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WTHR looks back at L. S. Ayres

The L. S. Ayres name disappeared from downtown Indianapolis 23 years ago, but interest in the name remains strong.

This 1991 holiday window display was the last for the downtown L. S. Ayres store.

INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - The L. S. Ayres name disappeared from downtown Indianapolis 23 years ago, but interest in the name remains strong.

"It's such an icon for downtown Indianapolis," said Indiana Historical Society Curator Eloise Batic.

Perhaps its biggest surviving legacy sits perched atop the corner of Washington and Meridian Streets.

"The clock has been a part of the real lives of everyday Hoosiers," Batic said.

Both it, along with the cherub that appears around Christmas, is a focal point of a new exhibit celebrating the best of the former 134 year-old business that was Indiana's last local department store. Its story is the latest edition of the Indiana Historical Society's "You Are There" exhibit.

"There's the look on people's face when you talk about L. S. Ayres and to me that's the meat of the story. Ayres is so many things to so many people and that's a wonderful way to fuse history -- the concrete facts of history -- with why we care about it in the first place, which is because it's a part of the story of our lives," Batic said.

The curator will tell you there's more to the story of L. S. Ayres than its famed clock.

"One of the things we wanted to celebrate was the idea of fashion," Batic said.

Decades of it flash on a large screen in the exhibit. The downtown holiday windows have also been recreated. Actors portray notable people within the company and Ayres family. New technology will help tell the old story, including video interviews with influential people who knew the store inside and out. That includes former executives, members of the Ayres family, and former models from the store.

The first L. S. Ayres store opened in 1872 and eventually set up shop at Washington and Meridian Streets in the early 1900's.

"Ayres was sort of a phenomenon that was happening nationwide of those downtown urban department stores that made shopping an event," Batic said.

But it all came to an end three years before Circle Centre Mall finally opened.

The Ayres family sold the company to Associated Dry Goods in 1972, with few changes to the Indianapolis operation.

In 1986, The May Department Stores Company of Saint Louis bought Associated Dry Goods and immediately made several devastating changes to Ayres, closing the downtown Tea Room in 1990 and eventually the store in early 1992.

Once housing dozens of different departments, the building owned by Kite Reality Group now houses a dozen businesses, from City Securities to Carson's.

Most of the Ayres building has dramatically changed since the 1992 closure. New tenants, including offices of different companies on the upper floors, have renovated their space; however, there are some parts where time has stood still.

The former L. S. Ayres Tea Room on the 8th floor remains intact, with the same wall paper, chandeliers, and even the same curtains. The carpet was replaced last year, the building manager said. The area serves as a meeting space for Kite and other tenants. Even an original escalator connecting the fifth and sixth floors is intact, but walled off.

The last bowl of the store's famous Chicken Velvet Soup was served 25 years ago, but loyalty to the Tea Room ran deep.

The WTHR archives show a protest and even a petition drive to keep it open. A group pushing to keep the Tea Room open could be heard telling store leaders they had 5,082 signatures.

Despite the push to save it, the May Company closed it in 1990, along with the store two years later.

"Downtown changed, shopping changed, women entered the workforce, and it wasn't realistic to keep a business going based on nostalgia," said Ken Turchi.

Turchi wrote the book on Ayres literally, spending five years writing L. S. Ayres & Company: The Store at the Crossroads of America.

"The store had a cat named 'Lady' who was trained to keep mice away from the store. She had a great time lounging under the lamps and sleeping in the lingerie department, but 'Lady' apparently had too many gentleman callers and became a little mean and was eventually shown the door," he said.

That's among the many interesting stories the one time employee learned while researching the institution that changed the way the nation shops today.

"Ayres was interesting and really attractive to a lot of people because of its legacy and because it was a great place to shop; it has a lot of memories for people, but the reason I wrote the book was because I was interested in Ayres as a business. It was very innovative. In fact it was the first store in the country to realize the power of discount retailing by founding their Ayr-Way division in 1961," Turchi said.

Powerhouse retailer Target started from a similar background in Minnesota, but Ayr-Way came first.

"I think if [Ayres management] made a few different decisions along the way, we might be shopping at Ayr-Way stores today instead of Walmart and Target," Turchi said.

Ayr-Way was later sold to Target.

In the building where those ideas came to life, there's a new life.

Private offices are now on the upper floors of the building at One West Washington Street, through the store's bank of elevators. That includes one original and restored glass gated elevator, complete with a stool for an operator.

"The elevator operators were predominately African-American and an incredibly valued part of the staff at a time when we don't think of the Hoosier workforce as being integrated," Batic said.

It is part of the rich history of a store that shaped a city now coming alive long after the doors were locked for good.

Ayres other stores survived at malls around the state until 2006. That's when the May Department Stores Company sold to the owner of Macy's. All remaining Ayres stores either converted to Macy's or were closed or demolished.

The only remaining original Indianapolis Ayres store in operation today is the Macy's at Glendale Town Center, which opened in 1958. The Indiana State Museum operates a restaurant replica of the Tea Room.

In July, Indiana Historical Society leaders reported a 20% increase in attendance since the Ayres exhibit opened. Curators say they were stunned by how many people loaned or offered up Ayres memorabilia for the exhibit, making it one that's truly by the people, for the people.

The cherub, which has been deemed a she by organizers, is on display in the exhibit until November when it will be perched atop the clock at Carson's.

The "You Are There: That Ayres Look" exhibit opened Saturday, March 14 and runs until August 6, 2016 during normal museum hours. Admission to the museum is $7 for adults, $6.50 for adults over 60, $5 for children.

Admission to IHS will be free all day on Thursday, July 30.