346 Madison Avenue

Editor’s note: The following piece, written by Daniel D. Covell, touched me. When I started at NW Ayer in 1986, Brooks Brothers was aspirational. I would go in not to buy, because I couldn’t, but I would go in to know what to aim for. Not all nostalgia is backward thinking as we have been led to believe, and this piece took me right back. I was gonna hunt for pictures, but the piece makes its own.

A few days ago, as I was rifling through a tottering pile of books I needed to consult for an ongoing research project, I noticed a sales receipt that my rummaging had unearthed and caused to fall and to land face-down on the floor next to my desk. I could tell at a glance that it was from Brooks Brothers, as the back was adorned with the brand’s iconic golden fleece logo in a fetching light blue, argyle-like pattern. Nothing out of the ordinary there for a regular patron of the creator of Ivy Style’s landmark No. 1 Sack Suit. 

I leaned over to pick it up, turned it over, and immediately my heart sank. Not because the items were overly expensive and I had acted improvidently. That would have brought on not sadness but golden fleece-induced sheepishness. The receipt reflected a redemption of merchandise credit at Register 16 (with Derek, the salesperson) in the amount of $214.53, and the selection of three items (a pair of navy seersucker trousers and two spring-season shirts; I have no recollection of what I returned) that left a balance of $12.97. I covered it with a $20 bill and got back $7.03 (yes, in bills and pennies). So no buyer’s remorse from that. 

The sadness came from having noticed the date (4/13/18) and the address of the store: 346 Madison Avenue at 44th Street, New York, New York, 10017. This transaction had occurred at the Brooks Brothers flagship store in midtown Manhattan, a place I had visited regularly since my spouse and I had moved to Fairfield County in Connecticut in 2016. 

As noted above, I had been a Brooks customer for years prior to my periodic landmark store visits. My two oldest suits – purchased in the early 1990s – are BBs: a three-button navy pinstripe “Brooks Stretch” with cuffed trousers, and a three-button grey “Brooks Ease,” also with cuffs. When the cooler weather hits (as they are not an insubstantial heft), these suits still come out, and the pinstripe still elicits a few “Nice suit!” comments. My tie rack sports a full complement of the Brooks trademark #1, #2 and #3 rep ties, along with a Brooks Argyle & Sutherland bow tie or two. As fans of the site will recall, my brother Brian worked for a time at the Brooks store in the Old Orchard Mall in Skokie, Illinois, and one of my most cherished ties is a blue/silver square-pattered number given to me then by him to mark the completion of my doctoral program. A few Brooks sport jackets and blazers are in the closet as well. A dozen or so shirts and a half-dozen pair of trousers are also in the rotation. 

Most of those would have been purchased at one of Brooks’s many satellite locations across the country (at one time numbering over 200), but it was only in the fall and winter of 2016 when I would have begun to frequent the flagship store (referred to as “Store One” in the company’s accounting system, as Brian told us a few weeks back). During these visits, I would peruse myriad table of ties and shirts displayed on the first floor, then ride the escalator or take the elevator up to floors for kids, ladies, men’s casual wear and shoes, and then, men’s suits. Generations of tailors, trained in the basement, fanned out across BB’s sphere of influence. On my visits Store One was never crowded but customers were always present, and clerks were generally helpful and pleasant. Around the time of the 2018 visit, Brooks was marking its bicentennial, and displays in the store touted this impressive longevity, as did a celebratory display in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall, complete with numerous photos and clothing samples artfully arranged and a coffee table book published by Rizzoli.

The readers of this site will no doubt be familiar with much of backstory about BB’s products and innovations, but maybe less about the brand’s physical locations. Here’s a brief recap:

• Founded by Henry Sands Brooks in 1818 on the corner of Catherine and Cherry streets with a capital investment of $17,000, a waterfront location he described as “convenient to the Gentry and Seafaring Men alike;” 
• The change to “Brooks Brothers” in 1835 when his sons inherited the business;
• The move from custom tailor to ready-made wholesaler in 1849; 
• The adoption of the golden fleece logo (borrowed from an insignia worn by a band of European medieval knights known for their appealing red and purple velvet robes) along with the move to Broadway and Grand in the 1850s (where a staff of 200 clerks and salespeople worked);
• BB’s questionable business practices in providing poor-quality uniforms to Union soldiers during the Civil War, for which its’ building was sacked by rioters protesting the draft in 1863; 
• The move to Union Square in 1869; to Broadway and 22nd in 1884 (just south of Madison Square and right across from where the Flatiron Building would rise a few years later); 
• The introduction of seersucker (1870), Harris tweed (1900), madras (1902), British foulard and British rep ties and the invention of OCBDs around the turn of last century; 
• The move in 1915 to a 10-story granite-and-brick slab of a structure at the northwest corner of Madison and 44th following the development of Grand Central Terminal.

Indeed, in Gotham, their 1999 encyclopedic, 1383-page history of New York until 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace mentioned BB no fewer than 11 times. It is arguable that no other retailer in the country – of any kind, not just for menswear – has had as long and remarkable a history. 

The new location made sense not only because of the proximity to Grand Central, but also to the many Ivy university clubs located in the neighborhood. Several still perch there – the Yale Club at 44th and Vanderbilt (also the most recent home for J. Press on the northwest corner spot of the block) and the Cornell, Harvard and Penn clubs a bit further west on 44th. The Princeton Club, on its own on 43rd between 5th and 6th, defaulted on its mortgage lease in 2021 and has faded away. 

The targeting of these schools and their alumni was a standard marketing approach for any upscale menswear company of the day. In my Yale football program research referenced in a post here a few weeks back, I spied a full-page Brooks ad in a program for the 1897 Yale-Princeton game in New Haven. Fans attending this late-November contest at Yale Field (the as-yet-to-be-built Yale Bowl was almost two decades in the future) would have read the ad that touted half- and full-box overcoats, pea jackets, Ulster and storm coats and Inverness cape coats. No fewer than 25 other menswear purveyors also bought ads in the program, including multiple vendors in New York City (Knox hats at 194 5th Avenue, E.W. Emery Tailor at 246 5th, Alfred Nelson & Co. Tailors at 2615th, W.J. Coleman Tailor at 928 Broadway, Barnewall and Eldridge shirtmakers at 8 West 29th Street, Wetzel Sporting and Mufti Tailors at 363 5th, Nicoll at 771 Broadway). In 1922, Brooks took out full-page ad for the Yale-Army game program at the cost of $150 (about $2700 in 2023 dollars) that prominently displayed the Store One building that “was only a step from Grand Central,” and could be reached by telephone by having the operator ring Murray Hill 8800. “The store had an attitude that made you feel you were part of a select group who were smart, privileged and had great futures,” said a woman shopper who graduated from college in the mid-‘50s.

But BB was hardly the only retailer in that commercial enclave. Abercrombie & Fitch was a block further north. J. Press’s NYC stores hovered around the flagship for decades, beginning in 1929 by sliding in next door at 11 East 44th, then across the street on the northeast corner of Madison and 44th in ’34, then back across Madison in ’62 to 16 East 44th, a locale that is now a Le Pain Quotidien where I sometime breakfast after a night’s stay at the Penn Club. Chipp and Paul Stuart decamped nearby as well. Funny that the Andover Shop never ventured further south than Cambridge to plant its flag.

As good as all these other shops were (though I never had the good fortune to drop into Chipp, Langrock or Fenn-Feinstein), and some still are (Paul Stuart is still in its expansive digs on the southwest corner of Madison and 45th), they were part of a constellation in which BB was the sun, and they were satellites in orbits around it. Put another way, they were underdog middleweight prizefighters circling the heavyweight champ looking for that opening to land that a flurry of jabs, or maybe even that one big knockout punch. J. Press may have had Dick Cavett and Frank Sinatra (for a time), Chipp JFK, the Andover Shop Chet Baker and Miles Davis, but Brooks had pretty much everyone else. 

But every champ goes down eventually, and that’s why I was hit with a wash of sadness looking at the receipt. I knew that Store One was gone, finished off by the fallout from the Covid crush of 2020. The building is still there, and the brand still exists of course – on-line and in smaller brick-and-mortar niches like a spot in Rockefeller Center on the corner of 51st and 6th – but 346 Madison is now just a shell, hosting on the ground floor a pop-up confectionary store. The flattened Doric portico, with its two squared and two round Doric columns, complete with “BROOKS BROTHERS” inscribed over the door, still marks 44th Street entrance (there’s also a more understated entrance on Madison), as are the diagonally-shaped leaded pattern on the glass windows that frame the doorway. When I stopped to consider the building recently, I caught notice of something I hadn’t recalled: A wrought iron railing in front of the windows directly over the 44th Street doorway lintel. Although likely only ornamental. one can only wonder who and under what circumstances might someone open the windows and lean out and address passers-by below. Perhaps after a few drinks at the annual Christmas party, after the last last-minute shopper had been ushered out?

On a post on this site from 2019, Christopher Sharp comments on a 1950 article from Coronet magazine, a digest owned by Esquire. The article’s author, Lester David, noted that when the Washington, DC-based Garfinkel’s bought Brooks in 1946, the new owners stated bluntly that BB would not change its approach to style and merchandising, and that “the store is just as emphatic in its refusal to keep pace with current sartorial fads. Not long ago one of its salesmen showed up for work wearing a hand-painted tie. He was taken to task in the next issue of the Brooks house organ. ‘Asked if it were compulsory,’ the editor wrote, ‘the offender replied that a friend gave it to him for Christmas. This did not seem to us to be a complete answer, but we let it go. Perhaps there is nothing to worry about.’”

Sharp summarized the piece thusly: “The amazing thing about Brooks Brothers and its image is how slowly things changed over the years. I believe Brooks Brothers customers over 40 feel some of the old mystique and will recognize something of the Brooks Brothers presented here. This article from the halcyon days of Brooks Brothers is bound to cause some nostalgia, whether for a place remembered but now lost, or for a place one wishes he knew.” 

That observation reminded me that the 2018 Vanderbilt Hall exhibit featured a grey, two-button suit made specifically for Jon Hamm for his role as anti-hero and advertising savant Don Draper in the acclaimed dramatic television series, Mad Men. Brooks also worked with the show’s costumer designer, Jamie Bryant, to create a limited edition suit with period-correct touches like narrow lapels and diagonal pockets, with the intent to give the suit the sharp, trim look of the early ‘60s “without feeling too retro.” That “iconic, beautiful” suit Draper wore, said Bryant, “was a visual symbol of his success.”

In the final episode of the show’s first season, entitled “The Wheel,” Draper makes a pitch to executives from Kodak looking to market their new product, a round device that allows photographic slides to be easily inserted and removed from a projector. “Technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged at a level beyond flash – if they have a sentimental bond with the product,” Draper says at the beginning of his presentation. He then cites the wisdom of former boss at a furrier company, an old Greek man named Teddy, who told him that the most important idea in advertising is “new:” “Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion,” says Draper.

But Teddy, said Draper, told him about a deeper bond with product: Nostalgia. “It’s delicate, but potent.” Then, the meeting room lights are dimmed, and Draper activates the machine, which with that telltale seven-beat clicking and shuffling as slides drop into place, shows image after image of Draper and his family, at weddings, birthday parties, at play in their yard. As the slides advance, the screen going black for a second before a new image appears, Draper tells the room that Teddy said the word nostalgia in Greek means literally the pain from an old wound. “A twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone,” continued Draper, and that this device, meant to show images of the past, “isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called a wheel. It’s called a carousel. It allows as to travel around and around, to a place we know we are loved.” Kudos to the writers of this episode, Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith, for that soliloquy, and for making me want to believe the actual pitch went down that way. Weiner later explained the connection in using BB as the show’s main outfitter for male cast members, stating that “my theory is that everything exists at once and that people’s taste may stop – as it does with music – in the period that they looked the best … All of these things become personal expressions, and Brooks Brothers had that entire variety for us.” 

But Christopher Sharp’s keen observations on the recreated retro suit underscores the fact that the past can be as much a burden as a benefit, especially in the ever-fluctuating world of fashion. Take a look back at those New York-based companies that advertised in the Yale football program. They’re all gone. For generations Brooks survived and thrived through its innovations and its connection to the Ivy Style market, and for while Brooks was able to thread the needle (apologies to Richard Press) – going backwards and forwards with equal dexterity, expounding on its history and its innovations, much like it did with the Mad Men edition suit.

But eventually its celebrated past became too weighty a burden, and stunted its ability to innovate. Yes, the burden was magnified by the inexorable rise of on-line shopping, multiplied by Covid, which in turn led to changes in work and dress habits. All this was exacerbated by the fact that that part of Manhattan continues to feel the fallout of these changed work habits. Being steps away from Grand Central is no longer a big deal when fewer and fewer people take those steps to work every day in a suit and tie. 

As a result, if one does take those steps today and passes by the shuttered Store One in a suit, one stands out rather than blends in, and even those in a sport jacket, blazer or suit rarely sport a necktie. If you are so clad it appears as if you are an alien who has disembarked from a spaceship/time machine from 1950, landed in Midtown and realized that the Dodgers and Giants are in California, Toots Shor’s, Veau D’Or and the 21 Club are gone too, and that Brooks Brothers is little more than J. Crew with a longer resume. Have I been grievously wounded by the demise of 346 Madison? No. But there is sadness. And it does hurt a little, especially when walking toward Grand Central at the corner of 44th and Madison.

• Daniel D. Covell