We all associate our childhood Christmas memories with one, two, or a handful of places. For me, Christmas happened at home or Downtown, nowhere else.
My dad was a traffic cop Downtown, and so some of my earliest memories of the Christmas season involved taking the streetcar with my mom and little brother Downtown for a trip that would involve the straight trek to Gimbels, then to Woolworth’s for a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake in one of those cone cups with a handle. After that, we’d walk about two blocks up the hill to 6th and Grant streets, where we were sure to find my dad literally standing in the middle of traffic.
As a kid, I was amazed at how he could ‘command’ all those cars, trucks, and buses to do what he wanted. People would crowd the corners of the intersection just waiting for his word on when it was time to cross. To me, he was a matador.
Downtown was a place for sensory overload. The Salvation Army bell ringers, the chatter. The noise from the buses, the bells of the streetcars, and the clanking of their steel wheels on the steel tracks, every so many seconds causing a bang! on the cobblestone and asphalt streets that you could feel, and it made you wonder if at any moment the street itself would buckle.
We bustled from one place to the next with thousands of other bustlers. There’s something about walking in the cold, where you can see your breath and you can see the steam coming up from the manhole covers in the streets themselves. It was like the whole place was alive.
Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.
Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.
Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.
The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.
I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.
The bustle of Downtown at Christmas was not a passing thing for me. Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown.
In college and after graduating, I worked for KDKA Radio, which was the big station in town. Even bigger than the TV stations. Our morning drive guy had built this massive following around three weeks of remote broadcasts from the windows of the three major department stores in Downtown. When I worked at the station, I (along with our station’s whole operation) spent long hours in those windows and on those sidewalks, producing those broadcasts, which went from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. for three straight weeks.
The purpose was to raise money for Children’s Hospital and talk to Pittsburghers non-stop, and that we did. I’ve never worked so hard doing the most mundane of things and loving every minute of it. I fed off of that Christmas bustle that was all around us. And I learned to drink copious amounts of coffee.
A few years later, when I was a newlywed working in a Downtown office building at a PR agency, the Christmas bustle took on a whole new dimension. I did all my Christmas shopping there. We met people after work for happy hours. We went to any number of Christmas parties in clubs, bars, and nicer places, all within blocks of each other.
At Christmastime, Downtown really came alive. It had an energy that I’ve only seen replicated in other downtowns in other cities.
Eventually, the malls stole Santa’s thunder, along with his department stores, and that’s where a different kind of bustle arose. This one was climate-controlled, without that feeling of a raw, wild city that only a Downtown could produce. People were in less of a hurry, and you couldn’t see your breath. You didn’t have to worry about stepping in slush-filled potholes, and as an adult, I liked that. But I did wonder if Christmas lost something along the way with the shift to the suburbs.
Since the 1990s, the internet has done to the malls what the malls did to downtowns. That evolution hit hyperspeed five years ago when the pandemic turned the retail economy into online shopping and home delivery-everything.
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Sure, we still have retail, and a handful of cities like New York and Chicago still offer that downtown experience during the holiday season, but for most Americans, the bustle just isn’t what it used to be.
What was it about that time that made it so special?
I think it was the shared experience. Everyone was out, together, and you could feed off of each other’s energy and the joy of the season. Weathering the elements together, waiting in lines, riding buses and streetcars together. Was it a hassle? Yes, but during Christmas, this wasn’t a bad thing. Uplifting in fact.
If you have the opportunity in the next week, I’d highly recommend adding a little bustle to your holiday. Don’t order everything online, and don't avoid the crowds like the plague. Pick a place where it’s maybe a little busier than you normally like, a little colder than you like, and requires a little effort to go about your business. Try to really experience the bustle once again. I think you’ll like that.
