Tom Keels and Larry Arrigale will celebrate their 20th anniversary later this year — and last week marked another milestone that took their partnership from personal to professional.
“Philadelphia’s Golden Age of Retail” hit bookshelves Feb. 27, marking the first time the duo has collaborated as authors.
Keels now has six books about Philadelphia history under his belt, several of which were published by Arcadia, which approached him with the idea for this latest venture.
Serendipitously, Arrigale was well-versed in the city’s history as a retail hub, which Keels said provided the ideal opportunity for the two to join as co-authors.
Arrigale, an antiques appraiser and the former general manager of Antiques Market of Chestnut Hill, began in the mid-1990s collecting “Victorian trade cards,” chromolithograph color cards that stores used as advertising and which children often collected as a hobby.
“The first card I ever bought was from a dealer who brought it into the store, and it was a Wanamaker and Brown card,” Arrigale said. “And from that card, we started going to antiques and paper shows looking for more, but I realized we can’t collect cards from all over the country so we said, ‘Let’s specialize in Philadelphia stores.’”
In his personal research, Arrigale amassed vast amounts of information and ephemera from the city’s early department stores, which came in handy when the book idea was proposed.
Keels said he didn’t have any apprehensions about working side-by-side with his partner on writing the book. He has written with co-authors on two of his other books, and Arrigale has helped edit and serve as photographer and “in-house tech expert” on several of his works.
Once the chapters were delineated, each author took charge of one and swapped their finished product for the other to edit and critique.
Keels said he was surprised to find that their writing styles were fairly similar and lends continuity to the book, which, as part of the “Images in America” series, utilizes photographic support to help tell the story.
“Philadelphia’s Golden Age of Retail” traces the period between the Civil War through the second-half of the 20th century, when the city saw the creation of a retail mecca on Market Street.
“Everyone talks about how New York had Macy’s and Gimbels next to each other in Herald Square, but here in Philadelphia imagine that there was Macy’s next to Gimbels next to Bloomingdale’s next to Lord & Taylor next to Bergdorf Goodman,” Keels said. “They were all competing with one another and were doing whatever they could to bring customers through their doors.”
Finding success amid so much competition required some unique marketing techniques, which the stores delivered on, Keels said.
In 1909, Gimbels sponsored airplane races between New York and Philadelphia. In the ’20s, several of the city’s earliest commercially viable radio stations operated out of the department stores, and in the 1940s, some of the venues began bringing in televisions for in-house advertising.
One of the most successful efforts, however, was the city’s — and the nation’s — first Thanksgiving Day Parade, begun in 1920 by a small group of Gimbels employees.
While Market Street’s retail landscape now looks much different from its heyday, Keels said today’s venues could learn a thing or two from their predecessors.
“They saw their stores as something more than just a place to sell sweatshirts and jeans, and really thought about what they could do to get people excited and show them a good time,” Keels said, noting that the current Macy’s in Center City seems to have held on to that ideal, with its annual Christmas light show, its restoration of the Wanamaker organ and the 2010 flash mob it sponsored, which brought 650 singers to the store for a rendition of “Hallelujah Chorus.”
Keels and Arrigale have several presentations on “Philadelphia’s Golden Age of Retail” scheduled, with the kickoff at 3 p.m. March 9 at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 219 S. Sixth St. Tickets are free for members or $10 for non-members and can be purchased by calling 215-925-2688 or visiting www.philaathenaeum.org.