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Taking off from the news that Robinson's-May will soon vanish from the scene, Cathy Seipp revisits the department store past of Los Angeles in her "From the Left Coast" column at National Review Online. She sort of misses the days of Bullock's, Broadway, J.W. Robinson's and May Co.:
We're losing something as the big stores fade from the scene, even if it's less an efficient or agreeable shopping experience than a collective cultural memory. They're now almost quaint relics; at this point the soul of the May Company lives on less in the Robinson's-May stores than in the minds of old-time radio fans: Jack Benny famously encountered his wife-to-be, Mary Livingstone, at the May Company in L.A., where she was a lingerie salesgirl....Say just two words — "Bullocks Tearoom" — to L.A. women of a certain age, and you'll conjure up more nostalgia than Proust's madeleine. Robinson's in Beverly Hills was a comfortably bourgeois bastion against overpriced and touristy Rodeo Drive; Bullock's in Pasadena (now a Macy's), an enclave of white-gloved, postwar suburban shopping refinement. (The chain's luxury spin-off, Bullocks Wilshire, closed years ago; the glittering, late '20s flagship where Greta Garbo used to shop for men's suits is now a law school surrounded by Koreatown.) The May Company was always dowdy inside as long as I can remember and probably even before — emphasizing the humiliation of Bette Davis's down-on-her-luck screen goddess in The Star, forced to work at the landmark Mid-Wilshire store's makeup counter — but the shell remains an art-deco treasure.
The photo above is of May Co. in its heyday at Wilshire and Fairfax (it's now part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) The cover story in this week's L.A. Business Journal says that mall operators won't much miss the departure of Robinson's-May. But the local newspapers most certainly will. Department stores are big ad buyers. Papers also face losing revenue from the mergers of Sears Roebuck and Co. and Kmart Corp. and Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless. Says Doug Hanes, senior vice president of advertising and marketing for Los Angeles Newspaper Group: "I’ve never met a merger or consolidation that’s beneficial to newspapers."