The Word on the Street : Like New York Itself, Fifth Avenue Has Grown Tawdry in Places, but the Famous Shopping Boulevard Still Has Its Glamour

Fifth Avenue had few sidewalk diversions when John Jacob Astor opened the St. Regis Hotel in 1904: There were no lipstick counters, no earring displays dripping diamonds and red tourmaline, no Italian silks, no German leather wear.

Yet what lines Fifth today would likely have both delighted and disgusted the likes of the Astors and the Vanderbilts. They would have adored the sales at Bergdorf’s, but that huge “OPEN TO THE PUBLIC” sign at Trump Tower. . . .

In fact, the street of turn-of-the-century mansions is now a strip of glass-front shops and masonry banks, with traffic seeping south and money flowing north.

It mixes luxury with honky-tonk, Lalique windows with neon signs. Decade to decade its epicenter shifts, but even in the tawdriest corners, there is always something grand. With all the changes, Fifth Avenue is still the greatest artery of a city that sometimes ignores it.

While Fifth at its glossiest remains New York’s proudest image of itself, it is no longer where New Yorkers regularly go. They may take visitors there, but who really shops the avenue and what they want from it is as steeped in mystery as it is in mystique.

“I mean, how many people can walk into a shop on Fifth and buy a $2,000 suit?” says Alan Millstein, editor of Fashion Network Report, a monthly newsletter for retailers. “Fifth Avenue has become a showcase for foreign products, but I’m not sure New Yorkers really spend time there anymore.”

The vanishing department stores, the explosion of outrageously priced European shops and the squeamish economy have all veered New Yorkers off on other courses to Madison, to Lexington and, Heaven forbid, over the bridges to the suburban malls.

Even the world’s most famous shopping boulevard has gotten a little mall-like. Although it is not a self-conscious brew of sneaker stores, food courts and Gaps, Fifth Avenue holds much of the standard fare.

Yet to wander the avenue these days is to mingle with the contrasts unique to this city.

Leaning against the wall at Tiffany’s, a pathetically contorted homeless woman screams her lungs dry about her hunger. A few blocks south, two neatly dressed girls dab on lipsticks at Christian Dior, squealing with laughter as a bored attendant looks on. In another store, a salesclerk who has worked exclusively on Fifth describes how she can walk the avenue and determine who has money and who doesn’t. It’s an inexact science, but she says she’s got it down.

From block to block, the character, the sounds, even the air quality seem to change. In the Trump Tower, the water cascades noisily down pink marble walls. In the subway, this would be a disaster, but here it seems a metaphor for how some people throw money away. In an electronics store, cameras are $100 more than they are on the next avenue and the air smells like dry wall. In Henri Bendel, the air is dense with perfume. Its intoxication--and prices--make you swoon.

There is also no getting away from ghosts on Fifth Avenue. In recent years Bonwit Teller and B. Altman, a victim of over-leveraging, passed on, following in the everything-must-go tradition of Best & Company, De Pinna, I. Miller, Arnold Constable and others. Bonwit Teller at least was replaced by an enthusiastic newcomer, Galeries Lafayette, a French department store specializing in designers’ secondary lines--and, apparently, in big bangle bracelets.

But no retailer has attempted to cover the scars left by Altman’s at 34th Street. The abandoned building, soon to be a business library, stands in the shadow of the Empire State Building, perhaps the only landmark equipped to rise above the demise of the neighborhood.

Millstein worries that with American stores closing and foreign stores taking over, the fashion industry will be stunted by new manufacturers’ inability to get a hearing--much less an order--from Fifth Avenue.

“Without gutsy retailers willing to back the kid from Indiana or the Bronx with a sewing machine and a dream, there might never be another Bill Blass or Calvin Klein,” Millstein wrote in a recent Fashion Network Report.

Despite a sort of general shopper malaise, Fifth Avenue publicists and merchants are predictably gushy about the renaissance between 49th and 57th streets. At 57th, today’s golden nexus, Bergdorf’s, Bulgari, Tiffany & Co. and a bank standing empty but heavy with expectations, like a cow desperate to be milked, seem to eye each other.

“There’s been an enormous reinvestment,” says Tom Cusick, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Assn. “If you go back five years ago, there were dormant stores everywhere and others didn’t have a sparkling accent.”

The association has done battle to wipe out the flea-market ambience created by overflowing garbage cans and an underground economy that allowed faux Gucci scarves to be sold in front of the Gucci store. It created a private sanitation crew composed of the homeless and hired additional security. And by lobbying in the New York Legislature and “donating” $400,000 to City Hall to help re-employ the scores of peddlers who were disabled veterans, the association swept vendors off the street.

“You can imagine how popular I was with state legislators when I asked them to take privileges away from veterans--right in the middle of the Persian Gulf War,” groans Cusick. Next he’ll go after street-side book vendors. “That’s our 1992 campaign,” he says, sounding a bit weary.

Merchants have bigger worries, though, what with high rents and the economy. Cusick tries to be upbeat about what he calls “an out-of-phase” period: “It’s all how you look at it. During the Depression, you had 25% of people out of work. The flip side was, 75% of the people were working.

“The Empire State Building,” he adds cheerily, “was built during Depression.”

Jiro Shinohara, executive vice president of Osaka-based Takashimaya--which is opening a 20-story building with five floors of retail at 54th in spring, 1993--is more realistic about the bad times.

“We are very much diversified behind the scenes and can wait this out,” says Shinohara. “We are a retail business, but we have a restaurant on Long Island, construction and interior design divisions, a wholesale division for men’s clothing. . . .”

Indeed, some merchants claim privately that they don’t care if they lose money on Fifth. They’re still there for the snob appeal.

Many shops don’t depend on one location, one city, one nation or one economy, says Faith Consolo of Garrick-Aug Associates, a mammoth store-leasing firm.

“I mean, Fendi doesn’t rise or fall on what it does on Fifth,” she says. “It’s worldwide.”

When Consolo was helping Goldpfeil, a German leather-goods store, search for a New York location, there was only one choice, she says. Store officials wanted Fifth, they wanted in the 50s, they wanted a corner, and they wanted the east side of the street.

“Their people said to me, ‘Faith, we have to be there, at all costs,’ ” she recalls.

And the prices are steep.

The average rent on Fifth is $500 per square foot, compared to $250 on Madison. Although commercial rents are down 22% citywide, rents on Fifth have slipped no more than 10%, Consolo says.

But if there is staying power to Fifth, it is in the predictability of its serious shoppers.

Ritzy parts of the avenue seem the exclusive province of wealthy foreign tourists--400,000 from Japan every year, and as many from Europe and South America--and of Park Avenue matrons.

For average tourists from Nebraska, the only place that seems affordable is the new Coca-Cola shop. But the price of the red-and-white caps seems to say it all: The hats with Coke spelled in Korean, Japanese and other foreign languages are $10; the same hats in English are $12.

Nevertheless, newcomers keep filling up the area--Escada, Tino Cosmo, Christian Dior, Wempe, Goldpfeil and St. John Knits, to name a few. It’s as if by opening near each other they hope to keep warm with the hot flow of money.

After its opening last September, Galeries Lafayette asked focus groups what they wanted from the store. What the French learned about New Yorkers is that they are very sophisticated, very savvy, very spoiled--and not a bit loyal to any one store.

“We have taught (customers) to shop sales,” says Eugenia Ulasewicz, a former Bloomingdale’s executive who is taking French as part of her new job as president of Galeries Lafayette. “We just have to teach them to enjoy our French quality.”

From the start, Fifth Avenue had a je ne sais pas quality that made it not only a central boulevard of the city, but an upscale one at that.

Soon after the street opened in 1826, fashionable mansions and brownstones began lining it. Inevitably, rich residences were followed by upscale commerce--followed by more mundane buildings that inspired wealthy people to move farther up the avenue. This happened over and over, and, much like the history of New York, the story of Fifth Avenue is one of northward development.

From the Civil War to the early 1900s, the center was at “Ladies’ Mile” from 14th to 23rd streets; between the World Wars it moved to 34th street; later, Tiffany & Co., Lord and Taylor, B. Altman and Saks all hopscotched around 14th to 34th streets before settling down in mid-town. And in the last 20 years, the cachet that made 34th to 42nd the center of the “carriage trade” has diminished. In those days, wealthy women came downtown by limousine to department stores that had elevator operators in white gloves.

Observes Millstein: “Those stores are gone, and those women are in Cypress Hill cemetery.”

With the high-end shopping now at 57th Street, it seems inevitable that it will have to move south if it is to move again: The boundary of Central Park seems to have made the area above 57th irrevocably residential, and Fifth Avenue above the park in Harlem has a separate tradition.

Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for the New York Times, complained in a 1990 article that too many skyscrapers with too much glass had thrown off the sense of cohesion that had always been part of Fifth Avenue, known for the Plaza Hotel, Rockefeller Center and the New York Public Library.

“There is hardly a need on Fifth Avenue, or anywhere else, for the new to copy the old exactly--but surely it is not too much to suggest that the existing context on a street like Fifth Avenue should command a certain degree of respect,” Goldberger wrote.

Ironically, the latest toning up has been helped by the $100-million renovation of the St. Regis, which looks much the way it did when it opened in 1904. But if transformation is always in the air on Fifth Avenue, some rituals endure nonetheless.

The other afternoon at lunch at the St. Regis’ new three-star restaurant, where the prix-fixe lunch is $35, the mysteries of the sea bass steamed in Kafir leaf reduction seemed to coalesce with the mysteries of the avenue.

Former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar was holding court with half a dozen people speaking French and English. After lunch, De Cuellar gave a $10 bill to the hostess for retrieving his entourage’s coats. And then, in a sweeping exit the Astors would have appreciated, he walked through the marbled lobby with his collar rolled up and added himself onto Fifth Avenue.