While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's price--and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter immediately upon his arrival. A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city, decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own investment in that street was too great and too recent to be jeopardized. Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep to the possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it. The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be underestimated. In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.