In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory; generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of merchandise--a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular. It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the store--there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back--made it necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into outside structures. So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock, not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon, who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers--the sizes "2½" to "3½" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on. This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified width--say "D" or "Double A"--she must rummage through the entire drawer until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair shop in the shoe department of that day--merely an aged shoemaker who lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.