Robert Ledermann was dazzled the first time he saw the elaborate animated Christmas displays in the department stores that lined State Street in the late 1940s. “When you looked into the windows in those days it was like looking into a big wonderland,” he says. He remembers waiting two hours in line to see Santa at Marshall Field’s, riding the miniature railroad at the Fair department store at State and Adams, and eating with his family at Harding’s Colonial Restaurant at 21 S. Wabash, where well-behaved kids could choose gifts from a pair of treasure chests. “There were so many wonderful things about downtown,” says Ledermann, who went on to spend most of his professional life working in retail along State Street. He even misses the five-and-dimes: “There was a certain smell in Woolworth’s that was just wonderful.”
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The same decade saw many State Street stores move or close as crowds flocked to Michigan Avenue and the suburbs; closing off the strip in 1979 to create a pedestrian mall nearly killed off those that remained. But a $25-million renovation in 1996 reopened the street to auto traffic, and Sears moved back onto the strip in 2001.
