Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and it’s Christmas Eve. Today we’ll look behind the holiday windows that captivate the crowds at this time of year. We’ll also get details on a report that says new housing isn’t being built fast enough. And we’ll see if you recognize a quote about someone who’s moving into a big new job.
Manny Urquizo opened an almost invisible door and led the way into a room where the sounds of the holidays were motors humming and gears whirring, not carolers caroling.
It’s the room behind the holiday windows on the Broadway side of Macy’s Herald Square store. Unseen by the crowds outside is the machinery that makes all the displays work.
There’s the laptop that synchronizes the turntables in the Christmas-as-history display in Window No. 3. There are the hydraulics that tilt the book Santa is holding in Window No. 1. There’s even a backup generator that would keep the phantasmagoria going in a blackout.
The end-of-year holidays are a part of what New York is, and no wonder: Santa Claus as we know him today was invented in New York. So were department store windows where the snow never melts, where Santa’s cottony beard is always perfect and where the Christmas trees are at least an inch too tall for your apartment.
At first holiday windows were only “spare still-life displays,” according to the book “Through the Shopping Glass: A Century of New York Christmas Windows,” by Sheryll Bellman.
Before long, she told me last week, the windows “were why people came to New York. The No. 1 thing was the windows.”
Year after year, the city waited to see what the window designers had dreamed up. Artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s and Andy Warhol in the 1960s put in their time creating holiday fantasies behind glass before they were famous.
One of their forebears, L. Frank Baum, was famous for designing windows. He wrote a book, “The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors,” with guidance on what paint to use, even what brushes. But another book he wrote at about the same time easily overshadowed it: “The Wizard of Oz.”
Bellman credited Lord & Taylor with “the first truly unforgettable Christmas window display” in 1938, at the flagship store on Fifth Avenue at 38th Street. What set those windows apart, and set the course that other stores followed, was what they did not do — market dresses, suits, hats or anything else sold in the store. (Lord & Taylor closed the Fifth Avenue store in 2019 and all other locations a year later.)
Macy’s builds each display in a workshop in Queens, “and then we rip it apart and bring it back to life, inside the store, in our windows,” Urquizo said. The backdrops are painted by hand. “That took hundreds of hours with different illustrators to get the lines and colors,” he said.
Urquizo talked about the evolution of the technology that makes the displays function. He said the equipment and systems marry the old (mechanical turntables and doll-like figures) with the new (animatronics and LEDs).
There are also video cameras that are trained on the displays. “We can see if a motor stops. You know, somebody has to come out and fix something,” Urquizo said. And there is a backup generator, in case there is a blackout.
One of the windows is an interactive singing display. People on the sidewalk can sing, karaoke-style, as the lyrics to well-known holiday songs appear on a screen.
Yes, Urquizo said, he has tested it — even though he added, sounding sheepish, “I have no singing potential or anything like that.”
Weather
Look for a sunny and breezy day with a high near 44, as dry air settles in. Clouds are expected in the evening, with a low around 31.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Christmas).
The latest New York news
-
Eric Adams’s complicated legacy: He took office in 2022 with bold promises. He leaves with a mixed record, tarnished by a federal indictment and an affordability crisis. Here is a look at Adams’s record on seven major issues.
-
Charged with hate crimes: The authorities say that Armani Charles, 23, accosted a 35-year-old man on the street near Chabad Lubavitch Headquarters in Brooklyn and made antisemitic comments before stabbing him. The charges Charles is facing — assault, attempted assault and aggravated harassment and menacing — are categorized as hate crimes.
-
The Rockettes at 100: This year’s holiday show is a celebration of the Rockettes’ past. But Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The New York Times, writes that “legacy and an impeccable kick line can’t turn this ‘Christmas Spectacular’ into a great show.”
-
What went wrong with “The Queen of Versailles”? The show was the only large-scale new musical to open on Broadway this fall, and reunited Kristin Chenoweth and Stephen Schwartz for the first time since “Wicked.” But they weren’t enough to save it.
WEDNESDAY QUIZ
Name the person he’s talking about
The other day we quoted someone who said this:
“He’s got big city experience, but he’s also got the migrant experience. Those are the two things that are key for the New York of today.”
Whom was he talking about? (We’ll identify who said it at the end of the newsletter.)
-
Mark Guerra, whom Mayor Eric Adams swore in as fire commissioner on Tuesday.
-
Bishop Ronald Hicks, who will be installed as the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York on Feb. 6.
-
Zohran Mamdani, who will take office as mayor on Jan. 1.
New housing isn’t being built fast enough, a report says
“Is New York keeping pace or falling behind?”
That question opened a report that looked at progress toward the “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 new homes by 2032, a target set by Mayor Eric Adams three years ago.
The report, from the influential Real Estate Board of New York, said that the city is not on track to meet that goal. New housing isn’t being built fast enough: About 9,450 new units have been added each quarter since the beginning of 2024, 3,650 fewer than the number needed to reach the 500,000-unit mark on time.
The report is the latest to underscore the challenges facing New York City, where the apartment vacancy rate is 1.4 percent, the lowest in more than 50 years, and rents are continuing to climb.
The report said it takes 3.4 years, on average, to finish an apartment building, and more than four years in Manhattan. It said there are geographical disparities: Brooklyn and Queens account for 65 percent of the units completed since the beginning of 2024.
METROPOLITAN diary
Window watching
Dear Diary:
I used to operate a small shop at the corner of Bleecker and Perry Streets in the West Village. We sold handmade glass, linens, pottery and cutlery. We had two big windows, and I spent a lot of time working on the displays.
One of my neighbors was an older woman who walked by with her dog every day. She would often stop and seem to be looking at the items on display very carefully. She never came in and never looked up to see me watching her.
After I had been there for about a year, she finally opened the door and stuck her head inside.
“Are you the same person who has been doing the window displays this whole time?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“You’ve gotten much better,” she said.
— Peg Vance
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
In the quiz, David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University was referring to Bishop Hicks.
I’ll be away until Jan. 5. Happy holidays! — J.B.
P.S. Here are today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Made in New York: The Magic of Holiday Windows in Stores appeared first on New York Times.
