“The unexpected always happens,” and, on the same general principle, what is always expected to happen seldom occurs. I was thinkin’ the other day how strikin’ly these two points have been Illustrated in the record of the dry-goods trade in this city. For forty years and more “the terrific” fire that was always goin’ to break out in “the dry-goods district” and devour everythin’ and everybody around, has been yearly prophesized, but has never transpired. The “dry-goods district” has in this time changed its location, worked, like everythin’ else, “its way up-town,” but the fire that is to destroy it has always been, luckily, in the future tense.
In forty years there have been only two really great “dry-goods fires.” One broke out on a Sunday afternoon in the store of Halstead, Haines & Co., on Broadway, and did quite a deal of damage, as far as that establishment was concerned, the loss bein’ estimated at over $150,000. But the conflagration was not general, but local–the fire did not spread.
Another notable fire in the dry-goods district was that which destroyed the establishment of Chittenden & Co., then the leadin’ house in the dry-goods line. The millionaire Eno was a partner of this house. The fire “burnt out” the firm, but it didn’t burn out “the district.” But everybody said: “Wait, we shall see,” but they didn’t see.
The dry-goods district has changed four times in the last fifty years. It used to be down Pearl street and around Hanover square in the “good old days” of Arthur Tappan. Then it got to be around Broadway and Chambers street, in the days of A. T. Stewart’s downtown store. Then it centered around Canal and Mercer street in the times when Arnold and Constable had a store at the corner of Mercer and Canal, and gradually extended northward from that point. At present there are really two “dry-goods districts,” one in the business centre of the city, around Broadway, the other between Fourteenth street and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. But spite of the changes and the constant prophecies of fire, there has been no fire. There have been any amount of alarms, it is true. A friend of mine, a wholesale dry-goods clerk, has kept an account in the last fifteen years of the number of alarms of fires in dry-goods houses in New York. They mounted to thirty-two, between 1869 and 1884, but only six of these were serious. I suppose the reason of this is just because people know that the dry-goods district is peculiarly liable to fire. On that very account they take all the more careful precautions against it.
Several of the fires that have taken place in the dry-goods district were the work of incendiaries. In two cases the firms in the burned buildin’ were suspected of complicity with the conflagration to get the insurance on their stock. In one case, about twelve years ago, the fire was attributed to the rage of a jealous woman, the mistress of one of the leadin’ Hebrew dry-goods dealers, who on learnin’ of the marriage of her former “friend” with a wealthy widow, paid him at his store a visit of mock congratulation, which was followed a few minutes after she left by a real conflagration. But even with all these episodes of crime and greed and human passion and extraordinary risks incident to the “stuff” itself, the long expected fire that is to consume the dry-goods district is still expected.
On the other hand, the most unlooked for things, the most unexpected, the most undesired, in the wholesale dry-goods trade, have been auctions. It has always been taken for granted that to sell dry-goods at auction was simply to throw the goods away–to indeed “sacrifice.” So the spectacle of great houses deliberately auctionin’ off their stock has ever been one for which the dry-goods district has been unprepared. Yet, at the present time, one of the oldest houses in the dry-goods line in the city is gettin’ ready to get rid of its stock by a monster auction (Bates, Reed & Cooley), and in this the house does but imitate an example set some fifteen years ago by Claflin himself. And this Claflin auction was thoroughly successful–a stroke of genius blessed by luck–although at first it was regarded with almost as much horror as if Claflin had with his own hands set fire to his own store.
The “crude” story of this Claflin auction was given me the other day by an old dry-goods clerk, and is somewhat curious. Year after year genial Horace B. Claflin had got richer and richer, till he kind of lost his head and took to outside speculation. Then he “busted up” and got an “extension.” Thus far everybody else had done the same thing as he had done. But the way he got out of his scrape and availed himself of his “extension” was odd and characteristic. He got up a monster auction and made a monstrous success of it. And yet this idea, which he was the first to introduce into the dry-goods trade, though original with himself, came to him by accident, and, through certain circumstances, one night.
The big-hearted and big-headed merchant was walking down Fulton street, Brooklyn, one Friday night about eight o’clock, havin’ been callin’ on a tradin’ friend of his doing business in the neighborhood, when he saw quite a crowd gathered around a shoe store near the Park Theatre. He stopped a moment and found that the shoemaker’s store was bein’ disposed of at auction. The man had got into difficulties. “So they are sellin’ the poor fellow out,” said Claflin pityin’ly. “He is sellin’ himself out,” replied somebody standin’ around, “and is makin’ a good thing out of it, too.”
Claflin inquired into the matter and found out the particulars. The shoemaker had put cards in the paper, sent out handbills and all that sort of thing, gathered the people from far and near, and made money instead of losin’ it by “sellin’ himself out” in advance instead of waitin’ to be sold out later on by somebody else; gettin’ cash for his stock, which he could sell right off, instead of keepin’ unsold stock on hand for customers who might never come.
Claflin went into the shoe store and watched the crowd awhile and the proceedin’s, and when he got through he came out with the best idea in his head that the dry-goods trade had ever known. He would imitate this Brooklyn shoemaker on a scale about a thousand times bigger, and bring all the dry-goods merchants in the country together to his place in New York at once to buy his stock at cost instead of sendin’ after ‘em one by one in the course of months and years to buy his stuff bit by bit for credit. In short, he would get rid of his debts by sellin’ himself out at auction.
Well, the first steamboat goin’ up the Hudson didn’t make a bigger row among the boatmen and sloopmen of the river; the first locomotive didn’t cause more stir among the old stage coach drivers, than did the idea of this first monster auction make among the old fogy dry-goods men. They thought that Claflin had indeed lost his head. They laughed at him. Some really thought he had gone crazy. One friend of his named Spelman, to whom Claflin had been very kind in his time of trouble, lettin’ up on his big indebtedness to him, and even givin’ him goods to start business on once more, took it into his head that it was his duty to use strong measures to protect his benefactor from makin’ a fool of himself. So he absolutely took the time and the trouble to go to several leading doctors of New York and Brooklyn to see if he couldn’t get ‘em, on the sly, to visit and talk to H. B Claflin and investigate his mental condition. Spelman felt convinced that the doctors would see that Claflin had really gone insane through the strain of his financial difficulties, and would take proper measures to restrain him and stop his proposed auction. Spelman even found two or three men who kind of agreed with him about Claflin, but he didn’t find any doctors who agreed with him, or who would undertake to pronounce the most successful dry-goods dealer of the age “crazy.”
So, spite of protest and discussion, the auction sale took place, after havin’ been advertised and handbilled and placarded, all over the United States.
And when Spelman found that instead of a dismal failure the gigantic dry goods auction was a stupendous success; when Spelman saw merchants from Maine to Texas crowdin’ and fillin’ up every square foot of the huge Claflin store, waitin’ for the auction to begin, then Spelman coolly, with a cheek almost as colossal as the Claflin auction, went around tellin’ the strangers in town who had come to attend the auction and who didn’t know the facts of the case, that he had himself originally suggested the magnificent idea of this monster auction.
[Editor’s notes: Claflin’s “monster auction” took place in November, 1873, as a result of the Wall street Panic of 1873. The action likely saved the company.]
