Retailing: The Ruler of Greeley Square

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Bernard Feustman Gimbel was in the third generation of a merchandising family already well established and wealthy when he entered the business in 1907. He was therefore inevitably tab-loided as "the Merchant Prince." The condescending title never fitted the round-faced ruler of New York's Gree ley Square. In the 34 years he spent on the throne, first as president of Gimbel Bros., Inc., and later as chairman, Gimbel personally changed the family firm into an empire that this year will sell $600 million worth of merchandise in 27 Gimbels stores and 27 swankier Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Beyond that, with a zest that lasted almost up to his death last week at 81 of spinal cancer, Gimbel roamed his adopted city as its conscience, urging on everything from bigger buildings to better education. "Anyone who lives in this city," he would say, "and doesn't make a contribution to it is like a barnacle on a boat."

"Fairness & Equality." For all his civic zeal and his personal flair for the good life on a 200-acre Connecticut estate and at his Florida mansion, Gimbel was more than anything else a shrewd merchant. He was hardly out of the University of Pennsylvania and into the Philadelphia Gimbels store before he was pushing drastic changes on his father and six uncles. The family business had started in Vincennes, Ind., in 1842. The Gimbel brothers built bigger stores in Milwaukee and Philadelphia, but "Bernie" insisted that they move to New York, where the real action was. He picked out a $9,000,000 site, and he got Julius Rosenwald, his friend, who was Sears, Roebuck chairman, to hint to the family that if Gimbels was not interested in the property, Sears would be.

The Greeley Square store, with its two subterranean floors of bargain basement for subway shoppers, was an immediate success. On the strength of it, Bernard Gimbel took another chance. In 1923 he negotiated with Horace A. Saks to buy Saks's 34th Street store as well as the Fifth Avenue site where Saks was planning an uptown store. The negotiations took place partly in a railroad baggage car, where the two men sat atop an empty coffin and talked business. Saks's Cadillac-class merchandise now accounts for half of Gimbel Bros.' earnings.

"Opera Is Too Dangerous." Outside the store, Gimbel was, in his own words, "a simple man." Wife Alva, to whom Gimbel was married for 54 years, once tried to get him interested in opera. Their first night at the Met, a pair of opera glasses fell out of a box above them and hit Gimbel on the foot. "If that had been my head, I would have been killed," he said. "Opera is too dangerous." Instead he settled for gin rummy, frequent trips to nearby race tracks with such intimates as Toymaker Louis Marx, and daily sessions at the Biltmore Hotel steam baths, where Gimbel, even as a septuagenarian, impressed friends by swimming the 35-ft. length of the pool underwater.