Читать книгу Mad Men's Manhattan - Mark P. Bernardo - Страница 11

Besides being known for advertising, Madison Avenue is also renowned as a shopping destination. An important storyline in Season 1 revolves around Sterling Cooper’s efforts to produce a campaign for the fictional Menken’s department store, a Jewish-owned business in Manhattan’s midtown shopping district (it is described as “sharing a wall with Tiffany’s”) that is seeking to revitalize its image to compete with well-known contemporaries Bloomingdale’s, Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bonwit-Teller.

Bloomingdale’s (59^th Street at 3^rd Avenue) merits special mention; it is where Pete and Trudy Campbell register for their wedding, and where Pete endured the emasculating experience of standing in line to return a duplicate wedding gift in the Season 1 episode “Red in the Face.” One of the pioneers of what we now call department stores, Bloomingdale’s started in 1872, as Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale’s East Side Bazaar, selling a variety of mostly European-style fashion garments. Joseph and Lyman’s father, Benjamin Bloomingdale, was the first American retailer to introduce the hoop skirt, a nineteenth-century fashion fad, to the U.S from Europe. The brothers moved their store to 59^th