A million square feet of department store with wooden escalators from 1902 still running on the upper floors. Free to ride, and almost nobody does.
The escalators
Take the escalators up from about the fifth floor and at some point the treads turn to wood. These are the original Otis escalators installed when the store opened in 1902, among the first ever built for a shop, and they still run — slatted maple treads, brass, and a distinctive sound. They are one of the oldest working escalators anywhere.
They are on the upper floors, mostly toward the back and toward the 34th Street side, and they are not signposted. Wandering upward until you find them is part of it.
The store
It advertises itself as the largest department store in the world, which depends on how you measure, and it is unquestionably enormous — around 1.1 million square feet of selling space across ten-plus floors on a full city block.
The building is a landmark and there are details worth noticing: the caryatids on the 34th Street front, the original clocks, and a corner of the block at Broadway and 34th that Macy’s does not own. A rival bought that lot in 1900 to force a payout, Macy’s refused, and built around it. The five-storey building is still there with a billboard on it.
The parade and the windows
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has run since 1924 and comes down Central Park West, along Central Park South and down Sixth Avenue to Herald Square, on the fourth Thursday of November. The balloons are inflated the afternoon before on 77th and 81st Streets by the Natural History Museum, and watching that is a much less crowded and arguably better event than the parade itself.
The Christmas windows on the 34th Street and Broadway sides go up in November. Miracle on 34th Street is set here and the store leans into it hard, with a Santaland on the eighth floor that requires a reservation.
The Fourth of July fireworks are also Macy’s, on the East River most years.
Practical
The store is open long hours, including most holidays. Toilets on several floors, which makes it one of the more reliable stops in a part of Midtown that is short of them.
Herald Square outside is a pedestrian plaza with chairs. Penn Station is two blocks west; the Empire State Building is one block east.
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