Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy
days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of
filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or
no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at
eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial
pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing
your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the
panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers
work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below
them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and
Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the
boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of
the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out--not
even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and
blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are
engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the
Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can
be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily
light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of
any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.
Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the
first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do
not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made
ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly
cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long
miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming
of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must
come well in advance of its patrons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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