page_title: Marshall Field and Company Building
section_title: Business history
hierarchical_section_title: Marshall Field and Company Building / Business history
caption_attribution_description: English: Historic perspective of the State and Washington corner
context_page_description: The Marshall Field and Company Building, which now houses Macy's State Street in Chicago, Illinois, was built in two stages—north end in 1901–02 and south end in 1905–06, and was the flagship location of the Marshall Field and Company and Marshall Field's chain of department stores. Since 2006, it is the main Chicago mid-western location of the Macy's department stores. The building is located in the Chicago "Loop" area of the downtown central business district in Cook County, Illinois, U.S.A., and it takes up the entire city block bounded clockwise from the west by North State Street, East Randolph Street, North Wabash Avenue, and East Washington Street.
  Marshall Field's established numerous important business "firsts" in this building and in a long series of previous elaborate decorative structures on this site for the last century and a half, and it is regarded as one of the three most influential establishments in the nationwide development of the department store and in the commercial business economic history of the United States.
context_section_description: Although the official corporate name of the retail entity based in this building had been Marshall Field & Company (nicknamed Marshall Field's) from 1881 until 2006, the store has had five different names since its inception in 1852 as P. Palmer & Co. In 1868, after bowing out of involvement in day-to-day operations with his new partners of Field, Palmer & Leiter, Potter Palmer convinced Marshall Field and Levi Leiter to move the Field, Leiter & Co. store to a building Palmer owned on State Street at the corner of Washington Street. After being consumed by the "Great Chicago Fire" and splitting the wholesale business from the retail operations, the store resumed operations at State and Washington in a rebuilt structure, now leased from the Singer Sewing Machine Company. In 1877 another fire consumed this building, and when a new Singer Building was built to replace it at the same location in 1879, Field then put together the financing to purchase it. The business has remained there ever since, and it has added four subsequent buildings to form the integrated structure that is now called the "Marshall Field and Company Building."
  Chicago's retailing center was State Street in the famous downtown "Loop" after the "Great Chicago Fire" of 1871, and this center has been anchored by Marshall Field's and its predecessor companies in this building complex. However, commuter suburbs began to have significant retail districts by the 1920s. In the 1920s, the store created new suburban locations such as Marshall Field and Company Store to remain competitive. After 1950, with the booming post-World War II economic/social climate with increasing suburban residential and commercial development, saw the construction of first "strip" shopping centers, followed by regional enclosed shopping malls along major thoroughfares and interstate highways such as the "Magnificent Mile" reduced the role of the "Loop"'s daily significance to many Chicagoans as downtown retail sales slipped and gradually additional business moved outward following first the streetcar lines and then the automobile. Eventually, there was an influx of stores from other parts of the country as the pace of commercial retailing merged, consolidating, and spreading first regionally then nationwide.  Nonetheless, the Marshall Field and Company Building has survived at this location. However, with the merger and conversion to Macy's the emphasis of the store changed and store-branded lines replaced many designer labels, such as Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Miu Miu and Jimmy Choo, which led to the disassembly of several designer departments of the former Field's (see picture below).
  On September 9, 2006, at the time of the stores merger and conversion, the name of the building was officially changed to "Macy's at State Street". Around this time of the conversion of Marshall Field's to Macy's the building was also the location of vociferous and outraged picketing and protesting by opponents of the merger/conversion and the growth in general of massive business mergers and economic consolidation across the country. After buying out his various partners over the early post-Civil War era, Marshall Field founded the Marshall Field & Company corporate entity that survived 152 years and had arranged before his death, to have this building constructed.  The sentimental objections to the conversion that both eliminated the existence of the corporate entity bearing his name and renaming the building bearing his name were widely reported in the national media of newspapers, radio and television.
caption: Sequence of store fronts at North State & Washington Streets corner, broken by the aftermath of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire
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