A Headstrong Dowager Gives In to Crumbling Reality

Ithought I had given her a heart attack. The woman in the Bullocks Wilshire elevator clutched her chest and yelped when I told her the store had just announced its doors would close at the end of the month.

“Oh my God,” she moaned. “How can they do that?”

To those who follow the retail industry, Monday’s announcement by parent company R.H. Macy & Co. wasn’t a total shock. A tenacious recession and huge corporate debt have combined to put Macy into bankruptcy.

But Bullocks Wilshire--now officially I. Magnin, its Art Deco tower rising high above the boulevard for which it is named--seemed eternal. For years, the store has been a holdout in its neighborhood, a headstrong dowager who refused to give in to the crumbling reality around her. In the last few years, it seems the parking lot has always been half empty. The cavernous store never seemed crowded, either.

You’ve read a lot about the regulars. They had their Tea Room, their Studio of Beauty, their favorite saleswomen. My particular Bullocks Wilshire thrill was no-hassle parking.

Having grown up in the suburbs, I didn’t set foot in the store until I was a young adult, but I can still recall the intimidation. The high ceilings and narrow main aisle of the first floor evoke nothing so much as a cathedral. But for lack of funds, I would have worshiped mightily at the altar of Estee Lauder.

As an infrequent customer, I couldn’t summon the kind of emotion that was wafting through the store’s perfumed air this week, but I could appreciate it. And I could marvel that in an affluent city like this, things could turn out so badly for the place.

Shortly after I arrived at the store on Monday, I was intercepted by the store’s elegant spokeswoman, who offered to show me why Bullocks Wilshire must be closed. We walked onto Wilshire Boulevard, and gazed up at the figures carved in stone above the heavy glass doors.

The spokeswoman began to recite the reasons, from a memo that had been typed out neatly in advance:

She pointed across the street to a business, whose several hundred employees moved to Valencia last month. To her right, she gestured to a big hotel that had just closed; to her left, the construction site for Metro Rail that will disrupt the boulevard for months to come. She waved toward MacArthur Park, whose vagrants, displaced by subway construction, now spill onto the sidewalk in front of the store. On cue, a toothless woman holding a cup wobbled by, asking for change.

Chief among the culprits, of course, were last spring’s riots, she said. Display windows had been smashed; the store suffered an estimated $10 million in losses. Customers were afraid.

The message from the top: It’s not our fault, Los Angeles. It’s yours.

Funny. She didn’t breathe a word about the corporate debt that has driven Macy into bankruptcy, nor hint that bad decisions at the top could account in any way for the store’s dismal performance.

The lunch crowd had thinned when I stepped into the coral-and-green Tea Room. A few well-coiffed, elegantly dressed women sat against the wall, which you would expect, but there was also a professor from the Southwestern University School of Law, which borders the store’s parking lot, and a student from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in a leather baseball jacket, toting a quilted leather Chanel book bag.

Waitress Angie Glavan, a 36-year-old Croatian immigrant, was unable to hold back tears as she contemplated the end of her seven-year career in the Tea Room.

“I didn’t sleep at all last night,” she said. “My heart is breaking.”

So were others.

“This place always made you feel so elegant, even if you didn’t have a dollar in your pocket,” said a wistful Ann Angione Ray, a 75-year-old retired psychiatric social worker who has shopped Bullocks Wilshire since it opened in 1929. She was in high school at the time, and cannot imagine life without the place.

“ Everything in my home is from Bullocks Wilshire,” she said, “my clothes, my china, my silver. I bought my trousseau here. I don’t know how to shop anywhere else!”

Her sister, Joan Angione, elegant in a peach wool suit with matching gloves poking out of her handbag, seemed equally bereft.

“I have no idea where I’ll shop now,” she said. “The parking is so bad in Beverly Hills. I guess I’ll have to go to Pasadena. It used to be hard to get a parking place here. You’d never come at noon, because us old ladies would be here.”

We chatted on the little benches at the porticoed entrance behind the store, next to the white azalea trees and the grandly conceived Fashion Walk of Fame, with the names of only two designers immortalized so far, Donna Karan and Rosita Missoni.

It won’t be missed by everyone, but when Bullocks Wilshire closes, a certain way of life goes with it; a certain civility, a certain elegance.

“It isn’t just the store,” said Ann Angione Ray, “it’s part of something bigger.”

That something is the sagging spirit of a city embraced by a motto carved above a department store’s stone portals: “To build a business that will never know completion.”

Until now.