Warner Bros. When the security guards at Walter's office throw Buddy out, they suggest he go back to Santaland at Gimbels. The highly festive store is heavily featured throughout the rest of "Elf," but viewers may not have realized that Gimbels was a real department store in New York City that closed in 1986.
Fun fact: Producers wanted to feature the famous Macy's 34th street location, the largest store in the world, but Macy's refused to have their name used. So they settled on Gimbels, a now defunct NY department store–the exterior was shot at 5th Avenue and E 30th St and decorated with CGI.
However, it's worth noting that 2003, when the film was made, there wasn't a coffee shop at 20 East Hastings Street. Instead, the location was home to a long-standing seafood restaurant, The Only Sea Food.
A major selling point for Gimbels were the underground passageways that took 34th Street subway and PATH riders right to the store's entrances. Gimbels is long gone, but the building, extensively revamped, is still there—it's now the Manhattan Mall with a JC Penney as its flagship store.
Gimbels also gained publicity from the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, the 1967 film Fitzwilly, and was frequently mentioned as a shopping destination of Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz on the hit 1950s TV series I Love Lucy. The Slinky made its debut at the northeast Philadelphia Gimbels store.
How They Made Elf | The Holiday Movies That Made Us
Is Gimbels in Elf Macy's?
Anyone who has been to New York would immediately recognise Macy's, but the iconic department store was renamed Gimbel's in Elf. Gimbel's is a now-defunct rival to Macy's and the store actually featured in the original Miracle On 34th Street film, back in 1947.
The mall replaced the former flagship store of the Gimbels department store chain, which operated from 1910 to 1986. It opened in 1989 as a shopping center called A&S Plaza and was rebranded Manhattan Mall in 1995. Stern's department store occupied the anchor store space from 1995–2001.
'Gimbels Dept Store', where Buddy redecorates the toy department overnight, is the Textile Building, 295 5th Avenue at the northeast corner of East 30th Street, embellished with CGI. Gimbels was a real department store chain – at one point the largest in the USA – until its stores closed in 1987.
When the security guards at Walter's office throw Buddy out, they suggest he go back to Santaland at Gimbels. The highly festive store is heavily featured throughout the rest of "Elf," but viewers may not have realized that Gimbels was a real department store in New York City that closed in 1986.
So that actually was the fun part of doing the role. Was the sidewalk gum pre-cleaned for you? WF: No, we didn't have a big enough budget, so I actually had to eat old New York City gum. But it wasn't as bad as you would think, still relatively favorable.
Although Jim Carrey didn't end up in this film you probably recognise him as playing The Grinch. An actor called Chris Farley was also asked to play Buddy but the writer of Elf didn't think he was a good fit. It took years before they found the perfect Buddy.
This actually makes Buddy a fair amount younger than Will Ferrell himself, who was 35 years old at the time of Elf's filming, and 36 when the movie was released to theaters.
Macy's, however, didn't like the idea of being associated with an “imposter” Santa Claus, according to Favreau. So if “Elf” wanted to film at the Santaland in Macy's, or even mention Macy's in the movie, the scene had to go. “We had to think long and hard about it,” Favreau told Rolling Stone in 2013.
Elf was Will Ferrell's second box office hit. He reportedly received a whopping salary of $17 million for that film alone, more on par with what his talents would dictate in the mid-2000s. He was allegedly offered $29 million to act in an Elf sequel, but couldn't get his heart into it, so he turned it down.
The rhetorical question "Does Macy tell Gimbel?" was a popular phrase used throughout the 1930s-1960s which meant that business competitors are not supposed to share trade secrets with one another.
Elf might be a story that's rooted as deeply in New York City as it is in the North Pole, but limitations restricted the amount of time Favreau and his team could spend on location in the Big Apple. As a result, an abandoned asylum ended up serving as the backdrop to huge swathes of the production.
New York is a city in New York state. It is the main setting for Elf. New York City, in Elf, is set in 2003, 2 years after 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Buddy the elf goes there to find his father, Walter Hobbs, who is working at the Empire State Building.
By 1986, Batus Inc the company that had bought Gimbels couldn't find a buyer. The only value Gimbels had was it's real estate. Department stores are a brutal business to be. In an earlier era, it made sense to go to a store that sold everything.
Gimbels was acquired in 1973 by Brown & Williamson, the American subsidiary of British-American Tobacco , a diversified conglomerate. Brown & Williamson also owned Marshall Field's (purchased in 1982), Frederick & Nelson , The Crescent stores, and Kohl's (purchased in 1972).
Buddy now works as a children's book author after the film, using his life and what he knows from his time at the North Pole as inspiration. Buddy is 30 years old by the time of the movie.
Gimbels has been out of business since the late 1980s - that's almost forty years ago. Too long, in my opinion to make a comeback, as most of Gimbels would-be customer's are too young to remember them in their heyday. So today's customers have no nostalgic memory of this old store.
What are the two department stores in Miracle on 34th Street?
The competition between the two famous department stores was popularized in “Miracle on 34th Street,” in which Macy's Kris Kringle would steer customers to Gimbels for better prices or selection.
