Summer in New York, 1948

In June 1948, as the industry was getting ready for Display Market Week, June 20-25 at the Hotel New Yorker (“this greatest event of the display year,” according to Display World magazine), the city's retailers were preparing their stores and windows for the summer season.

In New York, the hottest number on Broadway that season was “High Button Shoes” (starring Phil Silvers, Nanette Fabray and Helen Gallagher; music by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, directed by George Abbott, choreography by Jerome Robbins). So display director Winston Jones created referential “Sunday by the sea” window presentations for Franklin Simon. Turn-of-the-century bath houses and beach pavilions (painted on seamless paper) were the backdrops for mannequins in colorful contemporary one-piece bathing suits and gold slippers. In the windows'foreground, cardboard fish leapt out of rows of decorative blue waves. (It is hoped the windows were more memorable than the play's score. The only song that seems to have at all survived the intervening 52 years is “Papa, Won't You Dance With Me?” and even that is hardly a raging golden oldie. Considerably less memorable is “Nobody Ever Died For Dear Old Rutgers.”)

Display director Louis Villela also relied on a current New York attraction, filling B. Altman's windows with large cutouts of “familiar circus animals with their offspring” — pigs, camels, giraffes, ostriches, horses and hippos — to celebrate the circus at Madison Square Garden. The pastels of both the cutouts and the ribbon and flower trims were meant to coordinate with the pastel summerwear on the child mannequins in each of the six windows.

And what would a roundup of New York windows be without a reference to the work of Gene Moore? For “shade flower shades: our own exclusives for a beautiful summer life, wherever” in Saks Fifth Avenue, as described by Display World: “natural color Chinese straw 'cages'were filled with dried straw flowers in pink, blue, yellow and red. The poles on which these bowls were shown were of varying height and slightly tilting. The mannequin, in a wine colored shantung suit with matching linen shoes, wears a gray pearl choker and trails a gray silk scarf as she wanders through the maze of poles. The wall is French blue and the floor is covered with cork discs.”

The accompanying illustrations are from Winston Jones'sketchbook for upcoming Franklin Simon displays. “Back-to-School” is a miniature campus constructed of freestanding wallboard cutouts with applique plaid fabric. “Children's Back-to-School” features a young plywood and felt football hero on a wood pedestal. Colors are autumn reds, oranges and yellows. Each display would be filled, of course, with props and mannequins.