Wallace Company was a downtown Schenectady mainstay from 1892 until 1973, when all the great downtown department stores (H.S. Barney, W.T. Grant, S.S. Kresge) seemed to collapse within a few years of each other, leaving only Woolworth’s and the venerable Carl Company behind. Wallace’s was owned by Forbes & Wallace of Springfield, Massachusetts, and also had branches in Poughkeepsie and Kingston. It loomed large in my childhood, not only because I spent endless hours as a bored little boy stuck waiting for my mother in the fabric department (remember when there were fabric departments?), but because Wallace’s may have been the reason I exist in the first place. My grandmother was a waitress in the luncheonette (every department store of any kind of class had a luncheonette), and she noticed a young man who was working in the parking lot – they parked your car for you in those days, in the lot that opened onto Liberty Street – and somehow thought that her daughter should meet this young man. I can’t imagine why she thought that a young man who had never been to high school and was parking cars for a living, two years older than her possibly college-bound daughter, should be a good catch; maybe the only explanation is that it was the ’50s. My father graduated to delivering furniture for Wallace’s, and my mother worked there, too, making clothes for the mannequins (I know that makes no sense in the modern age, but back when people made their own clothes and pattern sales were huge, the stores would have someone make sample clothes and put them on the mannequins). Eventually (or about two months after she graduated high school), they married, and a couple of years later, both working at Wallace’s, they had me. My mother stopped working full-time because that’s what was done then, though she still sewed on the side and sometimes waitressed at the drugstore a few blocks from our home (yes, drugstores had waitresses then). My father went on working for Wallace’s until maybe 1967 or ’68, when he went to work for Central Markets as a local delivery truck driver. (Later on, Central Markets would change their name to Price Chopper.)
The Wallace Co. building, constructed in 1892 and expanded in 1910, still stands on Schenectady’s main commercial block.
