A&S

Mimi Sheraton had a part time job as a teenager working the cosmetics counter at Abraham & Straus department store in downtown Brooklyn in the early 1940s. “Putting a teen-age girl in cosmetics is like hiring an alcoholic for Sherry-Lehmann's,” she wrote in an article in The New York Times of May 8, 1998. “There wasn't a product I didn't have, not forgetting eyelash curlers, chin straps and winged patches stuck around eyes at night to forestall wrinkles.”

Abraham and Straus, usually known as A & S, was a large, mid-priced department store on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn that targeted middle-income shoppers, sort of a Brooklyn equivalent of Macy's. It attracted shoppers from Queens and Long Island as well as Brooklyn. Both A&S and Macy's had been owned by the Straus family. The store's roots stretched back to 1865. It was one of the original partners in Federated Department Stores in 1929 along with Bloomingdale's and Filene's of Boston.

Major downtown department stores like A&S in 1946 were much bigger deals than the mall department stores of today, offering not just clothing, cosmetics, bedding, giftware and housewares, but a full line of products and services like gourmet foods, books, fabrics and notions, restaurants and beauty parlors. A&S had an American Express travel agency in-store and there was a Horn & Hardart Automat in the basement.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the store underwent a major overhaul, including the addition of an Art Deco extension and a revamp of the first floor interior. In the July 24, 2005 New York Times, Christopher Gray described the design of the ten-story Brooklyn store as a “boxy crown of streamlined, vertical brick set over a plain, horizontal band of tooled limestone at the ground floor, with store window accents of polished gray stone.....Most of the facade is dominated by columnlike piers of rounded brick that rise continuously past the bays of windows and metal spandrels set back from the surface. The brick is of differing hues -- brown, rust, orange and other colors -- and the rounded forms sometimes present a hypnotic shimmer, as if the whole surface of the building were vibrating. ” The Fulton Street entrance had Art Deco reliefs subtly carved into light gray marble. Frosted glass boxes in the style of Rene Lalique flanked the elevators.

A&S began a postwar expansion in January 1946, including the addition of space for fashion shows. In the meantime it presented a show of Easter fashions at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights and opened a Passover department. In the March 20, 1946 New York Times the store announced the creation of a “home advisory service where individual homemakers may unburden 'all their household problems except marital ones.'” The department had a reading bar where shoppers could browse books on cooking, home planning, gardening and housekeeping. Consultants were available to refer customers to architects, contractors and suppliers. The Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn provided financial advice and Better Homes and Gardens magazine offered house plans and specifications.

A&S opened multiple suburban branches in the '50s and '60s , many of which, including the downtown Brooklyn flagship, became Macy's in 1995 when Federated acquired Macy's and retired the A&S brand.