Gimbels closes at Herald Square on September 28, 1986


The city, she’s a greedy old sow, and she’s always hungry. You think she cares about your memories? Your first Christmas window display, your mother’s perfume counter? Forget it. The city just wants what’s next.

Thirty-eight years ago, on a crisp fall day that promised nothing but the usual urban squalor, a great hole opened up in Herald Square. On September 28, 1986, the lights went out. The doors locked. The escalators froze. Gimbels, that sprawling giant at 33rd Street and Broadway, was dead. And if you listen close, on a foggy New York night, you might still hear the echoes of its final day, like a ghost rattling its chains in the dark.

The liquidation sale had been a cruel, lingering wound. People, with that particular vulture-like hunger that comes from thinking you’re getting something for nothing, had picked the store’s bones clean. They’d walked out with cheap toasters and discount sweaters, like little parasites carrying away their last bits of carrion. But even in their triumphant scavenging, they could feel it. The cold.

It started in the back corners, in the dusty, half-forgotten departments where the merchandise had been picked over like a roadkill deer. It was a kind of wrongness, an atmospheric pressure that made the hairs on your arms stand up. The escalators, once a cheerful, chugging parade of consumerism, had started to slow, to sigh, and then to die, one by one. The overhead lights flickered, leaving swathes of the once-bright store in perpetual twilight. It felt less like a store and more like a mausoleum.

When they locked the doors for the last time on September 28th, 1986, it wasn’t with a bang. It was with a whisper. A final click of the lock, and then silence. And that’s when the really scary stuff began.


You see, a building that big, a building that’s soaked up that many hopes and fears and desires for seventy-six years, it doesn’t just let go. It holds onto the past like a drowning man holds onto driftwood.

Some folks say if you stand across the street late at night, in the chill air, you can still see things. Ghostly hands reaching for the jewelry that’s no longer there. The flicker of a Christmas light where a display used to be. But the worst, the absolute worst, is when the wind blows just right, and it carries with it the ghosts of the sounds.

The hiss of a steam-pipe in the sub-basement. The screech of train brakes in the old Gimbels subway station passageway. The ghostly, faraway shriek of a child who dropped a candy cane. And, if you’re unlucky, the sound of the elevators. Not the cheerful ding-dong of them arriving, but a terrible, scraping, grinding sound from deep inside the shaft. The sound of something being pulled down, down, down into the darkness.

Because that’s the thing about Gimbels. It wasn’t just a store that closed. It was a giant, brick-and-mortar heart that stopped beating. And hearts, even dead ones, can hold on to a terrible, vengeful memory of what used to be. The city just wanted its next meal, but Gimbels…Gimbels just wanted to stay. And some say, in the echoing silence of that vacant space, that it never really left at all. It just waits.

I think about it sometimes, driving through New York, passing Herald Square. The city’s still there, loud and alive, but something’s missing. Gimbels was more than a store; it was a story, one on which the last page was turned on September 28, 1986. And if you stand on that corner at midnight, when the taxis slow and the wind cuts through the skyscrapers, you might feel it—a chill, a whisper, the faint jingle of a cash register that hasn’t rung in decades. The terrible, hungry silence of a store with no customers left to sell to. The ghost of Gimbels, waiting for one last customer who’ll never come.

Location: 6th Ave & W 33rd St, New York, NY 10001, USA

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