G. Fox & Co.

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Cheney Building on Main Street, about 1905

G. Fox & Co. was a large retail department store established in 1847 by Gerson Fox and his brother, Isaac (the store was originally named "I. & G. Fox Co.") in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1938, Gerson's granddaughter, Beatrice Fox Auerbach, took control of the company upon her father's (Moses Fox) death, and grew it into a powerhouse business that became the dominant retail store in the southern New England area for most of the last century. The store was also the largest privately held department store in the world until it was sold in 1965 to The May Department Stores Company. Through her efforts, Mrs. Auerbach became one of the most prominent women executives in American retailing and gained much respect in the Hartford area for her civic and philanthropic efforts.

Mrs. Auerbach fostered fierce loyalty among her employees and became a pioneer in the realm of employee benefits such as retirement plans, in-store hospital, loans to employees in need, paid vacations, at-cost meals, and more. In order to honor longstanding continuous employment, she created the Moses Fox Club to honor those whose employment attained the twenty-five year mark and every fifth year of service thereafter. Until the final Moses Fox Club dinner, Mrs. Auerbach awarded at least one fifty year pin each year of the club's existence.

The flagship store was located at 960 Main Street in downtown Hartford. History has it that the original store and offices, destroyed by fire in 1917, was able to be rebuilt because the store's customers rallied and paid (it is estimated) in the neighborhood of 95% of all outstanding bills - voluntarily. Encouraged by the response, Moses Fox had the new store designed by New York architect Cass Gilbert, as an 11 story behemoth initially dubbed "Fox's folly" in reference to its sheer scale. The new store opened in 1918. The fire served as impetus for Beatrice and her husband, George Samuel Auerbach, to return to Hartford from Salt Lake City to help with the business. George died in 1927 and Beatrice then began working alongside her father.

Not long after taking over in 1938 after Moses' death, Beatrice Auerbach embarked on a major renovation that added elegant art deco interior details and a signature marquee above the display windows and entrances along Main Street. In 1947, two years after World War II ended, G. Fox celebrated its 100th birthday.

Throughout the mid 20th century, the store continued to grow exclusively at its downtown Hartford location. Against prevailing trends, Mrs. Auerbach believed that branch stores only detracted from the appeal of the flagship store. This was, in no small part, due to the failure of Foxmart, a farm equipment and supply "branch" of G. Fox in Connecticut's Tobacco Valley. Instead of creating branch locations and in an effort to reach out to her distant customers, Mrs. Auerbach had about one-third of the 11th floor Toy Department carved out and expanded the store's telephone-order facility. As part of this effort, the company added direct phone lines to every exchange in Connecticut and parts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Mrs. Auerbach's belief in customer service was so focused that employees were charged with making sure every customer was satisfied, regardless of the cost. While the sales staff was not permitted to make final decisions in this area, Mrs. Auerbach's Service Managers had the last word, even to the extent that, on rare occasion, they were permitted to override a merchant's decision and take charge to satisfy a customer's need. While no Service Manager was ever chastised in this effort, an occasional merchant received the dreaded summons to the eleventh floor to be reminded by Mrs. Auerbach personally of her commitment to customer satisfaction.

Further evidence of the store's commitment to service had a small staff of the service management personnel and two or three drivers on duty, sometimes until after midnight, on Christmas Eve to dispatch replacements for gifts that had not been received in time to be placed under the tree for Christmas.

Following Mrs. A's (as she was fondly know by the staff) instincts, G.Fox added several major additions to the downtown complex, including a huge nine story retail addition to the Market Street (rear) side of the building (to accomplish this addition, a nine-story brick, concrete and steel warehouse had to be moved from one side of a city block to the opposite side - an immense feat at the time) and a major warehouse (Mrs. Auerbach insisted that it be referred to as the "Service Building") in the 1930s, a multi-level parking garage in the 1960s to accommodate family cars exiting from the two newly-opened Interstate highways into downtown Hartford, and the sixty-station telephone-order department.

The parking garage was situated next to the brand new interchange of Interstate highways I-91 and I-84. An accurately told story is that the construction of this interchange, notoriously poor in its original configuration and on a very constrained site, was the result of Mrs. Auerbach's 'insistence' that the off-ramps of the new highway deposit customers, almost literally at the front door of her store. Considering the prevailing culture of the 1960s, and how few women executives there were, this story highlighted just how influential Mrs. Auerbach was, particularly within the Hartford business community. As it was, it would be the late 1990's before the interchange would be reconstructed to correct many of the earlier design flaws. A follow-on to the I-84/I-91 story, when the company's third branch store was being constructed in Meriden, G. Fox (actually the May Co.) paid the State of Connecticut the funds necessary to have a highway exit near the new store completed in time for the opening of the new branch.

A final expansion of the downtown store occurred in 1969, when G.Fox took over and expanded into basement and first and second floors of the adjacent historic 'Cheney Building', designed by H.H. Richardson, that housed another local department store, Brown-Thomson's, which G. Fox had acquired sometime earlier (G. Fox had already expanded into the third, fourth and fifth floors where general management, personnel, credit & collection, advertising and marketing functions were housed). This building would later be redeveloped into the Richardson Shops Mall in 1980 with about 40 stores, a food court and some residential apartments. The mall also connected G.Fox to the flagship store of another local department store chain, Sage-Allen, which eventually closed this location in the summer of 1990, with the entire chain declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy and eventually folding in 1994. The Richardson Mall was later renovated into a Marriott Residence Inn, a revamped food court and some street level retail space.

After the 1965 sale of the store to the May Department Stores Company, G.Fox began an ambitious expansion beyond its Hartford base, building its first branch store in 1969 in Waterbury and thus beginning a 12 store branch expansion that continued until the chain was folded into the May Company's Filene's division in 1992. As a result of this merger, coupled with the severe recession that took hold of the regional economy in the early 1990s and the decline of Hartford's downtown retail environment, the flagship store and the executive offices were shuttered on January 29, 1993.

Prior to the merger with Filene's, two additional G.Fox stores were announced in Albany, New York and Stamford, Connecticut The Albany store eventually opened at Crossgates Mall, but under the Filene's banner in 1994, and the Stamford store, part of a proposed mall with an existing Lord & Taylor, was never built. Eventually, a Filene's store would open at the nearby Stamford Town Center mall in 1996 in a former J.C. Penney location, but it would close in 2004.

On February 1, 1993 the remaining G. Fox & Co. stores were re-branded as Filene's, until September 2006 when most of the that chain was re-named Macy's, after corporate parent May Company's merger with (assumption by) Federated Department Stores was completed.

After being abandoned for almost a decade, the downtown Hartford G.Fox building was re-opened in the fall of 2002 as a mixed-use commercial complex known as 960 Main. The building now houses street-level retail space, office space, meeting facilities the "Gershon (correct spelling is "Gerson") Fox Room" in honor of one of the founders of the store), and the new campus for Capital Community College. This renovation and adaptive re-use maintained many of the art deco interior and exterior details while adding a large interior atrium and interior circulation space. In addition, a new and much larger parking garage was also built on the site of the original G.Fox garage on Market and Talcott Streets.

[edit] Former Locations

Connecticut

Hartford: downtown flagship, 960 Main Street (Closed in the Filene's consolidation, January 1993) Renovated into Capital Community College campus and commercial space in 2002
Farmington: Westfarms Mall, 1974, renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Meriden: Meriden Square (now Westfield Meriden) 1971, renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Waterbury: Naugatuck Valley Mall, 1969 (Closed 9/97 with mall demolished in 2000, Filene's relocated to Brass Mill Center)1997, now Macy's
Danbury: Danbury Fair Mall 1986 renamed Filene's 1993, Closed 3/2006 and consolidated into existing Macy's location
Trumbull: Trumbull Shopping Park (now Westfield Trumbull), 1979 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Milford: Connecticut Post Mall (now Westfield Connecticut Post), 1991 renamed, Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Manchester: The Pavilions at Buckland Hills (now The Shops at Buckland Hills), 1990 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Enfield: Enfield Square Mall, 1971 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's

Massachusetts

Holyoke: Holyoke Mall at Ingleside, 1980 Renamed Filene's 1993 and relocated to new location in 1997, original G.Fox building now houses Target
North Attleboro: Emerald Square, 1988 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's

New York

Poughkeepsie: Poughkeepsie Galleria, 1987 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Middletown: Galleria at Crystal Run, 1989 renamed Filene's 1993, now Macy's
Crossgates Mall

Rhode Island

Warwick: Rhode Island Mall, 1977 (Changed to Filene's in 1990 and finally closed to consolidate with the Warwick Mall which housed a larger Filene's in 1993, building originally housing Filene's was demolished in 2001 to build a Wal-Mart on Level 1 and a Kohl's on Level 2)