Vintage Photos of People Mesmerized by Store Windows Stocked With Christmas Goodies in NYC From the 1900s

Each year department stores unveil their holiday window displays to admiring crowds. Festive windows have been a tradition in New York City since the 1870s; R.H. Macy, of the retailer Macy’s, is largely credited with having created one of the first Christmas window displays in 1874.

In recent years, gazing into store windows has become almost as much a tradition as the actual buying of gifts, which of course, is the ultimate goal of the windows–to get shoppers in the door. Today, an estimated 15,000 people pass by the store’s elaborate windows every hour during the season.

Today we look back to a time before online shopping, when browsing was done through a pane of glass. Delight in these vintage photos of people mesmerized by holiday windows from between the 1900s and 1910s.

Shoppers gather around a window, 1900.

Christmas shoppers, window shopping, New York, 1900.

Boy looking at Xmas toys in shop window, 1900.

Children looking at Xmas toys in shop window, 1900.

Christmas toys on display, 1910.

Captivated by Christmas toys, 1910.

(Images: Library of Congress, via Atlas Obscura)

See What Last-Minute Christmas Shopping in New York Looked Like 70 Years Ago

In the final days before Christmas every year, malls are bustling with shoppers who have waited until the last minute to purchase holiday gifts.

This tradition has been going on for decades. Check out these photos from 1946, which show hundreds of shoppers gathering outside Macy’s Herald Square in New York City on Christmas Eve.

A Christmas Eve shopper with a crated rocking horse tries to hail a cab outside Macy’s department store in New York City on December 24, 1946. (Photo by Carl Nesensohn/AP Photo)

In this December, 24, 1946, file photo, last minute Christmas Eve shoppers gather in front of Macy’s window display in New York. A $400 million makeover is giving New York’s iconic Macy’s store a sleek, new 21st century style. (Photo by Carl Nesensohn/AP Photo)

Mrs.Frances Corless her daughter “Chickie” are loaded down with bundles after doing some last minute shopping at Macy’s on Christmas Eve in New York, December 24, 1946. (Photo by Carl Nesensohn/AP Photo)

General scene showing Christmas Eve shoppers near Macy’s in New York, December 24, 1946. (Photo by Carl Nesensohn/AP Photo)

Before Black Friday: These 13 Vintage Photographs Captured Christmas Shopping in Glasgow City Centre From Between the 1950s and 1970s

Here's a look back at the changing face of Christmas shopping from the days before Black Friday, pedestrian zones and online retail.

Despite the changing fashions, relatively modest in-store displays, and less-than-flashy nature of much of what's actually on sale, there's still lots that feels familiar in this collection of scenes captured in Glasgow city center from between the 1950s and the 1970s.

The Christmas display at Wylie and Locheads, November 22 1955.

Four year old Kay McAleney from Coatbridge cuddles up to Pluto in Pettigrew's on December 6 1955.

Christmas scene in Pettigrew's, December 7 1955. One of the biggest stores in Scotland, Pettigrew and Stephens once stood on the present site of the Sauchiehall Street shopping centre.

Five year old Joan Ellsworth of Giffnock and Thomas Ross (one) of Duke Street gaze at the toys in Wylie and Locheads, November 20 1956.

Christmas shopping in Wylie and Lochead in Buchanan Street, November 22 1963.

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24 Amazing Vintage Photographs That Capture Eager Crowds Surging Down Petticoat Lane Market in London from a Century Ago

Here are the eager crowds of a century ago, surging down Middlesex St and through Wentworth St, everyone hopeful for a bargain and hungry for wonders, dressed in their Sunday best and out to see the sights. Yet this parade of humanity is itself the spectacle, making its way from Spitalfields through Petticoat Lane Market and up to Aldgate, before disappearing into the hazy distance.

When the rest of London was in church, these people congregated to assuage their Sunday yearning in a market instead, where all temporal requirements might be sought and a necessary sense of collective human presence appreciated within the excited throng. At the time these pictures were taken, there was almost nowhere else in London where Sunday trading was permitted and, since people got paid in cash on Friday, if you wanted to buy things cheap at the weekend, Petticoat Lane was the only place to go. It was a dramatic arena of infinite possibility where you could get anything you needed, and see life too.

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Candid Photos Taken at Malls Across America That Brought Us Back to the ’80s

Malls have been a staple of American culture for decades, representing suburban consumerism in its most basic form.

Throughout the 1980s, as America's downtown districts declined in importance and the "big-box" stores began their slow march across the country, malls became increasing central to American popular culture, dominating the social life of a large swath of the population. In 1989 Michael Galinsky, a twenty-year-old photographer, drove across the country recording this change: the spaces, textures and pace that defined this era.

“In 1989, following in the footsteps of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston, I drove across the country and documented malls across America,” Galinsky said. “I had a cheap Nikon FG-20 and an even cheaper lens - but I had a lot of passion.”

Starting in the winter of 1989 with the Smith Haven Mall in Garden City Long Island, Galinsky photographed malls from North Carolina to South Dakota, Washington State and beyond. The photos he took capture life in these malls as it began to shift from the shiny excess of the 1980s towards an era of slackers and grunge culture.

“I shot about 30 rolls of slide film in malls from Long Island to North Dakota to Seattle,” he recalled. “It was hard to tell from the images where they were taken, and that was kind of the point. I was interested in the creeping loss of regional differences. I thought a lot about Frank's "The Americans" as we drove from place to place without any sense of place.”

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Chess King, Contempo Casuals and Merry-Go-Round, Here are 13 Classic Mall Stores We Want to Shop at Again

Back in the day, every mall seemed to have at least a few of the same stores in it. They may have been stores you never actually saw anyone buying anything in, or they may have been wildly popular, but nowadays they have either disappeared from the mall landscape or have become increasingly hard to find.

While malls certainly still dot our landscape, some of the magic is missing with these stores no longer existing. Put on your walking shoes and lets go shopping in the past.

01. Camelot Music

In our local mall, the Camelot had a stone facade that looked like the entrance to King Arthur's castle. Inside, the music shop had a great selection spanning every genre, not to mention a towering wall of cassettes. Starting in 1956, Camelot was in the end sucked up by and converted to f.y.e. in 1998.


02. Casual Corner

Reaching 525 stores at its peak, this women's wear shop died in 2005. We especially dig the older, more elaborate storefront with wood paneling and 90-degree logo.


03. Chess King

This young men's shop dates back to the 1960s. Its founder figured boys liked chess and racing, and came up with Chess King. In the 1980s, this became the depot for those fashion plates hoping to emulate Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink. It died off in 1995.


04. The Children's Place

The coolest thing about The Children's Place was the hole at the entrance, a little tunnel that kids could crawl though to enter the store. We remember it being lined with indoor-outdoor carpeting. There was also stuff to climb all over inside. There are still Children's Place stores, but none like this that we know of.


05. Contempo Casuals

What Chess King was for boys, Contempo was for girls. Also started in the 1960s, CC boomed in the 1980s, when it became the place of choice for big, colorful clothing to match big, colorful hair. Paul Rudd made reference to it in Clueless, too. In 2001, the remaining stores were converted into Wet Seals, which had purchased the brand some years earlier.

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Grocery Shopping, ca. 1960s

“Being a woman influenced my ideas about what I wanted to photograph. My interest in women’s issues, in family issues, in social relationships came out of my experience of growing up as a female.” — Abigail Heyman

This photo is probably from the late 1960s and maybe even early 1970s. The Keebler brand name was adopted by United Biscuits in 1966 a few years before the Keebler Elves appeared. Also the photo is from Abigail Heyman’s 1974 book Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal, and she didn’t start her photography career until around 1967.

(Photo by Abigail Heyman)

Abigail Heyman was an American photographer and feminist. Her 1974 book Growing Up Female became an important text for the feminist movement. After becoming one of the first women to join Magnum Photos, she went on to produce two more books: Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker, a book for girls about women at work, and Dreams & Schemes, which took a journalistic approach to wedding photography. Throughout her career she published photo essays about subjects, especially those related to women’s lives, that had been considered too personal or trivial for photojournalism. Her work was published in outlets such as Time, Life, Ms., Harpers and The New York Times Magazine.

In 1981, Heyman co-founded Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative agency in New York City, along with Mark Godfrey, Charles Harbutt, Joan Liftin, and Mary Ellen Mark.

In the 1990s, Heyman joined the International Center of Photography in Manhattan as director of the documentary and photojournalism department. Though her work is most identified with the feminist movement, as Liftin told the New York Times, “as a feminist, she was not so much about marching. She took pictures that showed what the marching was about.”

Shopping Center in Istanbul: 14 Rare Photographs of the Grand Bazaar From the Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries

These are some rare vintage photos of the Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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13 Vintage Photos Show Christmas Shopping in New York in the Past

These vintage images show the air immediately before Christmas in New York in the past.

Christmas rush at Macy's in NYC, 1947

Christmas shoppers fill the sidewalk at 42nd Street and Sixth Ave,  New York City, 1929

Christmas shoppers in New York City, ca. 1910-15

Christmas shopping in New York City, 1913

Christmas shopping in New York City, 1945

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Macy's Preparations for the Christmas Season in 1948, Here's What Black Friday Looked Like Before It Was Called Black Friday

Black Friday wasn’t yet called Black Friday in 1948—nor do the newspapers from that era offer evidence of stampedes or overnight lines that have become par for the course on the day after Thanksgiving—but the kick-off to the holiday shopping season has long been a red-letter retail day.

Images of preparations for that season at Macy’s—then, at one million square feet, the biggest store in the world—bespeak a highly orchestrated operation relying upon 14,000 employees to ready 400,000 items to be swept off of shelves by 250,000 eager shoppers.

Jane Pickens leads 9,000 Macy's employees in "Jingle Bells" during giant rally designed to whip up fever of salesmanship for Christmas rush.

Eager customers stand outside the doors of Macy's, 1948.

Holiday shoppers line the sidewalk outside of Macy's, 1948.

Macy's shoppers wait to be allowed on the floor, 1948.

Bulletin board lists price changes made as a result of comparison shopping. Macy's gets around fixed prices by producing own brands, fixing own prices.

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Interesting Pictures of Bargain Hunters Shopping during the Holidays since the Early 20th Century

Holiday shopping has driven bargain hunters mad for the past century. Here are some of old photos showing bargain hunters shopping during the holidays, curated by Retronaut...

c. 1906. Bargain hunters waiting to enter a London shop during January sales. IMAGE: TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

Jan. 1, 1907. Lines crowd for the Ponting's department store sale in London. IMAGE: ARGENT ARCHER/SSPL/GETTY IMAGES

c. 1910. People shopping for bargains crowd the street. IMAGE: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Dec. 30, 1929. A winter sale begins In England. IMAGE: KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Dec. 30, 1935. A crowd of bargain hunters shopping for hats during the January sales at Whiteley's department store in Bayswater, London. IMAGE: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

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