The End of Saks

We like to surround ourselves with intimations of luxury.  Whether that fills you with anxiety or a sense of security is a matter of the moment and personal status.  But when it all goes away, when all you see is the skeleton beneath, what do you feel?

Saks Fifth Avenue, Chicago:
1929 at Michigan and Chestnut (left); 1935-1990, 669 North Michigan (right)
(images courtesy Nena's Notes)

Saks Fifth Avenue came to Chicago almost a century ago, in 1929.  It moved to what is now Niketown six years later, and, half a century on, to it's long-time, final home at 700 North Michigan.  It was anchor to a massive 1990 development, Chicago Place, a 42-story tower with 233 apartments above a 320,000 square-foot vertical shopping mall, to which Saks, with about a quarter of the space, was the department store anchor.  Emulating Marshall Fields, that still wasn't enough; their men's store was across the street.

Although there was still a lot of empty space at the time of opening, developers were optimistic of a quick fill-out, maybe even a Barney's to be added to the mix.  And while Chicago Place did fill out, it never met that initial promise, a third wheel to the majors Water Tower Place and 900 North Michigan just blocks up the street.  Like the joke of how you go bankrupt - slowly, and then all at once - Chicago Place went into painful decline.  The wonderful, upscale Bockwinkel's grocery in the basement folded early on, and more empty storefronts, dead behind the eyes, followed.  

[Read: Dead Mall Walking]

Then, in 2009, the mall was acquired for a bargain-basement $39,000,000, and the new owners pulled the plug for conversion into office space.  Saks, the anchor, was now sole survivor, having already pulled back the men's store into the mothership.

And there matters stood, as department stores fell out of fashion and bricks-and-mortar retail shriveled under the onslaught of Amazon and buying stuff on the internet. Water Tower Place shed anchors Macy's and Lord & Taylor, closed its food court, and now is about to shrink under a major rehab.  Somehow 900 North Michigan - and maybe the far newer Shops at North Bridge, anchored by Nordstrom's - seem to be doing fine.

Saks was not immune.  Owned by former Canadian department store powerhouse Hudson's Bay, in December of 2024 it spent $2.7 billion acquiring troubled luxury rival Neiman Marcus.  Little more than a year later, in January of this year, like two drowning swimmers dragging each other under the waves, the combined retailer filed for bankruptcy, announcing a wave of closings, including the Saks in Chicago Place, which happens to be right across the street from Chicago's Neiman Marcus which, for the moment, is last man standing.

Saks has only days to live, but it's already a corpse waiting to get itself buried.  The sparse selection of actual merchandise is overwhelmed by a closeout of art, furniture, fixtures and extension cords.  The medium of photography has allowed us to witness with dread the dance macabre of how even the greatest beauties wrinkle, age and die.  The current state of Saks infers something similar, although in reality it was always less a matchless beauty than a carefully appointed machine for selling expensive goods through the allure of luxury.  In department store years, Saks has had a long life, and now, in the final stretch, you can see how much it was held together at the end by botched surgeries and too much make-up.

"Going to the mall" used to be our solace, our safe place when the outside world turned anxious. Rem Koolhass famously wrote an entire spectacular, brilliant book about it, just before the phenomenon was about to begin its decline. In the present unstable moment, our psyches under constant assault from the capricious, destructive actions of madmen, we've strangely decided to continue weaning ourselves from the social consolation of shopping malls, our drug of choice, for the isolating, impersonal world of the on-line, the algorithms of AI feeding both our desires and their assuagement.   

For me, a simple lower-middle-class peasant, Saks Fifth Avenue was never my world, but walking this Die tote Stadt, stripped to its remnants like the twigs of Lavinia's hands, I feel both afraid and queasily at home.

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