“The Charles Broadway Rouss Building shall keep everything calculated to make a man fashionable, a lady irresistible, and a family comfortable.” Charles Broadway Rouss, New York Evening Post
When I was a child in upstate New York, going to the Midtown Mall in Rochester was a magical experience. Brilliant lights; an endless dizzying array of goods; shoppers, glamorous ladies in rustling elegant 50’s dresses; equally lovely ladies, uniformed, smiling gently, asking each shopper if there was any way they could assist. The distant pinging of the elevators stopping at each floor; the muted grumbling of the wooden escalators I loved to ride; cries of delight from a shopper who had found the perfect dress. Exquisite mannequins posed about a head higher than that of the shoppers, wearing perfectly tailored designer dresses and suits (although the concept of “designer” was not one I understood). There were racks and racks of beautiful clothes where a child could hide between the dresses and savor their scented crinkling. My grandmother would take me to the charming Garden Room painted in muted green tones; humming with conversation, where all her friends met to greet and eat. Where ladies lunched (chicken salad with toast points and iceberg lettuce) and savored rich desserts toppling like towers onto the plate. Icebox cake was a favorite, striped with chocolate and whipped cream and topped with a cherry.
It never occurred to me to wonder how this magical shopping experience came to be. But when much later I came upon a listing of the goods in a 19th century department store, the memories came rushing back:
“In the twelve stories of [the Charles Broadway Rouss Building] there are art-objects, boots and shoes, carpets, corsets, cigars, walking-sticks, canes, clothing, gloves, hardware, hosiery, hats, jewelry, laces, linens, millinery, notions, [“Japanese goods”], piece-goods, shades, shawls, jackets, skirts, show-cases, stationery, tinware, woolens, white goods, everything that one may think of, useful or ornamental, for personal wear or house-furnishing, including the inimitable Rouss parlor-organs. The value of the stock is $2,000,000.”
All—with the possible exception of cigars and tinware—sounded very like the rich array of goods sold in the 20th century department store.
But I’d never heard of Charles Broadway Rouss, who apparently had been a significant part of New York retail history. I knew the building was somewhere on Broadway in Soho. We found the building blazoned with his name: CHARLES BROADWAY ROUSS, a handsome cast iron and stone structure, dating from 1900 at 555 Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets. My interest piqued, I decided to track him and his building down.
The Charles Broadway Rouss Building is part of the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District and has itself achieved landmark status. The store, originally designed by Alfred Zucker.and expanded by architect William J. Dilthey, now owned by the publishers Scholastic, Inc., underwent a $35 million restoration by the architectural firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer. Scholastic, which reveres the building, also put up a companion building next door—and placed the name “Scholastic” just a little higher than that of “Charles Broadway Rouss.”
When Charles Broadway Rouss opened the CHARLES BROADWAY ROUSS emporium at 555 Broadway, in the heart of Ladies’ Mile it was truly a department store, carrying a vast array of goods, and boasting of branches in Paris, Nottingham, Vienna, Chemnitz, and Yokohama.
What was it like to shop at Rouss’s and other department stores on Broadway in the 19th century? It was every bit as glamorous as my 20th century shopping mall, even more densely packed, and a locus of all forms of entertainment – not just shopping. A brief description of the “Ladies’ Mile”, on Broadway a few blocks north, gives a vivid picture.
King’s Handbook of New York City (1893) glowingly describes the Ladies’ Mile, now the Flatiron District of New York City, declaring that everyone was drawn to the “fascinating, alluring, irresistible” shops. “What are the Parisian boulevards, or even Regent Street, to this magnificent panorama of mercantile display?”
The opulence of the stores and density of the crowds encouraged women to go out of their homes to shop, for the first time unaccompanied by men—and they thronged to the area. The district was the new home to women of every class. Elegant first ladies like Mrs. Grant and Mrs. Cleveland or literary lights like Edith Wharton came to shop at the Ladies’ Mile.
Similarly, a dense crowd of eager women shoppers thronged to the CHARLES BROADWAY ROUSS Building.
But who was Charles Broadway Rouss himself? Charles Broadway Rouss, blind millionaire retailer (1836-1902), now best known to architectural historians for his handsome building, was born Charles Baltzell Rouss, but changed his middle name to Broadway because he so loved the street.
Rouss himself epitomizes the classic New York rags-to-riches tale. Moses King’s Notable New Yorkers of 1896-1899 (1899) summarizes: “The man, a Virginian, [who displayed a talent for retail and publicity as early as the age of eighteen], came to New York immediately after the war [American Civil War]…. He came without money or influence, and with $11,000 of ante-bellum debts hanging over him…” In New York, Rouss was so penniless that he survived on free lunches and slept in the parks…” He also spent time in debtors’ prison. But by 1895 Rouss had constructed his Broadway department store, at once an ornament to the street and a testimonial to his considerable success. Rouss had become genuinely famous, and a millionaire.
Rouss is a complex figure—described as a true Broadway department store giant, a public relations artist, an eccentric, an atheist (not a popular stance), and a generous philanthropist who once rescued an old friend from the very debtor’s prison in which he had once been incarcerated.
Clearly a success, Rouss was still plagued with misfortune. In the same year of the store’s construction, 1895, he went blind. Rouss offered a million dollars to anyone who could cure his blindness and got many takers—but did not find a cure..
Rouss’s obituary in The New York Times (4 March 1902, p. 9), reflects the ambiguous feelings he aroused in his onlookers:
“Charles Broadway Rouss, for so many years an eccentric character in commercial life of New York, died after four days’ illness of pneumonia yesterday morning at his residence, 632 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Rouss was known throughout the United States because of his peculiar faculty for attracting public attention through dramatic and sensational feats, even turning his misfortunes to account…”
When Rouss died in 1902, his death certificate gave “Broadway” as his middle name. He was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Winchester, VA, in what was then the largest private mausoleum in the United States.
But his real monument remains the CHARLES BROADWAY ROUSS Building.
Sources:
Moses King’s Notable New Yorkers of 1896-1899 (1899);
“Broadway: His Middle Name.” (Christopher Gray, New York Times, Aug. 11, 1996”);
