(enchanting music) - [Lyle] I went to those shows when I was a kid.

I have great memories of Dayton's at Christmas time.

- [Kathryn] Seven-year-old me was captivated by what they did in this space.

It felt like being transported to a totally different world.

- [William] There was six of us kids, and we would be so excited to get to the eighth floor.

- [Thomas] You would end up on Santa's lap, which would be great, and maybe get some cocoa, too.

- [Tim] There was always the expectation that it would be really good, because it was, year after year after year.

- [Constance] We wanted things to be surprising.

People were gonna walk through that door, thousands of people per day, and they were gonna keep those memories for their entire lives.

We wanted to make magic.

- [Tim] But I guess, times changed, and then the magic ended.

(bus engine rumbling) (car horns honking) - It's wild to be back here.

People had sort of warned me and said, "Oh, it's gonna be so strange to go up there because, oh, it's just wrecked."

Nah, this is an empty auditorium, with all the paint on the floors hanging out.

This is exactly where we started, every time, every time.

It actually makes me a little nostalgic, like, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show.

It's all still here."

(bright music) - [Narrator] Before it was Macy's and Marshall Field's, downtown Minneapolis was home to the iconic department store, Dayton's.

For over a century, it anchored the Twin Cities retail scene with high-end fashions, one of a kind merchandise and cosmopolitan charm.

It was the shopping destination, especially during the holiday season.

What started as elaborate window displays and visits to Santa Land evolved into an extraordinary holiday show shared by millions for over five decades.

There was nothing else like it.

It was a storybook adventure come to life.

(upbeat music) - It was a special night.

It was a tradition that we all looked forward to.

- When I was a tiny child in the early '60s, mom and dad would dress us up in our finest.

Patent leather shoes, crinoline skirts, pretty bows on the back, curl our hair all up.

And then they'd bundle us up in our winter coats and hats, and we would come downtown.

- Downtown was magic.

We didn't get to see the big tall buildings all the time and hear the horns honking and just see all the activity down there.

So you're always looking for something shiny, including the windows that Dayton's had on the main street level.

- And the first thing we would do is walk around the building and look in the windows at the window displays.

They were all dressed up for the holidays.

(child laughing) (upbeat music) After that, we would go up to the 12th floor and we'd have dinner there.

By that time, this little three-year-old me was beside myself, "Do we have to eat dinner?

Can't we just go get in line for Santa?"

(customers faintly speaking) - I remember waiting in line to walk through the show and having the line curl all the way around the eighth floor and then down to the seventh or even sixth floor.

And you waited, you weren't gonna leave without seeing it.

- And as soon as you opened the doors, it was just like you're walking into "The Wizard of Oz" when things went from black and white to color.

(bright music) (customers faintly speaking) - It was magical.

I loved going every year, I looked forward to it.

I was always just enamored with all of the figurines, the set design, how elaborate everything was.

And I love that all of this work, all of this energy, all of this artistic talent went into these shows, and they were free.

They were free.

- I was probably the most mechanically interested in the movements of the characters, so I was the tag-along, the one they had to keep going back because I was carefully trying to understand how everything moved.

(customers faintly speaking) - I remember my mom used to love reading the story cards.

And I'm sure she started doing it when I was really young and couldn't read myself.

But she continued doing it long after I had learned to read.

I think she just really enjoyed doing that.

- Every year was a different story, and that was part of the magic.

That wouldn't be revealed until close to showtime.

(bright music) The anticipation of, "What is Dayton's eighth floor gonna be this year?"

Which was great marketing, great way to get people into your store.

- A couple weeks before Thanksgiving, the big announcement would come in "The Star Tribune," "Come and see the Wizard of Oz on the eighth floor, Cinderella," or, "Snow White."

And no matter what it was, we just couldn't get down there quick enough.

(film reel whirring) - [Reporter] Even though Halloween was less than two weeks ago, it's the Christmas spirit that abounds here in Dayton's.

Peter Pan in Santa Land opened this morning with something for children of all ages.

- My very favorite displays were Cinderella.

That was twice, I believe, 1989 and 2005.

Those sets were so elaborate, and the costumes and the animatronics, especially there was a ballroom scene, and they had all of the characters dancing and twirling and moving about.

It was magnificent.

(upbeat music) - It's beautiful this year.

We've been coming ever since I was a little girl, and I wanted her to share it, too.

- It's fun.

- Is it?

- Me and my family go here every year.

- Dayton's designers began brainstorming an idea, a Christmas world of involvement for children.

They had to find people to make the animated characters.

They found those people in New York City.

- [Narrator] After years of collaborating, Twin Cities artists took over sculpting and animating the figures.

And as the population of the Twin Cities changed, the holiday show figures changed too, adding greater diversity and cultural awareness.

- We were trying to get it so that families and children could see themselves in the story.

- [Narrator] Creating the look of the figures was a complex process, with characters running the gamut from cute to creepy.

- What you see is what's taken 11 months to create.

So why don't we enter that world of involvement?

(dynamic music) - To have a creative, vibrant, beautiful, magical experience in our downtown, it's just all (laughing) pretty amazing.

- [Kathryn] I didn't realize it at the time, but all of these designs, these characters, these sets, were made by Minnesota artists, with pretty impressive resumes.

As a child, I didn't even know that.

I just enjoyed being in the space and being in the story.

- The little scenes they would make, the stories they would tell, the design was impeccable.

- The artists who were responsible for these very special objects were absolute heroes of mine.

- There was something pretty special about being part of this huge thing.

I remember the first time I worked on the show and I saw the lines, it's like, "What the heck?"

(laughing) (bright music) "What have we done?"

I was a character designer, sculptor, originally started out as one of the painters.

- I washed brushes, I hauled water, I hauled paint, I mixed paint, and very gradually got brushes and giant rollers put into my hands.

- [Lyle] I started in '96 on the Christmas carols.

- Oh, okay.

- Christmas carol.

- I'm almost positive that was it, "Nutcracker."

- That was like humanoid intensive.

- What did that one look like, Christmas carol?

I was so thrilled to be a part of it.

It incorporated all my different skills of doing props and costumes and things.

- It's not to say that working on the Christmas show was necessarily a picnic.

People got tired, people got sometimes frazzled.

It was hard work.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] While the figures are often what people remember most, the artistry behind the sets, lighting, music, props, story and creative design, played a vital role in orchestrating the magic for the millions of visitors who came to the annual holiday show.

- Prior to when we started showing up at the scene, it was just basically a glorified line to see Santa.

What happened is when they brought the Jacks, Jack Edwards and Jack Barkla into the scene.

Both Jacks were from the theatrical world.

Jack Edwards was a nationally known costumer, and then worked as a director at Guthrie.

Jack Barkla was a local gem, rose to national prominence, he even worked in Broadway.

They just kind of blew up the show.

- They were called the two Jacks, although Jack Edwards would say it's more like jack and a queen, because he would have on more bling and more fur and more eccentricity than anyone in town.

(laughing) Whereas Jack Barkla was the opposite.

They were quite a team, the two Jacks.

- Whatever they were asked to do, they would always deliver twice as much.

- [Reporter] Theatrical designer, Jack Barkla, created this series of 25 three-dimensional scenes that wind through the auditorium.

The characters' costumes are all handmade and designed by Jack Edwards.

- The scale is the whole thing is to make sure that the jewelry, the buttons, everything is in scale with the figures.

(bright music) - Jack Edwards was wonderful and eccentric and scary.

(laughing) You wanted to impress him.

And so it was always a little nerve-wracking when he was gonna be coming into the studio to see what you'd done with his designs.

- [Constance] Oh, look, one of the Jacks.

Mr. Edwards.

(Dan laughing) - [Dan] This is my favorite one.

(inquisitive music) - I started building an archive for Jack Edwards at the Anderson Library Performing Arts Archive.

I had met him later in his life, and I felt his work was important.

And I contacted the U of M, and they agreed.

Now, these are a personal (laughing) favorite of mine, these donkey boys.

- Yes, the donkey boys.

- Yeah.

- What I love about them is how animated they already are.

- Right, yes.

- They're already practically alive.

- Right.

- Before they even hit the stage, you can feel the gesture of the actor.

- [Dan] This has a lot going on.

- You can see sometimes in the archive, there are hints of the research that he's done, he'll pull images, and then he starts to work from those images to create his own.

So part of that value of the archive is that you really get a glimpse of the whole creative process.

You get the research, you get the renderings.

Hey.

- I love this, the crow.

- [Deborah] The crow is gorgeous.

- There are Polaroids in the archive of Constance Crawford posing for these characters, in just street clothes.

- Right.

- And they're kind of funny, 'cause if you don't know what these photographs are about, it's amusing.

(bright music) - [Lyle] Jack Barkla was the concert master.

He really was the head visionary.

- Because Jack came from the theater, everything comes up from the black.

It was really, really an invented space.

He would paint that way, too, and taught many of us to paint scenically that way.

He would have a few brushes, nothing fancy, and he would just.

And there's the moon.

There's the perfect skyscape.

- The details were all there, too, of course, which were extraordinary.

And that was based on the level of professional theater that Jack worked with, where the finest details existed.

And the management at Dayton's supported that 100%, saying, "Do the best you can and we will support you."

(dynamic music) - [Lyle] Is there a comparison to those shows?

- [Dan] The only comparison I could think of is Disney World.

- Disney, yeah, that would have to be it.

- Disney Land.

- Minus the ride.

- Yep.

- It was the only walkthrough of its kind in the whole entire country.

- Yeah, and it's all handmade.

I mean, it's-- - Yeah, it came from here.

- We didn't buy it from somewhere.

- [Dan] No.

- [Constance] There was a whole lot going on in studios all around town, making figures or putting fur on figures, or casting them, or animating them, or putting costumes on them.

- That's what I loved, it's like you'd work on it, it'd get sent to me, I'd work on it, get sent to you.

- [Constance] Incredible artists, with vision, just kind of going, "Ooh.

Ooh, what if we did this?"

- [Narrator] For Dayton's, Christmas came early, very early.

- I don't think the general public knew how much we cared.

The planning for it began in January, start talking stories.

- It was usually based on an existing story, and oftentimes, it was based on a particular version of the story that may have been illustrated.

- [Constance] You can't tell a complicated story.

That's why they often were fairytales or something familiar.

- [Thomas] Then you try and figure out how within maybe 15 or 20 storyboards you can tell that story.

- What moments we really have to have to get the plot points across.

"Let's start thinking about who would be the best characters to use?"

- And then Jack would get to work.

(dynamic music) Sometimes he would make a three-dimensional model so that you could see a bird's eye view of the auditorium all done in cardboard and see how you were gonna move through.

- There would always be something very, very large and painted here, because we didn't want 'em to see any farther.

The show's laid out so you only see a little bit at a time, and you're really, really taken through it, so that there are surprises.

- [Dan] Jack was very intentional about placing walls and corners so that you don't see the next scene.

For example, Pinocchio, you could kind of in a distance see something giant.

(Gary faintly speaking) But you couldn't really tell what it was until you walked through an entrance.

And then there would be this massive gaping mouth with rotten teeth and tongue, the whole thing.

- [Jack] After the floor plans are done, we sit down with the animators and the sculptors, and discuss the characters.

How many characters in each scene, what they're going to be doing and what expressions are on their faces.

- I got to sculpt five different facial expressions for Scrooge.

It was a blast.

So I kinda looked at the figures as they were the emotional cues for the audience.

So that's why it was important for me to sculpt different facial expressions and different postures.

- Dan would sculpt the heads, hands, feet, but then they are basically on an armature.

And so we would actually build the bodies first, and then we would make the clothes.

Jack was so detail oriented, there would be fabrics layered over fabrics with trims.

Then the wigs and the hats.

We would hand-knit sweaters or hand-knit scarves, or we'd do whatever we needed to do to make the costumes.

I just don't think people can quite fathom how much work goes into it.

- It is like creating 15 to 20 different theater sets.

The scale is smaller, but the details are no different.

In fact, it's even more difficult to do something that is gonna be that close to the audience, and have to have mechanics and do these things over and over and over again.

- [Narrator] The two Jacks were also the creative powerhouses behind the eighth-floor auditorium flower shows and the iconic HoliDazzle parade.

- His drum.

(audience cheering) - It is so hard to talk about the Jacks.

They were larger-than-life people who are unfortunately no longer with us.

And oh, I want them to be here to tell stories and speak for themselves.

(sighing) But what I do love is that probably both of them would say, "Look at the work.

Just look at the work."

And in talking about the figures now and looking at them and seeing how much they mattered, I think they both would be very pleased.

They'd give us the nod.

(laughing) (upbeat music) - Some of the special effects that they did.

You would look into a little cubby, and one thing would morph into another thing.

and they actually did use (laughing) smoke and mirrors, like for real, - A favorite trick of ours, and we used it almost every show, was this thing called the Pepper's ghost.

And this is another signature of Jack Barkla is maintaining and resurrecting old, old ancient tricks of illusion.

Pepper's ghost is one of those fabulous ones where what you do is you have two rooms come together at a right angle that are exact mirror opposites of one another, but they're exactly the same room.

And separated is a piece of plate glass at a 45-degree angle.

And if you light one room and turn the lights off in another, you'll look through the glass.

If you turn off the other room and light the other room, you'll see the reflection in the glass.

That's the way you can do things like take boys and turn 'em into donkeys or take a pumpkin and turn it into a carriage, make Marley's ghost appear Scrooge's bedroom.

But in order to make it work, you have to set the plate glass so that the elements in the two rooms line up exactly.

And it becomes very hard sometimes to line it up.

And I remember one time they were fighting it, it was right before the opening, and Todd Knaeble would yell, "30 minutes before opening," and they're still fighting it.

He goes, "20 minutes before opening.

Five minutes before opening."

And then they'd go, "The door is open," and they'd finally get it just set just in time to jump over the back of the scene and have audience walk through.

It was just fabulous.

And the thing that's kind of funny, when we drift into the digital age, the unfortunate part was a lot of people just thought what they were looking at was some projected thing.

They didn't realize it was a physical trick.

(upbeat music) When I first started there, they were just picking publicly owned stories.

It's a cheap way to put up a show.

You're not asking for rights.

When we started getting the crowds, then suddenly people upstairs were saying, "We're gonna pick the show this next year."

And so that's when the fashionable shows started coming on where they had to get rights.

(bright music) Well, here is notes for "Harry Potter."

(Constance gasping) But that's what we'd do, we'd come up with a character (laughing) and I'd count how many sculptures per character.

- [Constance] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- That was a crazy show.

- I kind of loved doing that.

- Yeah.

- People were just really loving the books and everything at that time, so.

- Oh my God.

Well, that was the record show, so.

The record for us was over 600,000 people in a single show, two-month period.

- Of course, I'm excited.

I happen to have read them all aloud to my niece and nephew.

(children screaming) So I knew them.

There had been nothing but the books with those original illustrations.

There had been no movies, there had been no action figures, there had been nothing.

So all of a sudden, in our meetings, we've now got reps from Warner Brothers who owned the property.

We get there and Dan has done just great representations of Harry and I think he's got Hagrid and he's got a Ron Weasley and he's got, of course, Hermione.

And Hermione's just great and absolutely true to the book.

She's got frizzy dark hair, slightly protruding teeth, very intelligent face, freckles and kind of big eyebrows.

(enchanting music) And we get to the meeting, and the people from Warner Brothers go, "Oh, well, we like all of these, but Hermione, she needs to change.

We're thinking curly blonde hair, kind of a snub nose, blue eyes, very cute.

Maybe a little shorter."

You'd think to yourself, "I don't even know what they're talking about."

It was because of an actress they had in mind to play Hermione.

Fortunately, our Hermione did in fact have curly blonde hair and a snub nose.

Oh, it was wonderful to work on.

The shows would be in a serpentine.

That serpentine was twice as long because there were so many plot points that we had to get through.

(train whistle blowing) We had the train, and then we had giant Hagrid on a giant foam motorcycle coming down from the sky.

It was marvelous.

(dogs growling) Three-headed dogs and flying brooms and quidditch and Nimbus 2000 and that very, very scary chess game.

We are dealing with some sacred stuff here.

- [Lyle] Yeah, "Wizard of Oz."

- [Dan] "Wizard of Oz," we got a lot of response out of that.

- It was a gorgeous show.

So you walked in and the first thing you saw was the Gale family farm and it's all very gray and there's Dorothy in her gingham dress there.

And the next thing that happens is that you walked into this central chamber, and it was the tornado.

- [Dan] The tornado.

- And then suddenly you're in Oz, there's the yellow brick road and the witch.

- [Dan] And then there was the flying monkeys.

- It was very frightening.

Whenever this was pointed out to Jack, he said, "Well, if we haven't made anyone cry, we're really not doing our job."

(everybody laughing) - [Dan] It's true.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Not all the shows were Christmas themed, but many were.

And two years running, one theme launched a highly collectible and hugely successful marketing campaign.

- This year, the story deals with this fella, he's called Santa Bear, and the story is called "Santa Bear's First Christmas."

- That was the year that my daughter was three years old.

And you better believe she was all over that.

She loved her Santa Bears.

(light music) - You can see all of those little bears up there.

Well, of course, they're for sale, but they developed this character for last year's Christmas season.

And it was so popular, they sold out all of their merchandise before Thanksgiving, - [Narrator] The Dayton Hudson Company was known for their innovative retail approach, including creating the discount store Target, that grew to become their parent company.

In 2001, Target rebranded Dayton's as Marshall Field's to gain greater name recognition.

Shortly after, in 2005, Marshall Field's was sold to Macy's, where they continued with the holiday show tradition.

Well, at least for a while.

(bright music) - Economy is changed, media changed.

That became really expensive to make a brand-new show year after year.

From a corporate level, it was becoming untenable.

- Macy's made a decision to have their theme every year be "A Day in the Life of an Elf."

Eight years running, I believe.

I was a little bit irritated and annoyed at first.

- In the guest book, people were writing things like, "Oh, this again?

We came all the way from Iowa.

We didn't know it was gonna be the same show."

- After a while, I thought, "Well, I'd rather have this than nothing."

So I decided to appreciate it and enjoy it, by this time, with my grandchildren.

We kept the family tradition alive with one theme instead of multiple changing themes from year to year.

(upbeat music) - We would be currently standing in the middle of Santa's workshop for "A Day in the Life of an Elf."

And to my right, there was the flight school, that happened beyond a window where they taught reindeers how to fly by sending them up on balloons up and down, a little tiny reindeer.

Great scale, so it really looked like it was far away.

And then in the front was the mail room.

We would take the real dimensional letters, transition slowly down, be replaced by painted letters, because if I had dimensional letters, kids would try to pick 'em up.

Look at the beautiful drop shadow, all the way around this.

There was letter paper, envelope, plenty of things to write with, and a beautiful big red mailbox so the child could just seal that up and send it right off to the North Pole.

- We were doing the planning for "A Day in the Life of an Elf," and they had decided that there were gonna be two main characters in the show, and they hadn't decided who the other elf, what he was gonna look like.

So this gentleman, Bill, from New York, from Macy's, said, "Let's have it look like Lyle."

Dan nailed it.

(laughing) - My sculpture load for that show was sculpting a Lyle, and then 500 pairs of pointy ears.

And that was it.

(Constance laughing) - That's right.

- [Dan] That was my job.

(Lyle laughing) - It's a really good show.

I thought that show was magical, I loved it.

I got to see it several times.

The singing trees still (laughing) resonate with me.

♪ Tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree, tree ♪ Tree ♪ Tree, tree, tree (bright music) - Even though we knew it was paint, it was lighting, it was styrofoam, it was motors.

It was being with the people we loved.

Pretty soon we had six kids we were hauling down here, and meeting Grandma and Mom and Dad.

Then it was Mom and Dad, my siblings and I, our spouses, our children.

Then our children started having children, and so it was another generation got to experience this.

One of my nephews was born with a condition where he needs to use a wheelchair to get around.

So when we brought him here in his teeny-tiny little wheelchair, people were very kind.

They let him go to the front of the crowd so that he could see the display.

And being a young person with a disability, he spent a lot of time around grownups.

So when he got to Santa and hopped on his lap, he was just like, "Hi, how are ya?

Nice to meet you."

Whereas the other children in the family would be screaming and crying and kicking and, "Get me outta here."

(laughing) But not this guy.

For me, the thing that drew me here was the memories of (crying) being with family.

(light music) (traffic whizzing) - Macy's announced this week it will shut down its Nicollet Mall store in March.

The whole eighth-floor auditorium, will we ever have a retail experience like that in our time on this Earth?

- The displays, all the activities that went on?

I mean, this.

- When I found out that it was going to be the last show that they would do, I hadn't been for a couple years.

They had been doing the same story, and I had seen it, but I knew that we had to be there that last show.

And so I got my mom and my dad and my brother together, and we did go down and walk through it.

And it was really bittersweet being again in that space and with those figurines.

- I took a lot of pictures in hopes that we could recapture some of it someday.

- It was very hard when the store finally closed.

- I got a call from a colleague that there was a fire sale happening there and that the figurines were at risk of being lost forever.

So I arrived at Macy's and I saw the splattering of figurines out on the floor in very random, unexplained ways, with like price tags of $200 and $300.

And it was heartbreaking.

And that if there was any way that I could possibly rescue all of these treasures being literally thrown in the dumpster, that I was gonna do everything I possibly could.

(door clacking) (footsteps clopping) - [Tim] You are here in a place that people normally don't get to see.

This is the basement of Hennepin Theater Trust.

(bright music) - [Joan] My team at Hennepin Theater Trust were experts at moving copious amounts of artwork and installations.

- That was havoc and chaos.

We had to act fast.

We had a team of about, I don't know, eight or nine people.

- So it was like, "Hold everything, drop everything.

Everybody on site, everybody on deck.

Everybody's car, everybody's van.

Get the U-Haul."

- We had to wrap these, put 'em on trucks or in cars.

- [Joan] "Everybody pull up and this is all happening and we're gonna take as much as we can fit."

- When we first got 'em down here, we didn't have the cabinets.

So they were kind of everywhere, all around the building.

- There was no plan, there was no money for restoration.

There was nothing, it was just, "Don't you dare throw away our treasure."

(laughing) - And these are the cabinets we made.

And they live happily here, and they stay safe and sound, until we use them again.

- [Joan] I think we rescued 38 in all.

I don't think we left very many behind.

And I think that if we did, it was because they were like missing like a head and like that they were just unrecognizably damaged.

- [Tim] We have bits and pieces from different shows, so there's no full complete set.

And every one of these has something wrong with it.

So the motor might not work, or the makeup is scratched, or a costume lost a button kind of thing.

These probably would've gone to a dumpster is what I understand.

So they'd never be seen again.

(light music) - After the sale, little pockets of people began to arise that had bought figures, or found figures, or were collecting figures, and just wanted to restore them.

- We are in the living room of our home in Minnetrista here, surrounded by our Dayton's figurines.

These are a accumulation of a collection that started in 2017 and continues on through today.

The number-one question we get when people walk in here is, "Is this up year round?"

The answer is no.

Everybody's got a hobby, mine is clearly unique, and they all laugh at me for it, but these are very healing pieces for me.

By day, I am a fire chief with the city of St. Bonifacius.

The fire service can be highly stressful, under the best circumstances.

And so it takes a while to wind down after calls.

And so you come home and clean up, and then go down to the shop and put the music on and maybe pass a couple two or three hours working on the characters.

I'm restoring something that was done by professionals, and I try to do my very best to live up to that, and fall short many times.

- On the last day that this store was open as a store, they had a clearance, clearance, clearance sale.

And I thought, "How cool would that be to own a piece of that magic?"

(car engine rumbling) "March 19th, 2017.

After church, I went to say goodbye to the Macy's store in downtown Minneapolis.

Today was their last day being open.

(crying) When I got to the fourth floor, there were bunk beds full of little elf animated figures.

They were selling them for $30 per bunk bed full of elves.

Of course, I had to buy one.

I had to tear it apart to get it in my car.

But then I drove it up to my sister Jill's house because she wanted it.

We rebuilt the little elf bunk beds, plugged the elves in, and our little Candy and Jasper are in fine working order and are living at Jill's house in the corner of her bedroom.

I am so pleased.

Jill and I decided to have joint custody."

- My sister went down to the store after it had closed.

She bought the opening piece of me on the ball.

(Dan laughing) That was up in the ceiling.

(Constance gasping) She surprised me.

I came home one day and it was in my basement.

(everybody laughing) - People still remember all that fun they had coming to see the figurines.

And when they hear that these figurines are still available to go look at, they get excited.

I know I did.

I wanted to go see them all.

I wanted to see them again.

(customers faintly speaking) And the campfire.

One winter, we went up to Duluth.

They have a big light display up there.

It's called Bentleyville.

(upbeat music) And we saw that they had several of the items from Macy's eighth-floor display up there.

After we got back, I said, "Well, these elves are like 200 years old, don't you think it's time they moved out?

They could move up to Duluth and live there, and then we could go visit them."

My sister thought that was a fabulous idea.

We put the whole thing in her van, drove up to Bentleyville, donated those elves.

And they were delighted.

Enormous, gigantic TV.

"The children were nestled all snug in their bed."

- [Jill] What's in this one?

- [Joan] Look at that.

- [Jill] It says, "Children were nestled all snug in their beds."

- Candy still rolling.

- [Narrator] Many of the holiday figures, props and even set pieces were given a second life in public and private collections.

And many collectors are devoted to repairing and displaying the figures, so as many people as possible can share in the magic.

- Okay.

- This guy I really like.

Where's his head?

(gasping) They were in a heap, they were undressed, the faces were washed out and chipped, and we did a lot of repair work on them.

- [Narrator] In the 2022 holiday season, Douglas Flanders & Associates collaborated with Hennepin Arts to bring back the Dayton's figures in their window displays.

From there, the idea caught on, and soon figures were popping up in window displays around downtown Minneapolis.

- You'll never recreate any one of these shows in the way that it was originally.

But this last year, we did an experiment with Downtown Council where artists reimagined a character.

So they might be in a completely different environment than they were originally.

That was really interesting, and I'd like to see more of that kind of thing happen.

Let the figures live into the future in new ways, inventive ways.

You could have Mary Poppins on the Moon.

(laughing) - [Narrator] For some, it's all about nostalgia, reliving memories, but for others, it's something else entirely.

- Hi, so this is Rosie- - Hi.

- and I'm Elijah, and today-- - This is the toy testing area.

- I was thrilled to hear of Elijah.

When his mother reached out to me, it really warmed my heart because I could feel the passion that he had for it.

See, he moves for food.

- Yeah.

(laughing) (William laughing) - And he's clearly the most determined person I know that would like to preserve the legacy of these characters.

He's got a deep interest in it.

- I've always liked the guy tickling the other guy's toe.

I thought that was really funny.

(laughing) We went downtown and walked through the show like, I don't know how many times, like maybe 40 times (laughing) a season.

It was a lot.

(William laughing) Yeah, I just wanted to go again and again.

And one time, I was so close to actually getting up (laughing) on stage to get a closeup view of all the animatronics and stuff, but yeah.

- Yeah who could blame you?

- Yeah.

(laughing) - I wouldn't.

- So around the same time that I reached out to you, Elijah also determined that a lot of the pieces had gone to Bentleyville and begged me to reach out to them, hoping that maybe we could just watch them set it up.

(William laughing) And so I had communicated about that, about his passion and his interest, and sent them a little video clip of something he'd set up in his room.

- He did, okay.

- [Ann] Mannequins dressed up like elves attached to oscillating fans to make them move.

- [William] That's very creative.

- And I think I must've oversold our expertise because when we got there, they said, "Oh, you're the animatronics people from the Twin Cities."

To which we said, "Yes, we are."

(William laughing) (bright music) There was a tractor trailer truck full of all sorts of characters, and Elijah recognized them all from our many hours spent there.

And so he could look at the face and know exactly what that individual did, where they needed to be positioned, whether it was on the floor or on a ladder.

So he kind of directed my husband and I where everything was supposed to be.

And the end result was spectacular.

(light music) - [Ann F] They're really something.

- [Narrator] The Minnesota Historical Society saved three holiday figures, Pinocchio, Professor Severus Snape from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and Cinderella.

- [Ann F] And Cinderella has a really interesting petticoat.

And I created this petticoat with a short, soft.

- I was in my 20s, and I found out about the Performing Arts Archives at the University of Minnesota Anderson Library, and I started volunteering.

One of the collections I worked on as a volunteer was the Jack Edwards collection.

And I didn't know when I started working on it that he had played this huge role with the eighth-floor shows, that he had done the design work for the costumes and the figurines.

And I remember, clear as day, flipping through the collection and coming across slides of Peter Pan.

And it just all came back to me, all of those memories of being a little kid and going through those exhibits and seeing the shows.

And here was the evidence of the labor, really.

The design, the sketches, the photographs, all of the work that went into putting these together every year.

This was one of the earliest artistic experiences that I can remember as a child.

I was only two or three going through some of these shows, and I remember them.

Part of me does think that that impacted my trajectory.

And if I had not studied music, I would not have volunteered at the Performing Arts Archives.

And if I had not volunteered there, I certainly wouldn't have gotten a job here.

And seeing them really kind of brings a lot of feelings, both personal and professional, I guess, at this stage of my life.

(laughing) - When I got these elves, some people thought I was really ridiculous, "Why are you so obsessed with these elves?

What is wrong with you?

Why do you want them?"

And it's hard to explain and to capture the magic that they represent.

It's really what they represent, not the actual pieces.

It's what they represent.

- I am filled with such a palpable nostalgia, even just like talking about it.

What I wouldn't give to be able to walk through that space again and grab a gingerbread cookie and hunker out on the floor of the lobby.

- These figures are a deeply meaningful part of our community and our history.

And these figures did something that no amount of money, no amount of vision, strategy, planning could ever do.

- And I think that says so much about how people feel about this gift that Dayton's made to the community over so, so many years.

- This is just happy memories for me, really, really.

What a great place to work.

I recognize these blue walls that we painted a million colors.

But were painted this color so that it would go back to being sky.

So it would always have kind of an infinite sense.

So I see many skies here, I see the sky of Provence, I see the sky above Mary Poppins when she's going up held by an umbrella.

Aw, so many, many things happened in this room.

You just don't erase that.

You can take it away, but it's not gone.

Lives here, lives here.

(bright music) - I think about it so much now because I'm out of the business at this point.

And I was talking to my husband last night about it, 'cause I was looking through some things to bring.

Sometimes I don't wanna look at those things 'cause I think it'll make me sad, but it reminded me of how special it all was and how lucky I was to be a part of it.

- Any city has problems to solve.

We were not without our problems, even before COVID or George Floyd.

I think it's important to balance that kind of history with history that's also about fantasy, or hope, or delight, or doing good things.

If we don't have shared history, I don't know if we exist.

- I remember this place, and all the memories associated with it are kind of washing over me.

(crying) It's something I'll always cherish.

(upbeat music) (serene music)