Walk into Boyds on Chestnut Street and the first thing that takes you is not the clothes, fine as they are. It is the room. A double staircase of white marble climbs into the light, chandeliers hang above it, and five floors open around you with the ease of a building that was made to impress people at the most important moment of their lives. Which, as it happens, is exactly what it was made to do. You are standing in what was, for most of the twentieth century, the grandest place in Philadelphia to be dead.
The undertaker’s palace
The building went up in 1907, designed by the architect John T. Windrim in a confident Renaissance Revival style: five storeys, stately columns, French plate-glass windows, and behind them that white marble double staircase. It was built for Oliver H. Bair, the most successful undertaker the city had ever produced. Bair had entered the trade in the 1870s, continuing a family business a brother had started in 1862, and he ran it under a slogan that tells you everything about his ambition and his showmanship: No Deserving Poor Refused.
What Bair really did was invent the modern American funeral home. He took mourning out of the cramped front parlour of the family house and moved it into a grand commercial establishment, then sold the idea to the middle class through brochures mailed by the thousand. At its height the operation employed eighty-five people and handled more than two thousand funerals a year. The building had apartment suites for out-of-town guests, two dining rooms, a kitchen, sitting rooms, a library, assembly halls, bronze busts and statuary, a hotel for grief, done in marble. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and the Philadelphia Register in 1995. Eventually the Bair company moved out to Upper Darby, and the palace on Chestnut Street went quiet.
The chandeliers, and a story I cannot quite prove
The chandeliers are still there, still lit, still hanging over the marble as they have for more than a century. That much you can see for yourself. There is also a story, and I want to be honest that it is a story, that those chandeliers were cast from old button molds, the little forms once used to shape buttons by the gross. I have looked, and I cannot find it written down anywhere, so I pass it to you exactly as it was passed to me: as the kind of tale a great old building earns whether or not it is strictly true. If you want the real answer, ask Kent or Alex Gushner. They know the house better than the internet ever will, and half the pleasure of the place is that it keeps a few of its secrets.
How a clothier inherited a funeral home
Boyds was founded in 1938 by Alec Gushner, who had come to Philadelphia from Russia, together with his brothers Albert and Ben. It began as a modest men’s shop on Market Street, and for half a century that is where it stayed and grew. Then the city came for the block. The Pennsylvania Convention Center and its Marriott hotel rose over that stretch of Market Street, and Boyds’ original store was cleared to make room for it. Rather than fight the tide, the Gushners crossed town and, in 1990, moved into the empty Bair building at 1818 Chestnut.
There is a neat symmetry in that. A store that dresses the living took over a house built for the dead, kept every bit of its grandeur, the marble, the staircase, the chandeliers, and turned it into the most beautiful shop in the city. The bones that once received Philadelphia at its saddest hour now receive it at some of its happiest: a wedding suit, a first good overcoat, the shoes a man buys once and keeps for twenty years.
Four generations of one family
Alec was the first generation. The second was his son Gerald, “Jerry”, who joined in 1952 and became the guiding spirit of the place, president by the mid-1960s. Gerald is the one who turned a good local men’s store into a genuine destination: he was among the first in Philadelphia to bring in the European designers, he built “The Penthouse” at the top of the store with its glass elevator and valet parking, and he expanded into womenswear. When he died in 2016 at eighty-six, the trade press called it the end of an era, and meant it.
The third generation is Kent Gushner, Gerald’s son, who took the reins in 2004 and runs Boyds today. The fourth is already in the building: Kent’s son Alex joined in 2014, with Andrew close behind. Between them they keep alive something that has almost entirely vanished from American retail, a large, serious, independent clothing store, with master tailors on the premises, a shoe floor watched over by the incomparable Edward Maurer, and the kind of depth of stock that no website can imitate.
Kent and Alex, the consummate gentlemen
Here is the thing the marble cannot explain. What makes Boyds Boyds is not the staircase or the chandeliers or the labels on the racks. It is the manners. Kent Gushner works his floor the way his grandfather did, with a memory for names and necks and the particular way a customer likes his trousers to break, and a host’s instinct for making a person feel looked after rather than sold to. Alex, the fourth generation, carries the same sense of ease and the same seriousness about service, worn lightly.
They are, in the oldest and least fashionable sense of the word, gentlemen, gracious keepers of a house that has always been in the business of caring for people at the moments that matter most. The building once met you at your most vulnerable and treated you with dignity. The Gushners meet you now with exactly that same grace, only for far happier reasons. In a trade that has mostly forgotten how, the two of them still understand that selling a man his clothes is really an act of hospitality. That is rarer than any suit on the floor, and it is the real reason the place endures.
A store that dresses the living took over a house built for the dead, and made it the most beautiful shop in the city.
If you go, take the marble stairs slowly and ask someone for the story of the building. For the documented history, the Oliver H. Bair Funeral Home entry and its Clio history are both worth reading, and Boyds tells its own family story here.
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