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Photo courtesy of Frank C. Kautenberg
Miller & Rhoads window in 1956
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Photo courtesy of Frank C. Kautenberg
Miller & Rhoads window in 1959
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Photo courtesy of Frank C. Kautenberg
Miller & Rhoads window again in 1956
In Richmond more than a half-century ago, one of the most accessible places for the average citizen to experience glamour and couture, as well as connect to art and perhaps the international culture beyond Broad Street, was the department store. The retail colossi Miller & Rhoads (1885-1990) and Thalhimers (1842-1992) provided windows on the world.
At holiday time, Miller & Rhoads presented the Legendary Santa with his Snow Queen and transformed the seventh-floor Old Dominion Room into a magical Santaland. Thalhimers offered an elaborate “Wonderland,” featuring puppeteer “Sir” George Creegan and kinetic, mechanized street-view displays.
In 1970, Thalhimers presented “Christmas on the James.” Wending from the large windows into the store auditorium, the display followed the river from Williamsburg to Richmond, with models of historic buildings and modern skyscrapers bedecked in yuletide manner.
The late Betty Bauder, a former fashion model who rose through Thalhimers’ ranks to become fashion director and vice-
president of marketing, recalled in a 1999 interview for Richmond magazine the impact of the central retail district during the holidays. “People would come down to Richmond from West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and they’d get rooms at the [Hotel] John Marshall and stay for the weekend and shop.”
Thalhimers strove to reflect Richmond’s culture and history, and not just during holiday time. “Salute” themes emerged that received fastidious art direction equal to a persuasive theater set. These storefront celebrations worked alongside current events, from Virginia Garden Week and the Richmond Ballet to the Jamestown 350th anniversary and the Left Bank of Paris. Across the street, Miller & Rhoads had hats made by Sara Sue and its community center of the Tea Room, which presented regular fashion shows accompanied by maestro Eddie Weaver on organ and piano. A “Tea Room Express” elevator zipped directly from the first to the fifth floor.
Bauder extolled the window displays. “These windows served as a way for the city’s cultural life to promote itself. You have to remember, there were at the time — this is back in the 1940s, 1950s and even later — maybe only one or two art galleries in town, if that. Not everybody had television then. People walked downtown and looked at those windows to learn something about the world.”
A dedicated group of designers who worked many years for Thalhimers created the store’s windows. “They were my little elves,” Bauder said. “I’d tell them I needed something made, or a display created, and they’d go off into a warehouse and come up with something grand.” The late Kip Kephart, Thalhimers’ window display manager, and his Miller & Rhoads counterpart Addison Lewis, endeavored to create dramatic and intriguing tableaux. Kephart recalled in 1999, “These kind of presentations didn’t exist much anywhere else [downtown], and not at all now.”
Years of planning went into Bravissima Italia (1964) and Bravo Britannia (1965), complex, storewide two-week-long festivals produced by Thalhimers. For the latter, the British Embassy sent Thalhimers a trove of original art, figures of Trafalgar Square statues, a double-decker bus, and the city’s town crier, complete with his bell — and installed a London pub on the fourth floor. For both festivals, an Ambassador’s Ball was held at the Hotel John Marshall. The events drew school groups and tourists. Bauder recalled, “These were enormously popular, but extremely time-consuming.”
Thalhimers maintained relationships with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Valentine, with complementary results. In May 1962, the art museum’s director, Leslie Cheek, and Thalhimers manager, Herbert Leeds, began their collaboration with an annual “Focus on the Arts.”
The downtown stores cultivated relationships with designers including Oleg Cassini, Vera Maxwell, Adele Simpson and Pauline Trigère, who made appearances at Thalhimers. During the 1970s, Perry Ellis worked as a buyer and merchandiser (and window designer) at Miller & Rhoads, and was a silent partner in A Sunny Day clothing store at Harrison and Grace streets; its somewhat racy windows were landmarks of their own.
Miller & Rhoads underwent several unsuccessful buyouts and mergers. The store and Thalhimers were considered anchors for the city’s urban mall, Sixth Street Festival Market Place (1985-2008) — with its dramatic/socially thematic bridge over Broad Street and big stained-glass “6th.” But instead of stanching downtown’s drain, it became synonymous with poor planning, tax-dollar waste and failure.
Miller & Rhoads filed for bankruptcy protection in 1989, and on Jan. 19, 1990, locked its doors. The famous clock under which many people met hangs now at the Valentine. A portion of the store forms the Broad Street side of the Hilton Courtyard Inn. Thalhimers also got caught in mergers that led to its February 1992 end. These were sad conclusions for not only esteemed retailers, but also important corporate citizens.
The shift to suburban malls and the rise of big-box stores and online shopping altered downtown department-store merchandising. Along East Grace and Broad streets, where for decades the department stores dominated commerce, there was also a fantastic procession of architectural lovelies that once housed boutiques for shoes and accessories; these are currently being repurposed as restaurants, specialty shops and residences.
What ultimately became Richmond CenterStage caused the demolition of the Thalhimers buildings at Sixth and Grace streets in 2004, while the 1950s Modernist Thalhimers building at Seventh and Grace underwent an architectural grafting into the project. The design modernized the original façades that enclose Dorothy Pauley Square’s Gottwald Playhouse, Rhythm Hall and the Showcase Gallery.
For more on these mercantile monuments, see Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt’s Finding Thalhimers; Under the Clock: The Story of Miller & Rhoads by Earle Dunford and George Bryson; Emily Rusk’s Thalhimers Department Stores; and Christmas at Miller & Rhoads: Memoirs of a Snow Queen by Donna Strother Deekens.
