” (as he grandiosely put it). Selfridge believed to achieve that, he had to construct a gigantic “technologically advanced department store”, hence the massive amount of money, time and effort he put into the project [LAWRENCE, J. (1990). ‘Steel Frame Architecture versus the London Building Regulations: Selfridges, the Ritz, and American Technology’. Construction History, 6, 23-46. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41613676].

A ground-breaking, landmark modern steel-framed building
Construction of the Selfridge store was something of an architectural coup in itself. It won praise in its day from British building journals for its innovative construction methods…built with steel frames and reinforced concrete allowing for much narrower than usual walls, the frames permitted a far greater window area, so very large plate-glass windows could be installed (12 of which were the largest sheets of plate-glass then in the world!) – making for much more interior natural light and brightness (designed by famed US architect Daniel Burnham and associates). Originally comprising a 250′ x 175′ site, Selfridge’s had nine Otis passenger and two service lifts and six staircases. 100 separate departments were spread out over eight floors. While the physical construction of the Oxford Street store took only 12 months, Selfridge had first to overcome London City Council’s raft of objections (unprecedented size of the commercial structure, fire danger, etc). Selfridge and his engineers’ lobbying of the LCC Committee eventually resulted in the passing of two local building acts – LCC (General Powers) Acts of 1908 and 1909 – necessary for the Oxford Street project to be completed [Lawrence, ibid.]☯.

Rigid building regulations weren’t Selfridge’s only impediment to making his dream store a reality. Half-way through the project funding became a pressing issue when his partner and main backer Sam Waring, frustrated by Harry’s “grandiose and reckless approach” to the venture (Selfridge had grievously underestimated the complications of the project), withdrew his financial backing. The economic downturn in London (and in the US) at the time made alternative sources of funding a very grim prospect, and disaster was only narrowly avoided when a new backer, millionaire tea tycoon John Musker stepped in to rescue Selfridge [Gayle Soucek, Mr Selfridge in Chicago: Marshall Field’s, the Windy City and the Making of a Merchant Prince, (2015)]. After the big opening Selfridge remembered to make sure the store’s product lines included everything to do with tea-making (teapots, cups and saucers, sugar bowls, etc) [‘Selfridges: 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the department store’, (History Extra), www.historyextra.com].

Selfridge, customer-centred strategies ahead of the curve
Harry’s approach to retailing was characteristically innovative on many fronts. Selfridge placed tremendous faith in advertising, the 1909 campaign leading up to the store’s opening cost a reported $500,000 in 1909 money [‘Selfridge Dies: Ripon Lad Who Jolted Empire’, The Milwaukee Sentinel, 9-May-1947 (online fiche)] (Britain’s biggest ever ad bill to that point) and he used it imaginatively together with ingenious publicity campaigns. Selfridge was the first retailer to make popular the idea of “shopping for pleasure”, rather than it being solely a functional task undertaken for necessity (as people conceived of it prior to Harry’s advent). In-store activities and arrangements often were original and novel (eg, displaying the monoplane used by aviator Louis Blériot in the first cross-English Channel flight at Selfridge’s (1909)✜). Another interest-generating feature in the store was Logie Baird’s television prototype shown on display in 1925.

Those specially designed wide windows were put to optimal use, Selfridge was the first to utilise window dressing where he could show off the latest fashions and utensils in open display [‘Selfridges 7 things’, loc.cit.]. The staff at Selfridge’s Oxford Street store (initially comprising 1,400 employees) were instructed to assist customers in their purchases, not to pester or use any “hard-sell” tactics on them⊟. Harry’s philosophy was “first get them in, then to keep them there. Thereafter they would buy” (Woodhead). One of Selfridge’s more forward-thinking moves was to locate the goods where they were visible and accessible to customers all around the store’s interior (a practice he devised while at Marshall Field’s in Chicago), rather than hiding them away from sight under counters (as had been the practice in most retail stores hitherto). He also introduced the concept of the “bargain basement” to retailing, a section where shoppers could find regularly discounted commodities [‘Innovation Lessons From The World’s First Customer Experience Pioneer — Infograph’, (Blake Morgan), Forbes Magazine, 26-Jun-2017, www.forbes.com ; Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge, (2012)].

A visceral, holistic experience
Selfridge’s vision was to make the department store more than just a shop where you went to buy goods, he continued to introduce new features to Selfridges…elegant (moderately priced) restaurants, a library, reading and writing rooms and special reception rooms for French, American and ‘Colonial’ clientele. There were cookery demonstrations in the kitchenware section. All this marked a radical departure from the practices of other department stores which employed floorwalkers to ‘shoo’ people out of the store who were just hanging around and not actively engaged in buying an item! Even the store’s roof was put to productive if curious usage (a shooting range for an all-girl gun club as well as an ice rink✧) [Lawrence, loc.cit.].

The female shopper as an identified demographic
Selfridge saw the role of the department store in macrocosmic terms – “the store should be a social centre, not merely a place for shopping”. Unlike the conservative establishment of the day and much of the mainstream, Selfridge endorsed the Suffragette Movement…the new store was (in part) “dedicated to woman’s service”. In a 1913 advertisement Selfridge described the store thus: Selfridge and Co: The Modern Woman’s Club-Store” [‘Suffrage Stories/Campaigning for the Vote: Selfridge’s and Suffragettes’, Woman and her Sphere, (Elizabeth Crawford), 16-May-2013, www.womanandhersphere.com; ‘Selfridge Lovers: The Secret behind our house’, www.selfridge.com]. Astute businessman that he was, Harry popularised shopping as a leisure activity specifically for women…to make it a more welcoming and conducive place for them to spend time (and money!), he displayed freshly scented floral arrangements and had open vistas in the store, he employed musicians to perform and added beauty and hair salons (Paris-inspired) and art galleries. And he introduced public restrooms for women to the store (the first time ever done!)❅
[Forbes, loc.cit.].

The H.G.S. leadership style
As retail magnate go, Selfridge went against the grain for his day by not being an authoritarian business leader. He was temperamentally inclined towards fairness with regard to remuneration, increasing the wages of his staff, elevating them above “wage slavery”, treating them as employees as opposed to ‘servants’ (cf. Harrods) [ibid.]…not to overstate it, Selfridges shop floor staff were still exposed to long, long hours of drudgery but they were paid a livable wage for their arduous labours. A sample of the quotes attributed to Selfridge reflect his anti-dictatorship approach to business and interpersonal relations: “The boss drives his men, the leader coaches them” ; “The boss depends on authority, the leader on good will” ; “The boss says ‘I’, the leader says ‘We'” ; “The boss inspires fear, the leader inspires enthusiasm” ; “The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown, the leader fixes the breakdown” ; etc.✥ [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, op.cit.]

Tower folly
Selfridge’s thrived, prospered and grew after the Great War (the store size doubled). Things didn’t always go the Wisconsin-born retail magnate’s way however…a couple of commercial reversals suffered by Harry during the decade concerned his plans for erecting a massive tower from the building which was rejected by the LCC Committee because of excessive height, and possibly also because it would have vied with the iconic St Paul’s Cathedral for attention (a fortunate outcome perhaps as the model drawings for the tower suggest the result would have been an incongruous coupling of architectural forms and a hideous eyesore!) [Lawrence, op.cit.]. The other setback was Selfridge’s proposal for a tunnel between the store and the nearest tube station, Bond Street, the plan ultimately got kiboshed!

Harry on the downslide
By the late Twenties Selfridge & Co was at the top of its game, the name was synonym with quality merchandise and Selfridge took its place as a stellar institution on the London commercial scene. Some time after the onset of the Great Depression things started to turn badly pear-shaped for Selfridge, as for businessmen as a whole. Harry Selfridge contributed to his own decline however by persisting in his flamboyantly extravagant spending. He squandered money on his womanising ways for which he earned a certain notoriety, for instance, $4M was wasted on his dalliances and affairs such as with the Dolly Sisters (Hungarian jazz dancers) – a part of his story that the TV series was quick to focus on) [Forbes, loc.cit.. By 1940 the company owed £250,000 in taxes and Selfridge was deep in debt to the bank, forcing him to sell out and retire from the business (retaining a modest annual consultancy stipend) [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, op.cit.; Milwaukee Sentinel, op.cit]

Selfridges’ Birmingham Bullring store ▼Selfridges post H.G.S.
Selfridge & Co’s reversal of fortunes signalled a move from its circling competitors…rival department chain John Lewis & Partners acquired some of Selfridges’ provincial stores in the Forties, which was a preliminary move to John Lewis’ eventual takeover of the flagship Oxford Street store (1951). In turn John Lewis was itself acquired by the Sears Group in 1965. Its current owners, the Anglo-Canadian Galen Weston company bought Selfridges in 2003 for a reported £598M. Today the store name ‘Selfridges’ survives on the Oxford Street building, and in the three other regional branches in the counties (Trafford Centre and Exchange Square, both in Manchester, and the Bullring in Birmingham).

FN: Harry Selfridge from when he first arrived was perceived widely as a Trans-Atlantic “blow-in”, splashing his (and his wife’s) money around, vociferously determined to show the established home-grown retailers what a ‘superior’ type of modern department store looked like. Selfridge displayed a talent for polarising opinion…to his dazzled admirers he was “the Earl of Oxford Street”, the flashy Midwest American merchant was “as much a part of the sights as Big Ben” (as one columnist waxed lyrically), but to his detractors (including many of his competitors and much of the London press) he was merely a “vulgar American tradesman” or worse [Milwaukee Sentinel, loc.cit ; Woodhead, op.cit.].

PostScript: ‘Selfridges gets Sixties hip
In 1966, Selfridges, by now under Sears Holdings boss Charles Clore, recognised the youth market with a separate outlet for young women, Miss Selfridge (forming a link back to Harry Selfridge’s traditional focus on female customers). The new store in Duke Street signalled Selfridges’ wholesale embrace of the Sixties’ fashion revolution. Miss Selfridge used mannequins based on the straight line form of 1960s iconic model Twiggy and sold the latest in Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin fashions. In the early 2000s Miss Selfridge was acquired by the Arcadia Group [‘Selfridges 7 things’, op.cit.].

“The Queen of Time” AKA Ship of Commerce Statue ▼
⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎

✱ described as “Downton Abbey with tills” [” ‘Mr Selfridge’: It’s ‘Downton Abbey’ with tills…”, The Telegraph, (Daphne Lockyer), 15-Dec-2012, www.telegraph.co.uk]
☯ the impressive Selfridge facade, personifying power and permanence, was later complimented by the addition of a decorative Art-Deco motif – the ‘Queen of Time riding her Ship of Commerce’ (clock-statue by Gilbert Bayes)
✜ around 12,000 visited the store to view the displayed history making French monoplane…no doubt plenty of these visitors also made spontaneous purchases while they were in Selfridge’s premises [Forbes, op.cit.]
⊟ Selfridge possibly was quite consciously also trying to make his front-line staff as unlike Harrods’ staff – who had a reputation for ‘snootiness’ and stiff formality – as he could! [Milwaukee Sentinel, loc.cit]
✧ recently the roof was again used in idiosyncratic fashion, by being turned into a “boat lake” and a “putt-putt” mini-golf course for customers
❅ in return, when protesting suffragettes smashed shops windows in Oxford Street, Selfridge’s was one of the few left unscathed
✥ other (very famous) attributed ‘Selfridgeisms’ are “the customer is always right” and “only xx shopping days till Christmas”

Harrods: Haunt of the Self-consciously Posh, the Shopaholic and the Curious in Search of a Luxury Fix

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Retailing history

If you mention the name Harrods today to any self-respecting ‘shopaholic’, don’t be surprised to see them salivate at the prospect of exploring a shoppers’ paradise which boasts 330 different outlets – names such as Adidas by Stella McCartney, Armani, Christian Lacroix, Givency, Hugo Boss, Polo Ralph Lauren, R.M. Williams and Yves Saint Laurent all on the one site! It’s an appeal that has massive international traction too, visitors to London with just a minimal amount of shopping curiosity in their DNA will ink in a trip to the Knightsbridge SW3 store on their “must do” lists (even if only to pick out the least expensive souvenir gift they can find, or failing that the green and gold Harrods carrier bag!). But Harrods is more than a high street mega-store, it is an institution with staying power and expensive tastes – its intriguing backstory reaches nearly 170 years into the past to the early days of Victorian Britain.

Harrods was the brain-child of London draper Charles Henry Harrod…from the 1820s he had small drapery and grocery businesses in the East End but the salient year for the company’s future trajectory was 1849. In this year Harrod moved his business to Brompton Road (Knightsbridge), its present and ultimate location. Harrods’ mid-19th century relocation to Knightsbridge was strategic in its timing and advantageous to the company. Knightsbridge and Western London were areas just being opened up to development at the time. Most opportune, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was held in nearby Hyde Park and Henry Harrod was able to capitalise on its drawing power to increase the store’s trade.

After some formative years on Brompton Road, the Harrods business bounded ahead especially after the founder’s son Charles Digby Harrod succeeded him in the 1860s. Under the energy and drive of Digby’s leadership Harrod expanded in piecemeal manner, accumulating neighbouring properties and land through astute purchases. A fire in 1883 razed Harrods to the ground, a calamity which Digby turned into an opportunity to rebuild the department store on a larger scale. Architecturally, the new Harrods was palatial in style with a terracotta tile facade decorated with cherubs and swirling Art Nouveau windows and a Baroque-style dome [‘Harrods’, (Civitatis London), www.londonbreak.com].

Control of Harrods stayed in the Harrod family until 1894✱ when Richard Burbridge took over the running of the department store. Among Burbridge’s store innovations was the introduction of the first escalator in England in 1898. The escalator caused quite a stir among patrons, shock and horror even for some perhaps…so much so that precautionary measures were taken by staff, Harrods shopmen would perch themselves at the top of the escalator ready with brandy and smelling salts at hand for any customers who found the strange and novel experience of riding on the “moving staircase” (as it was oft called in the early days) too much! [‘Harrods’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

It was under Burbridge’s reign that Harrods’ profitability escalated⌻ and the business established its brand and retail style…high-end quality, expensive products but the best quality and value for money. And it was during this time that Harrods gained a reputation for the purveyance of goods and merchandise that was not easily obtainable elsewhere, hence the firm’s motto, Omnia Omnibus Ubique (Latin for “All things for all people, everywhere”). The other constant in the Harrods ethos and credo is service, the retailer has always prided itself on the advice and assistance given to customers, as the tag-line on Harrods’ home page seeks to stress: “Enjoy exemplary personal service and an experience that can only be found at Harrods.”

Pets are us!
That penchant for providing the unusual and unexpected led Harrods to diversify into the pet supply business in 1917, but not just offering the commonplace, suburban garden-variety “moggies and mutts”. Harrods’ Pet Kingdom went for the real exotica in animals. For those exclusive customers who could afford it, Harrods acquired tigers, panthers, camels and the like. Who wanted such an exotic pet? In the main customers tended to be politicians, actors and celebrities. Noël Coward was the recipient of just such a gift, a friend purchasing an alligator for the playwright/composer/director/ actor/singer. Ronald Reagan, when running for California governor in the 1960s, contacted the store seeking a baby elephant (elephants being the symbol and mascot of the US Republican Party). Harrods’ legend has it that the staff assistant who took the call from America, replied to the future US president’s enquiry with the words, “Would that be African or Indian, sir?”✥ [‘Harrods’ pet department to shut after nearly 100 years’, (Pat Sawer), The Telegraph, 10-Jan-2014, www.telegraph.co.uk]

Pet shop boys
By far the most celebrated of Harrod pet stories is that of Christian the lion cub. Spotted by two young Australian backpackers in a cage in Harrods in 1969, the three-month-old lion ended up back in the boys’ trendy Chelsea flat. A year later through the agency of actors Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, the rapidly growing lion was repatriated to Africa and set free by wildlife conservationist George Adamson in Kenya. Most people are aware of the story as a result of the video made documenting the two backpackers’ later reunion with Christian in Kenya (see also Footnote).

The extraordinary state of affairs that created Harrod’s zoo of wild animals could not last for ever. The passing of the Endangered Species Act in 1976 signified the end of this trade. After that, Harrods’ Pet Kingdom had to satisfy itself with selling more conventional household pets, cats, dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs and the like. In 2014 Harrods’ management pulled the plug altogether on the pet shop, the space was given over to an expansion of the store’s womenswear department [Sawer].

Harrods of Manchester and Buenos Aires
After WWI Harrods entered an expansion period, acquiring other smaller retail outlets, most notably Kendals in (Deansgate) Manchester. After the takeover the name was changed to Harrods Manchester, but this met with strong disapproval from Mancunians, both staff and customers, and the name reverted to Kendals Milne in the 1920s [‘Kendals name dropped forever’, (David Ottewell), Manchester Evening News, 28-Oct-2005,www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk. Harrods no longer own Kendals, in 1958 ownership passed to department chain House of Fraser, and as of 2018, is owned by Sports Direct. Before the venture in Manchester, Harrods opened its one and only overseas outlet in Buenos Aires (1914). The Downtown BA store stayed in Harrods’ hands only until 1922 when it was bought by Argentinian retailers. Harrods Buenos Aires continues to operate independently under that name but a legal injunction prevents it from using the name ‘Harrods’ outside of Argentina [‘Harrods Buenos Aires’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Ownership passes offshore
As the 20th century progressed, Harrods’ rising prestige and continued growth made it a desirable retail takeover target (despite a terrorist attack by the IRA outside the store in 1983 which killed six bystanders). In 1985 Egyptian shipping magnate Mohamed Al Fayed and his brothers gained control of the House of Fraser group which included Harrods (at a cost of £615M). Under Fayed Harrods’ growth proceeded and added his own personal touches to the store, nothing more personifies that than the (some would say) garishly lavish and cluttered Egyptian Hall✫. An even more personal touch is Fayed’s staircase memorial to his son Dodi and (Lady) Di (replete with a bronze statue of the couple with symbolic seagull). In 2010 Fayed sold Harrods to another foreign concern, Qatar Holdings (ie, the Qatari Royal family) for £1.5bn, citing as his reason ‘frustrations’ over government delays re a Harrods “pension scheme” [Mohamed Al Fayed reveals why he sold Harrods’, (Andy Bloxham), The Telegraph, 27-May-2010, www.telegraph.co.uk].

The Harrods dress code
In 1989 Harrods introduced a dress code to the store (in Harrodspeak its called “Visitors’ guidelines”). The code specifies that the following are not permitted within the store – beachwear, Bermuda shorts, ripped jeans, bare mid-rifts or revealing clothing, uniforms of any description, thongs or flip-flops, cycling gear✦. In addition no visible tattoos are allowed, nor are clothing which have lettering with “objectionable language or design” (not exactly a formula to maximise Harrod’s sales potential with Gen-X’ers and Gen-Y’ers!). Backpacks must be carried in front of visitors, not worn on the shoulders⋇. Harrods a beacon of good deportment and presentation seeking to keep out the “riff-raff”? Wanting its patrons to all look like posh, debonair types? Snobbish elitism aside, management’s decision was arguably a rational response (albeit with a degree of overkill!) to the views expressed by Harrods’ core clientele (traditionally 60 per cent of Harrods customers live within three miles of the shop in the so-called Tiara Triangle of affluent Knightsbridge and Kensington). Harrods’ feedback from local clients, its rich ‘sophisticates’, was that they were increasingly unhappy shopping side-by-side with people who were dressed scruffily or in bad taste [‘Don’t come as you are: There is only Harrods dress code’, (Louise Levene), The Independent, 18-Jul-1994, www.independent.co.uk].

The Chinese are coming
By 2017 the basis of Harrods’ profitability had shifted – internationally. The firm’s efforts in courting the growing Chinese Middle class over the previous decade had paid off (managing director Michael Ward has been making four trips a year to China over that period to develop the budding relationship). Chinese shoppers, with their focus firmly on high-end fashion and accessories, were now outspending British ones in this most English of department stores, Ward disclosed that the Chinese made more than £200M worth of purchases at Harrods in 2016 [‘Chinese customers heralded as Harrods’ biggest spenders’, (Bo Leung), China Daily, 28-Nov-2017, www.chinadaily.com.cn].

Safe in Harrods’ hands
A less well-known service that Harrods has provided for over 120 years is located at basement level in the store. Since 1897 the mega-rich of different nationalities (foreign royals, VIPs, movie stars, etc) have entrusted Harrods with their money and their assets – works of art, antiques, collectibles and other valuables. These are held in secure safe deposit boxes and strong rooms within the Harrods building [‘What You Don’t Know About Harrods (But the Rich and Famous Do)’, (Michael Levin), Huffington Post, 22-Feb-2017, www.huffingtonpost.com].

Harrods as you see it today in 2018 is five million square feet of department store, eight levels x 330 individual departments and 5,000 staff, with additional outlets in Greater London (airport stores at Heathrow and Gatwick). As well as the Egyptian Hall, there is a Crystal Room, a large and showy Food Hall (the Arts and Crafts tilework is a standout), a Wellness Clinic, 28 separate dining and drinking establishments, interior decorators, a travel shop, Waterstone’s book shop et al, Bespoke tailoring, a Floral Couturier, a Toy Concierge (who will help you source out the world’s most expensive toys – of course!) and much, much more.

Footnote: Harrod’s Pet Exotica was in synch with a prevailing vibe in European culture, especially in the interwar period. It was a vogue for the fashionable and chic of society (actors, artists, musical performers, etc) to have (and be seen in public having) exotic animals, singer Josephine Baker had her pet cheetah, artist Frida Kahlo had a granizo (a fawn), actress June Havoc a toucan, artist Salvador Dali an ocelot. Even later, after the war, the exotic pet was a fashion accessory de jour for the famous. Sometimes the pairings were undisguisedly and unashamedly publicity-driven, eg, Salvador Dali walking an anteater on a lease in a London subway. Harrods itself has been known to resort to blatant PR stunts involving animals to promote itself, eg, the pop group ‘The Small Faces’ were photographed in the 1960s walking baby crocodiles in Belgravia borrowed from nearby Harrods! Recently, Harrods promoted its reputation for extravagance by using a live cobra to ‘guard’ a display of ruby and diamond-encrusted sandals valued at £62,000 [‘Eleven secrets of Harrods’, (Laura Reynolds – The Londonist), 12-Apr-2016, www.londonist.com]Retailer with a shady past: CH Harrod ▲
PostScript: A skeleton in the merchant’s cupboard
One aspect of the Harrods story that doesn’t get a mention whenever Harrods promotes its long tradition of luxury merchandising and commodity versatility, concerns a dark chapter in the founder’s early career. In 1836 (when the business was still at Cable Street, Whitechapel) Charles Henry Harrod was convicted of receiving stolen goods (and of trying to bribe a policeman) and sentenced to transportation to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) for seven years. Fortunately for Harrod, the court defence presented by his lawyer and a raft of supporting character references got the grocer’s sentence commuted to one year in Millbank Prison. Had Harrod been transported to the Tasmanian penal colony, the illustrious retail history of Harrods would never have come to fruition [(Robin Harrod) ‘A brief history of Harrods’, BBC History Magazine, 23-Mar-2017, www.historyextra.com].
≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛≛
✱ although in 1889 Harrods became a public company, and remained so until Mohamed Al Fayed’s takeover in 1985 when it reverted to being a private company
⌻ from when Burbridge became managing director in 1894 to 1916, Harrods’ profits increased from £16,000 to in excess of £200,000 [‘Richard Burbridge’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✥ this anecdote has a “urban myth” feel to it…and it verges on the realm of apocrypha when you take into account the similar sounding variations on it that were doing the rounds, eg, in the early days of Harrod’s Pet Kingdom it was said that a lady phoned the store asking for a camel, to which the assistant also in this case replied, “Would that be one hump or two, madam?” Slightly surprising not to hear Elton John’s name among the celebrity owners of Harrods’ exotic animals, it sounds like it would have been Reggie’s kind of thing to do in the Seventies
✫ to get the full effect of the “full-on” Egyptian motifs you are supposed to ascend the Egyptian escalator and take in the view from there – which includes faux-hieroglyphics, a sphinx with the head of Mo Fayad(?!) and a zodiac-design ‘night’ ceiling. While you are in the vicinity you can hop off the escalator on the first floor to avail yourself of the ultra-swish “luxury washrooms”, in the presence of an attentive attendant ready to pass you an unused hand towel at the appropriate time
✦ among the famous to be barred entry on dress grounds include singers Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. Others excluded include a young woman with a Mohican haircut and a soldier in uniform
⋇ Harrods are a bit funny also about where exactly you can and can’t take photographs within the store

Levittown: The Attainment of an Affordable, Socially Upwardly Mobile Home and Lifestyle – for Some! (Part II)

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Popular Culture, Racial politics, Regional History

The first Levittown housing development on a former potato farm on New York’s Long Island (1947-1951) was seen as a ‘godsend’ by GIs returning from the war. Two-bedroom homes in the suburbs at a cost of only $6,990 with a minimal amount of money down (zilch down if you were a GI), seemed an opportunity too good to miss. The only catch was you had to be White as well as a veteran to get one! William Levitt’s planned housing development was intended for Caucasians only, restrictive covenants were inserted into sales contracts barring African-American families from membership of these new, model suburban communities.

Building comfortable White enclaves?
With Black veterans of WWII turned away from Levittown, Bill Levitt was forced to defend his exclusivist policy. Despite avowing (rather hollowly) that “as a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice”, Levitt sought to justify his position on the grounds that a White-only community was best for business. He argued that if he sold “to one Negro family, 90 to 95 per cent of White customers would not want to buy into the community”. Levitt was clearly not prepared to be an agent of social change if it meant a diminution of business profitability…self-interestedly and rather lamely he protested that it was unreasonable to saddle one builder with “the entire risk and burden of a vast social experiment” (even though the particular “one builder” in this case had been recognised by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America) [‘When the Niggers Moved into Levittown’: Review of David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 63 (Spring 2009): 80–81; Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109]. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was complicit with Levitt and other developers in the perpetuation of the practice of segregation, despite its clear violation of federal housing laws [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org]. Little wonder then that African-Americans saw the housing market as tainted, a “symbol of racial inequality”✱.

ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/image-22.jpg”> The Myers[/cap
Levitt received a phalanx of criticism for the racially restrictive clause⍍…the NAACP (National Committee for the Advancement of Colored People) and the ACLU (American Civil Rights Union) campaigned against it, a Committee to End Discrimination for formed to specifically take on the task of fighting housing segregation. In 1957 a Black family moved into one of the homes in Levittown Pennsylvania⌖. After Daisy and William Myers (and their children) arrived in the Dogwood Hollow section of the estate, they were subjected to ongoing harassment and intimidation by White bigots nightly outside their home. Some Levittowners called in “professional supremacists”, the Ku Klux Klan to coordinate the protest (jeering crowds milling on the front lawn, cross burnings, Confederate flags, rocks thrown through the Myers’ windows, petitions to force the family out). After the local police failed to protect the family, the protesting crowds were eventually ended only after intervention by state troopers✫ [‘White Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA’, www.historyengine.richmond.edu; ’60 years later, the Levittown shame that still lingers’, (Jerry Jonas), Bucks County Courier Times, 12-Aug-2017, www.buckscountycouriertimes.com].

Desegregation of Levittown
Levitt resisted the criticism and made his third mass-produced settlement, Willingboro/Levittown in New Jersey, another Whites only community (no Blacks but it did permit White ‘ethnics’ – Hispanics/Latinos and Jews). By 1960 Willingboro had its first African-American family residing there (by 1970 it was 11 per cent Black). Only in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, did Levitt come out and announce that Levittown housing developments would no longer be racially segregated. Pointedly this occurred at the same time as the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act into law [Kushner].

Over the years many sociological studies and much cultural criticism has focused on the Levittown housing model. An early take on Levittown described the housing project in aspirational working class terms as “the dream come true of the skilled mechanic in the blue dungarees” [‘Levittown U.S.A.’, A. Miller, Phylon Quarterly, 19(1), 1st Quarter 1958, 108-112]. Many observers have portrayed Levittown as a double-edged sword…”Levittown embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story”, some saw Levittown’s achievements symbolising America’s can do” spirit, its ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but for many liberals it symbolised violent prejudice, unthinking conformity and race-based exclusion [‘Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburb’ (C Galyean), US History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com].

Sanitised homogeneity of Levittown
From the time of Levittown’s first outing in New York in 1947, some critics were concerned than the large-scale experiments in housing may turn into mass slums of suburban sprawl. If they weren’t thought of as slums, they were characterised as bland and unoriginal. Sociologist Lewis Mumford depicted the developments as comprising a “low-grade, uniform environment from which escape is impossible” [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com]. A common perception of Levittown from the outside looking in that has become generic is of an over-sanitised suburb consisting largely of identical housing [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Standardised houses produce standardised people was a popular view of critics at the time. Some went further and labelled Levittown a “social failure and an environmental disaster” [Steven Conn].

From an aerial or from a panoramic view, Levittown did leave itself susceptible to satire…the clear-cut “cookie-cutter” pattern of little boxes and white picket-fence wholesomeness invited comparisons with the world of the 1950s as portrayed on American television. The neighbourhood houses and their neat configurations resembled the sets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best: images of irenic and idyllic communities of harmonious middle class suburbia…in other words, they looked like the cruel parodies of the American dream detached from realities – as depicted on the small screen [Review of Diane Harris (Ed), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, (2010), (DR Contosa)].

Customising a Levittowner
The view of the Levittown landscape as fixed and immutable has been rejected by some observers who point out that the owners themselves were the agents of change and non-conformity…after they settled in some of the residents altered the nature of their tract-houses to suit themselves and their lifestyle – extending a standard utilitarian Cape Cod or a Rancher to express the individuality of their homes. They also converted car ports into garages or additional rooms for new children, and the like [Schuyler]. Furthermore, Richard Lacayo argues that Levitt homes were made to be customised, the original structures were basic and over time homeowners added features such as porches, dormers and new wings [Lacayo].

Un-Americanism, McCarthyism and Levitt
The formative days of the first Levittown projects coincided with the McCarthyist period of political witch-hunts aimed at exposing supposed communists within America. By a curious convergence of mutual interests, Senator Joe McCarthy joined up with fellow illiberal Bill Levitt in promoting the virtues of Levittown (“a model of the American way” McCarthy declared). In one of his incendiary speeches McCarthy equated public housing (Levitt’s competitors) with communism [‘The Levittown Legacy’, (Ellen Leopold), Monthly Review, 01-Nov-2000, www.monthlyreview.org]. Levitt returned the favour by vilifying anyone who opposed his segregationist practices as ‘communist’, linking Levittown to the McCarthyist cause, and by endorsing the Levittown way of housing as a more American and capitalist alternative to public housing [Galyean].

In 1968 Levitt sold Levitt & Sons to telecommunications goliath ITT for a cool $92M. Subsequent attempts by Levitt to replicate the glory days of Levittown in overseas housing projects (Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela) floundered, and then a big project in Orlando, Florida, also went “belly up”, with dire personal consequences for the realty developer. Levitt misused funds belonging to customers and from his charitable trust [‘Tough Times for Mr. Levittown’, (MT Kaufman), New York Times Magazine, 24-Sep-1989, www.nytimes.com]. The once great ‘King of Suburbia’ – whose multi-multi-million dollar business at its height was constructing 12 houses a day on its construction sites – died in debt, still dreaming of pulling off one more mega-housing triumph.

FN: By the late 1980s there were high taxes imposed on individual Levittown properties due to the absence of a commercial tax base. Levitt recognised, all-too belatedly, that this was a weakness of his developments (the estates were designed without adjacent industrial/commercial complexes)… which also deprived residents of a local employment source [Kaufman]. Another ironic twist for Levitt whose marketing mantra always invoked the affordability of a Levitt home, in 1988 homes in Levittown Philadelphia had a $200,000 price tag on them! [‘It Started With Levittown in 1947: Nation’s 1st Planned Community Transformed Suburbia’, (JF Peltz), Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com]

PostScript: “Little Boxes”
The period from the mid/late Fifties to the early Sixties saw a heightening of criticism of Levittown (and its clones) in literary and cultural forms. US novels of the period presented a downbeat, unappealing and even bleak view of life in a Levittown style environment, especially John C Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Social critic Keats wrote of the postwar suburban ‘solutions’, “find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums”, Yates spoke of an era dominated by “a general lust for conformity”. The takeaway message of these works was that the tract-home buyer was entering a stultifying world of social alienation, the anonymity of suburbs, impersonal supermarkets, inane ‘mod’ gadgetry and mortgage servitude✜…bleak stuff indeed! To William H Whyte these were the “new package suburbs” whose residents (were) “transient, interchangeable cogs in the engine of corporate America” [Schuyler]. The critique of the Levitt house also extended to pop music of the day, Malvina Reynolds’ song ‘Little Boxes’ added a similar disparaging note to the Levittown commentary.

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✱ even after the removal of racial exclusion covenants in the 1960s, the 2000 Census revealed that Caucasian residents of Levittown, Bucks County, still comprised 98 per cent of the population
⍍ Kenneth Jackson has argued that the problem would have been avoided had Levitt simply made Levittown available to all from the start, he asserts that the demand for houses after the war was so great that White buyers wouldn’t have been put off by the prospect of having some Black neighbours [quoted in Schuyler]
⌖ it had been sold to the African-American couple by the home’s original owner (Levitt was legally powerless to prevent the re-selling of Levittown properties)
✫ the 2017 George Clooney movie Suburbicon is a fictionalised interpretation of the Myers Levittown incident
✜ the acerbic (other) Mr Keats followed up The Crack in the Picture Window with The Insolent Chariots (1958), a comparable hatchet job on the automobile and Americans’ problematic relationship with it

Levittown: The Attainment of an Affordable, Socially Upwardly Mobile Home and Lifestyle – for Some! (Part I)

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, Commerce & Business, Popular Culture, Racial politics, Regional History

Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.

Into this scenario, at a most opportune time, walked the Levitt family, father Abraham and sons Bill and Alfred. Bill Levitt, who took over the family real estate development business from his father, saw a chance to meet the country’s pressing accommodation needs by mass producing houses at lower cost. Levitt and Sons, as the company was called, had already entered the field pre-war, initially successfully but had failed in its first foray into the high-volume sector✱. Venturing into postwar low-cost housing bore a certain irony for the Levitts – as they had began their career in property development during the Depression building and selling high-end, custom-made houses to upper middle class people (the Strathmore project in Manhasset, Long Island). Indeed, the years spent making and selling exclusive, upscale properties to the gentry of New York made the family rich [‘William Levitt Facts’, (Your Dictionary), www.biography.yourdictionary.com].

Levittown, New York
The first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.

A revolutionary approach to housing
Prior to the advent of the Levittown model, house construction was done in a unitary fashion, a building company would work on a new home until completed and then move on to the next project (the average builder had been constructing only about four to five homes a year). William and Alfred Levitt✫, building on the mass-production experience of Californian builders, devised something radically different, a totally new division of labour to speed up the process dramatically. Construction was divided into 27 separate steps or operations, each worker or specialised team of workers would complete one step and then move to the next house to repeat the step there, and so on (for example one worker’s job would be the singular task of going from house to house bolting washing machines onto the floor all day!)[Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531].

Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.

Vertical integration
Key to the spectacular success of Levitt & Sons (at its peak the company was constructing homes at the staggering rate of one every 16 minutes!), and its rapid prosperity, was the way it achieved a vertical integration of the industry…the company purchased its own forests in Oregon and started its own mills to provide the lumber it needed; a lot of the parts came in prefabricated; Levitt & Sons even made its own nails. It also purchased materials in mass quantities thus avoiding markups on prices paid [Schuyler]. By buying directly from the manufacturer, Levitt’s saved through cutting out the middleman in the process. Kenneth Jackson credited the Levitt brothers with “transforming a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process” [KT Jackson, Crabtree Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)].

Integral to Bill Levitt’s cunning strategy for success was his exclusion of labour unions from his projects and his capacity to persuade lawmakers into softening industry regulations making Levittown easier to achieve [‘William Levitt Facts’]. Another huge advantage in boosting the success of Levitt’s projects was the securing of mortgage financing incentives from the federal government (veterans could buy into the estates with little or no down-payment) [‘Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)’, (Suzanne Lashner Dayanim, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org].

Levittown, Pa. ca.1959

Levittown, Pennsylvania

The second Levittown (commenced in 1952) was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. The Levitt houses built had limited exterior variations – six types: the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, the Country Clubber – but again they were moderately priced with low down-payments. At project’s end, 1958, a total of 17,311 homes had been built on the site [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Growth and expansion of the prototype
Eventually the Levittown concept of housing estates extended elsewhere – both far and wide. In Burlington County, New Jersey, Levittown Willingboro started in 1958, followed by Levittown Largo in Maryland, 1963, and two other Maryland communities, Bowie (1964) and Crofton (1970). As well, a Levittown in Puerto Rico was built in 1963, and two “Gallic Levittowns” in Northern France in the 1960s, Lésigny and Mennecy (both close to Paris)⍉.

The Levitt covenants
William Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].

There was another more controversial Levitt covenant, this one with grossly inequitable and far-reaching overtones. From the onset of the first Levittown, Bill Levitt refused outright to allow African-Americans to buy into the company’s housing estates. Levitt, a Jew, copped a lot of flak for his stance on excluding Black citizens, including Black veterans (see below FN re the dilemma of his Jewishness). I will detail this less edifying side of the Levittown phenomena in Part II of the blog.

Footnote: A “Gentlemen’s Agreement”:

‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day

William Levitt’s discrimination against Non-Whites in Levittown was preceded by a similar policy against his own race in the earlier, North Strathmore housing project. Despite being Jewish himself (and a generous benefactor of the state of Israel and an organiser of Jewish-American funding for Israel during the Six-Day War) Levitt in his business dealings would not buck the local practice of real-estate agents refusing to sell to Jews – the unspoken “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among Gentiles to discriminate against Jews [‘William Levitt Facts’].

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✱ building a 1,600-shack community in Norfolk, Virginia, which still had unsold units in 1950 [‘William Levitt’ Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ William was overall the boss of the business as the financier and promoter, whilst Alfred created the mass production techniques, designed the homes and the developments’ layouts. Father, Abraham, pretty much early on took a step back, ceding the running of the enterprise to oldest son Bill. This allowed the elder Levitt (a horticulturist by training) free rein to pursuit his pet interest, taking charge of the Levitt projects’ landscaping.
⍉ Levitt designed tract-homes can be found also in Buffalo Grove and Vernon Hills (Illinois) and Fairfax (Virginia)

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𓇽 see also the October 2021 blog Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittown on www.7dayadventurer.com Lakewood Park, a mega-sized, rapidly constructed Californian housing development in the 1950s—the brainchild of three Jewish American developers—operated what was effectively a (unwritten) covenant discriminating against non-white prospective home-buyers.