Two days before Thanksgiving in 1898, a Providence News columnist who signed himself “The Crank” had a busy day for, as he put it, “a citizen of quiet disposition.” He spent part of the morning at a show of paintings. Then he walked into the big new Shepard Company store in Providence, Rhode Island, to try out its newest wonder. Here’s what he told his readers the next day, Wednesday, November 23:
I dropped into Shepard’s to see the stairway that walks you upstairs instead of making you walk up it. It’s lots of fun, that stairway. I rode on it six times. I’ve only one fault to find with it. It doesn’t work both ways. That’s why I quit it, although I had ten minutes more time on my hands for amusement.
“‘Twixt You and Me,” by The Crank, the Providence News, Providence, Rhode Island, November 23, 1898, page 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.
A rainy opening day
The Shepard Company was one of the city’s big department stores, and that November it opened a new store with its grand entrance at the corner of Westminster and Union streets. The opening was set for Saturday, November 19, and it rained. “It is also hard on the numerous thousands of us who planned to take in Shepard’s opening today,” The Crank complained in that day’s paper. The same page joked that the new store seemed to have about everything you could think of “except a newspaper plant.”
The Crank on opening day: “I don’t like this weather.” The Providence News, November 19, 1898, page 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.
The News sent a reporter through the building, and his story ran under the headline “It Is Vast and Bewildering.” He found pictures and frames, boys’ clothing, hats and bonnets, and in the basement, harnesses, whips and saddles for “the horse, the rider and the driver.” A big instrument called an orchestral, provided by the piano dealers M. Steinert & Sons, played music every morning and every afternoon, and the reporter said it sounded as good as a fair-sized orchestra. On the street floor stood a soda fountain thirteen and a half feet high, made of white onyx and white mahogany on Tennessee marble, which the paper said couldn’t be built again for less than $5,000.
The stairway that walks you upstairs
The real show, though, was on the same floor as the fountain. “On this floor also is the Reno inclined elevator,” the reporter wrote, “upon which 2000 people an hour can be transported to the upper floor without any difficulty whatever, and can also enjoy quite a novel experience.” It was an early kind of escalator, a moving slope that carried shoppers up to the second floor. A month later, the News’s Christmas shopping guide called it “the only one of its kind in New England.”
“The Reno inclined elevator, upon which 2000 people an hour can be transported to the upper floor.” The Providence News, November 19, 1898, page 5. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.
The store knew a good thing when it had one. The inclined stairway ran up to the shoe store, and Shepard’s put it right in its ads. “MEN’S SLIPPERS,” one read in December, “And the Inclined Elevator takes you directly to them.”
Christmas at Shepard’s
That slipper ad was part of a giant Shepard’s ad that filled most of the News’s front page on December 16, and it’s a window into a Providence Christmas in 1898. Six hundred pairs of men’s slippers, the $1 and $1.25 kind, were marked down to 69 cents, “just what a man needs to make him solidly comfortable.” Skates ran from 35 cents to $1.57 a pair. Hartz Mountain canary birds, “fine singers,” were $1.97, and the grocery counter had crystallized Canton ginger at 19 cents for a half-pound can.
Up on the third floor was something you won’t find in many stores today, a free day nursery. A professional nurse and her helpers would watch the children while their mothers shopped, keep them busy with toys, and give them a bed if they got sleepy. The ad offered the same comfort to the grown-ups. “Should you become ill or tired, don’t hesitate to go there, too. It is for you also.”
Christmas prices and the free day nursery in the Shepard Company’s front-page ad. The Providence News, December 16, 1898, page 1. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the picture to see it full size.
Only one way to go
For now, the stairway still had the fault The Crank found on his first visit. It carried shoppers up to the shoes and the slippers, and they walked back down on their own two feet. The Crank didn’t mind much. He’d ridden it six times, and he had a Thanksgiving dinner to get home to.
Sources
- The Providence News (Providence, R.I.), November 23, 1898, page 4 (“‘Twixt You and Me,” by The Crank).
- The Providence News, November 19, 1898, page 4 (The Crank on the rainy opening day; “except a newspaper plant”).
- The Providence News, November 19, 1898, page 5 (“It Is Vast and Bewildering,” the new Shepard Company store and the Reno inclined elevator).
- The Providence News, December 16, 1898, page 1 (“The Shepard Company as to Christmas,” front-page advertisement).
- The Providence News, December 21, 1898, page 3 (Christmas shopping guide: “the only one of its kind in New England”).
- Shepard Company building history: National Register of Historic Places nomination, Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission.
- Newspaper images from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Published 1898, public domain.
- Cover: “Westminster Street, Providence, R.I.,” Detroit Publishing Co., between 1910 and 1920, about fifteen years after this story (cropped). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, 2016812504. No known restrictions on publication.
