Monday, July 2, 2007

Marshall Fields photo by Flickr user palmea


, originally uploaded by palmea.

1 comment:

Jason Pettus said...

This reminds me of a one-week temp job I had almost 15 years ago, when I first moved to Chicago; as a graveyard-shift back storeroom stocker for this store, running around in the middle of the night filling each floor's local storeroom of merchandise for sales the next day. (For those who don't know, the old Marshall Field building [now Macy's] is just enormous, ten stories tall and an eighth of a mile per story, an entire community on its own that takes its own around-the-clock staff to work.) If you think images this like one are bizarre, imagine coming across them with most of the lights off at 2 in the morning by yourself.

For those who are curious as to why such strange vestibule areas have formed inside Marshall Field's, by the way, it's because the store only slowly built up to the size it is over half a century, literally by building one little store on its block at a time. These odd-looking areas inside the store are literally where the old back wall used to end, then was hastily expanded when the next store was purchased and its space taken over.