The lights went out on Main and Ervay the way they go out on a certain kind of American dream — quietly, with a soft click of the locks on those great glass doors. September 30, 2026. The last of the original major department stores still breathing in downtown Dallas simply ceased. The end of an era that had once seemed as permanent as the red-brick-and-white-stone Renaissance Revival pile itself, raised in 1914 by George Dahl after the first little specialty shop burned down.
One can still see them — the ladies who lunched, ascending that double staircase or the opulent escalators Stanley Marcus installed as if money itself were vertical transportation. Up to the sixth floor, to Eleanor LeMaire’s Zodiac Room, that celestial blue dream where the carpet was deep enough for snowshoes. Popovers with strawberry butter. Chicken consommé in demitasse cups. Models drifting between tables like elegant ghosts. High society made visible, edible, purchasable.
Stanley Marcus understood the theater of it all. Weekly fashion shows, the first in America for a specialty store. The Neiman Marcus Award that lured Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent. The Christmas Book with its his-and-hers fantasies. Fortnights that turned the store into a temporary embassy of distant glamour. Dallas suddenly had a claim on the world’s attention, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a ribbon the color of money.
“I had measurements for every case and column there,” Gale Sliger recalled of setting up the celebrated Fortnights during the store’s 1970s-80s heyday with Bill Reed and designer Alvin Colt. “We’d load in on Saturday afternoon, they’d lock the doors, the trucks went away, and we started putting stuff together. When they opened Monday morning, it was done.”
“I think it’s a real mistake not to have that anchor of history,” she lamented. “I hate to see it close.”
Harvey Haigh started helming the store’s chic salon in 1970 and continued for over 50 years.
“There was something magical about that store, you know,” Haigh noted of Neiman Marcus. “There was always something going on. You never knew what was going to happen. Stanley had this saying, ‘Everything under one roof.’ That was beauty and clothing and shoes and service and so on. I’d never met anybody like him.”
“Nothing was pretend,” he said of the store. “If it looked like a 15th-century chaise longue, that’s exactly what it was, because he wouldn’t have anything that wasn’t up to his standards.”
Haigh recounted illustrious visitors: Sophia Loren, the Queen of Thailand; Princess Grace of Monaco came three times.
“His door was always open,” Haigh recalled of Marcus. “We became friends — a great pleasure of my life. Going to that store every morning was like going home.”
And so, the glass doors lock. The Zodiac’s blue migrates to NorthPark. Sixty-seven jobs scatter. Downtown loses its last original temple of aspiration. One walks past the darkened windows and feels the peculiar ache of something that was never supposed to end — something clean, modern, quietly classy — suddenly revealed as mortal after all.
Harvey smiled sadly, “I don’t think it’ll ever happen again.”
Author
Josh Hickman
Josh Hickman is a national award-winning journalist, visual artist, sometime musician, and author of seven books. His writing For People Newspapers often focuses on arts & culture, local small businesses, local history & government, and interesting personal stories. His paintings include a commission for Dallas County and a donation to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
