E-Mail This Article to a Friend DEPARTMENT OF STORES All that’s in a name BY ALAN LUPO

I never tire of looking across the harbor at the Boston skyline, at the city I have loved for so long, yet I do so now with a sense of loss.

Downtown Boston is morphing into Anytown. For me, the loss of the Filene’s name is both a symbol of that transformation and part of a very personal tale.

In the very hot summer of 1957, when I was 19, I was a stock boy at R.H. White’s Department Store on Washington Street, then the vibrant artery of Boston’s retail district.

One day, all employees were summoned to the street floor, where a guy announced that after more than a century of business, White’s would be no more. It meant little to me, a summer hire, but to the sobbing saleswomen, the store had been their lives. I understood that in my head, but I hadn’t been on the planet long enough to feel in my heart what should have been proper sympathy.

You have to live in one place for a stretch of time before you can grasp the trauma that often accompanies change. We mark our lives not only by marriages, births, war, and elections, but also by what is familiar to us. After all, my pals and I had felt stabbed in the back four years earlier when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, but I didn’t connect the two events. It was just as unthinkable that the Taylor family would sell the Boston Globe to the New York Times, that Jordan Marsh would become Macy’s, that the First National Bank of Boston, and the John Hancock and Gillette companies would be gobbled up by corporations based elsewhere.

For my generation, the big draw was not some paved-over plot of land in suburbia. It was Washington Street, its sidewalks packed with people seeking bargains at Filene’s, Jordan’s, White’s, Raymond’s, Gilchrist’s, Kennedy’s, and other emporiums.

My dad, Max, was a men’s-clothing salesman at Filene’s. He dressed immaculately, wore a tape measure around his neck, and kept a card file with the names, phone numbers, and clothing preferences of his customers. Decades later, he often boasted to strangers, "I was in men’s clothing, 17 years in Filene’s."

You need not be related to a department-store working stiff to share the memories of such places. Some wax eloquent about the Christmas window displays that transfixed them as kids or the fear they felt when mothers dragged them into the bowels of Filene’s Basement on a sale day.

These days, retail personnel come and go. Loyalty between management and workers has become a victim of the more corporatized, impersonal nature of American business in general.

For a very long time, Filene’s, which opened in 1890, was touted as an example of enlightened capitalism. Edward and A. Lincoln Filene, the sons of the company’s founder, William — an immigrant Prussian Jew — were innovators both in business and in social responsibility.

They were progressives who pushed for workers’ compensation, profit-sharing, health clinics, credit unions, minimum wages for women, and the 40-hour work week. With Louis Brandeis, long before he became a Supreme Court justice, and muckraker Lincoln Steffens, they fought for "reform" and good government. The Filene family donated heavily to universities and the arts.

Once upon a time in Boston, you could depend on local moguls to serve the public good. Sometimes they went too far, as with urban renewal and airport expansion, but they could be counted on to weigh in when the city and its nonprofit institutions needed help.

Beyond that, it is simply saddening to ponder the loss of the familiar, and to reckon with the fact that the once-great Washington Street stores are either dead and gone or swallowed up in the continuing homogenization of America.

Now, a half-century later, I finally understand in my heart what those women were sobbing about in the hot summer of 1957.