{"id":103995,"date":"2026-01-18T15:28:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T15:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/103995\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T15:28:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T15:28:07","slug":"saks-fifth-avenues-bankruptcy-threatens-a-civilized-way-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/103995\/","title":{"rendered":"Saks Fifth Avenue’s bankruptcy threatens a civilized way of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saks Global, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, is on its way to financial restructuring in the wake of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing<\/a> that would enable the company to pay its bills and keep its New York stores open.<\/p>\n

Even so, these woes are the latest warning flag about a\u00a0kind of retail business that a million fancy boutiques can\u2019t replace: department stores, which are a civilizing and democratizing influence on urban life.<\/p>\n

Retail economists disparage the country\u2019s surviving department stores as \u201cdinosaurs,\u201d a perception that\u2019s grown since online shopping dealt a staggering blow to bricks-and-mortar retailing. But when Lord & Taylor closed its Fifth Avenue flagship<\/a> in early 2019, I lamented not only losing its absurdly discounted $39 Perry Ellis jackets\u00a0on the sixth floor, but also the emporium\u2019s \u201cwelcoming civility that softened the city\u2019s rough edges<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saks Global, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, is on its way to financial restructuring in the wake of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that would enable the company to pay its bills and keep its New York stores \u2014\u00a0including the iconic Fifth Avenue flagship \u2014 open. Brian Zak\/NY Post<\/p>\n

Manhattan, once home to over a dozen department stores, is down to five\u00a0full-size ones \u2014 Macy\u2019s, Bloomingdale\u2019s, Saks, Nordstrom and Bergdorf Goodman \u2014 and a smaller Bloomingdale\u2019s Soho satellite. (Although\u00a0Printemps<\/a> on Wall Street is often called a \u201cdepartment store,\u201d its 55,000-square-foot size is a postage stamp compared with Macy\u2019s 1.25 million square feet.) Several Macy\u2019s branches survive in the outer boroughs, including a drastically shrunken one in Downtown Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0roll call of the long-departed includes Gertz, Korvettes, Alexander\u2019s and\u00a0May\u2019s. More recently, we lost Barneys<\/a>, Henry Bendel<\/a> and a short-lived Neiman Marcus<\/a> at Hudson Yards.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers should worry about the futures of our dinosaur holdouts. They\u2019re majestic even in decline. They welcome all walks of Big Apple life \u2014\u00a0and if crowds on Macy\u2019s sprawling ground floor can seem \u00a0like an extension of the subway station below, I\u2019m fine with it<\/p>\n

Department stores are as\u00a0inclusionary as boutiques are exclusionary.\u00a0No uniformed guards stand in door fronts to\u00a0scare off shoppers whose looks they don\u2019t like,\u00a0as they do at stuffy boutiques on Madison Avenue and East 57th Street.\u00a0Bathrooms are open to everyone. Restaurants such as Cafe BG at Bergdorf Goodman and L\u2019Avenue at Saks appeal equally to serious shoppers and those \u201cjust looking.\u201d<\/p>\n

A department store conveys abundance, variety\u00a0and prosperity. I experienced my first taste of their magic as a child, at the holiday-season model-railroad display on the eighth floor of A&S in Brooklyn. Lionel and American Flyer trains zipped through tiny villages and mountains that seemed to go on forever.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers should worry about the futures of our dinosaur department stores like Saks. They\u2019re majestic even in decline. They welcome all walks of Big Apple life. REUTERS<\/p>\n

Many decades later, my fantasy lies in racks of $5,000 Armani jackets. But I still witness a touch of the old-time thrill in kids\u2019 eyes widened by the sight of festive lights in today\u2019s department stores.<\/p>\n

These retail havens also have a mysterious aura that insulates them from outside chaos. <\/p>\n

When I was caught up in the Puerto Rican Parade day mayhem<\/a> of June 2000 \u2014\u00a0when troublemakers from outside the city crashed the event \u2014\u00a0a\u00a0friend and I found refuge inside Barneys at Madison Avenue and 60th Street. We guessed that rioters who broke other nearby windows would respect the fashion temple\u2019s boundaries \u2014 and they did.<\/p>\n

Barneys later fell victim to rampant mismanagement. Saks and Bergdorf Goodman appear to have dodged the bullet for now. But all department stores are imperiled \u2014 less by changes in shopping habits than by the temptation they offer to real estate companies that would love to replace them with supertall condo towers.<\/p>\n

Department stores like Saks are as\u00a0inclusionary as boutiques are exclusionary.\u00a0 AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Dissident shareholders of publicly traded Macy\u2019s Inc. and investors in privately held Saks Global salivate over their\u00a0properties\u00a0in plum Manhattan locations. How simple it would be to raze the bricks and mortar and build palaces in the sky for vagabonding billionaires.<\/p>\n

The stores\u2019 owners have turned back the challenges \u2014 so far. Macy\u2019s dropped a proposal, announced six years ago, to build an office tower on top of a smaller Herald Square flagship. The land beneath Bloomingdale\u2019s on Lexington Avenue\u00a0is owned not by the store\u2019s parent company but by a Bloomingdale family trust\u00a0\u2014 which severely limits redevelopment potential.\u00a0Nordstrom, not tower-developer Extell, owns its 320,000-square-foot store on West 57th Street and, presumably, would\u00a0have no easy way out if it ever wanted to leave.<\/p>\n

But Lord & Taylor seemed destined to last forever, too. It\u2019s\u00a0now a Google office location with a ground-floor food hall on the way. Alexander\u2019s on 59th Street, where I would pick up clean socks at the last minute during my single days, is the site of a Bloomberg office tower. Neiman Marcus\u00a0lasted barely a year after it swaggered into Hudson Yards with seven glam shopping floors and a half-dozen fancy restaurants.<\/p>\n

Enjoy our dinosaurs that hold out against the odds \u2014 while we still can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saks Global, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, is on its way to financial restructuring in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35314,1891,27044,9,24,55,54,11201,56,299,21489],"class_list":["post-103995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-bergdorf-goodman","tag-bloomingdales","tag-macys","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-nordstrom","tag-ny","tag-opinion","tag-saks-fifth-avenue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}