Slater Building (390 Main Street)

When the Slater Building opened in 1907 it was Worcester's second "sky-scraper," joining the State Mutual Building at 340 Main Street in a vertically growing city's new skyline. The National Register of Historic Places added the Slater Building to its registry in 1980. It is one of two Worcester buildings that housed seven different corset-making businesses.

Note: this is the last stop on the City of Corsets walking tour. To return to the Worcester Historical Museum walk up the hill on Elm Street from Main Street one block.

Two downtown addresses housed the largest number of Worcester's independent corset makers: Slater Building (390 Main Street) and Burnside Building (339 Main Street).  There were fourteen corsetiere shops at those two addresses from 1912 to 1965. Of those shops, only two were owned by a man: Frederick Shelton's shop in the Slater Building and Johnson & Valva, co-owned (with Hannah Johnson) by Michael Angelo Valva. The job of corsetiere was almost exclusively that of a woman. Frederick Shelton -- the first corsetiere in the Slater building -- was surrounded by women as he progressed through the industry, including at his shop in room 634 at 390 Main Street. 

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1912 - room 634 - Frederick Shelton

Frederick Shelton opened the Slater Building's first corsetiere shop in 1912. He and his siblings had moved from New Brunswick to the economic opportunities of Worcester, where they thrived. Working alongside his wife Bertha and sister-in-law Jennie, Shelton opened his shop after years of experience elsewhere in Worcester's corset industry, having worked his way up from the shipping department at Globe Corset to supervisory positions of treasurer and manager at New England Corset. His sister Louisa was a forewoman at a local corset factory. He spent a year at the high-rent address of 390 Main before moving the shop to the north end of town where he died from tuberculosis in 1914.

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1921-1926 - rooms 641, 1040, and 639 - Mrs. Arthur H. (Harriet) Evans

The next corset maker into the Slater Building was Mrs. Arthur H. Evans (Harriet) who set up shop in 1921 as a "Spencer Corsetiere." After pivoting from the field of dressmaking, Harriet trained with national brand Spencer Corset in construction of items from their product line, just as thousands had by then received equivalent training from Royal Worcester Corset Company at its Bon Ton School of Corsetry. Evans provided this service to Worcester's women from 1919 until 1951.

When she moved her business into the Slater Building, the exaggerated hourglass figure of twenty years earlier was no longer the norm. Women aspired instead to a more comfortable so-called boyish figure which newly evolving corset shapes could provide, such as the "corselet" ... not quite a corset, more of a brassiere-girdle-garter belt fusion. There was still support, as we can conclude from the Met's notes (see photo caption) on the materials of this piece in their collection: cotton, bone, metal, elastic. The overall look, however, is much less pinched than that of its late 19th century predecessor.  

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1927-1929 - room 351 - Barclay Corset Co

New England Telephone & Telegraph company phone directories of the 1920s listed the Barclay Corset Company in 1927 and 1928, showing the 390 Main Street address, phone number Park-1171. In 1929 the city directory included Barclay Corset Co. at 390 Main noting room 351. No business owner was identified.  Was it affiliated with the Barclay Corset Co. of Newark NJ, a member of the Corset Manufacturers' Association of the United States whose business had a multi-state reach? [See the profile of Smart-Form 1935-1941 below for more details.] It will be up to us to imagine room 351's corset-fitter of the mid-1920s. 

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1931 - room 848 - Helen Marie (Donovan) Haley

From Kilgarvan, Ireland, Helen Haley arrived in Boston in 1901 as 11-year-old Ellie Donovan. She headed from there to Worcester with family where she held various jobs (shop clerk, restaurant owner) before entering the corset industry. Both her predecessors in the Slater Building brought years of experience to their commercial tenure there, Frederick Shelton with experience in corset factories and Harriet Evans with a dressmaking background. In these years between World Wars I and II, Haley -- without any obvious background in affiliated professions -- could have learned how to fit a corset at a clerk's position behind a corset counter in any of the city's larger department stores. Her years in the restaurant industry show that she had no fear of people and her gig as restaurant owner, although brief, shows a willingness to attempt self-employment. By 1931, those three skills would have been the set needed to establish oneself as a corsetiere. She worked for a year in the Slater Building then was gone. At the start of World War II Helen was employed as a saleswoman at the large downtown department store Denholm & McKay. She died in July of 1942.

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1935-1941 - rooms 316, 217, and 324 - Smart-Form of Worcester

Loretta Mitchell in 1935 was the first manager of Smart-Form's Worcester location. She was a 37-year-old mother of four children whose husband worked in insurance. Her employer Smart-form had opened in 1899 as the Barclay Corset company, a New York City business founded by Harry Barclay, a tailor from Missouri. He moved operations to Newark, NJ, and there the business prospered, growing large enough to support the opening of two more factories in the U.K. Son Gaylord joined the family business early in the century and ran it for decades, overseeing its eventual move to a Florida headquarters. From a corporate profile in 1957 in the Tampa Bay Times we learn more about the early years of Smart-Form: 

"The company makes two basic lines of undergarments. All are sold in corsetieres and through individual orders through the main plant. One line is Smart-form, a semi-stock item which has easily alterable features, a Barclay patent. The other line is the Barclay, an exclusive light-weight strictly custom-designed product."

Their products were sold locally by women trained in measurement, fitting, and sales. In recalling business strategies from the 1930s, one of the subsequent owners of the company told of a shift back to corsets during that decade, after ten years of 1920s flapper girls tossing them aside. Fueling that shift were referrals from doctors who instructed women to seek maximum support, for health purposes. There was significant buy-in on this and we see that medical focus in corset ads of the period. Language from a 1933 Louisiana newspaper feature on the Barclay product line exemplifies the push: a Barclay corset, it explains, "safeguards health of the one for whom it is designed… Your corsetiere is a physician of the figure.' She diagnoses its condition, applies a treatment."

Smart-form of Worcester kept its space in the Slater Building until 1941. From 1935 onward, Slater's corsetiere tenant businesses had names that no longer advertised a particular person's work, names like Smart-form, Nu-Form, Arcade. During its six-year Slater tenancy Smart-form had three different managers and after leaving 390 Main in 1941, it had three more managers in Worcester until closing in 1961. The business model was changing. We are witnessing the end of the appeal of local corset-makers. Instead of going to Edith or Emma on a regular basis over a 20+ year period, you would instead have a relationship with a product that was manufactured in a New Jersey factory. The 21st century buzzword concepts of "branding" and "outsourcing" were alive and well in the Depression-era corset industry of Worcester.  

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1937 - room 408, 1937 - Nu-Form Corset Shop

Smart-Form had a corset-making neighbor in the Slater Building in 1937: Nu-Form Corset Shop. Selection of a suitable business name was becoming focused less on the handiwork of a particular person and more on the concept of body reshaping. With the help of a saleslady trained in custom fitting, you could step back out onto Main Street feeling like your body has a "new form" or a "smart form," molded by one of the corset brands that a 1930s shop owner would have in stock.

The two lawyers and the constable who had worked out of room 408 in 1936 packed up their files and made way for a corset shop run by two enterprising women of very different ethnic backgrounds. Both were daughters of immigrants. Evelyn Kouri's parents came from Syria. Katherine T. Phelan's came from Ireland. These two women would have had many conversations behind the sales counter about different traditions in faith and holidays throughout the year, as Phelan was most likely a Roman Catholic and Kouri worshipped at St. George's Antiochian Orthodox cathedral. 

Nu-Form's Slater Building tenancy was short-lived.  In 1938 a lawyer named Michael H. Selzo moved into room 408. Kouri continued work in the city as a saleswoman, later married, and then raised two children. She is buried in Worcester's Hope Cemetery. Phelan continued in the trade as a designer and a stitcher, at one point working for Cusette Foundations, an Austin Street corset manufacturing facility in the 1940s. In 1950 she was forewoman at a women's garment company. She died in Worcester in 1968 and is buried at St. John's Cemetery.

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1941-1964 - room 408 - Arcade Corset Shop

Behind the counter in room 210 of the Slater Building in 1941, we find Aurise Brodeur and Elvira Edstrom, two women who had worked together at the business of another person included in this tour. We have also profiled May Byrne Cosgrove, sole proprietor of the fashionable corset shop that opened in 1918 in the heart of Worcester's downtown… grew up above her father's downtown saloon? After years of retail experience at corset counters in the city, Cosgrove opened a business that endured into the 1950s. Brodeur and Edstrom both worked as clerks at Cosgrove's Pearl Street locations (26 Pearl then 21 Pearl), Brodeur from 1927 to 1940 and Edstrom from 1924 until 1932. Their Arcade Corset Shop did not beat Cosgrove's for its 34-year life but Arcade spent a very impressive 24 years at 390 Main Street. Brodeur and Edstrom must have found in each other perfect business partners.

Brodeur was part of Worcester's community of Canadians. Born on July 25, 1896, she was the second of seven children of Joseph and Victorine Brodeur. Her first documented job is as an "operator" in 1919. A year later, the U.S. Census provides more detail with the description of operator "at a corset shop."  She became a forewoman in 1926. The following year, she took a job with Cosgrove in retail. She lived for many years on the west side of the city at 51 Lovell Street in -- of course -- a triple decker.

Edstrom was part of Worcester's community of Swedes. She was 5 years younger than Brodeur (born 1901) so brought less corsetry experience to their partnership. The first public record of a job for her appears in 1921 when she worked as a 20-year-old stitcher, just a few years before she took a job at Cosgrove's shop where she stayed until her marriage in 1932. From Cosgrove's years of retailing and corset fitting and Brodeur's years on the factory floor, Edstrom had a large pool of experience to absorb as a clerk at Cosgrove's Pearl Street shops. At the time she went into business with Brodeur, she lived in the south side of the city in Quinsigamond Village where many of Worcester's Swedish citizenry gravitated, as it was the location of the giant wire factory where many of them worked.

Located in the popular arcade section on the second story of the Slater Building, Brodeur and Edstrom were in an ideal location for attracting customers. Unlike many other Worcester corset shops, Arcade found its space on Day One and stayed there until the end, over twenty years later.  The obituaries of both owners mention their business, another unusual happening for our corset makers but by the time of their deaths (Brodeur in 1986, Edstrom in 1976) women's employment was not so routinely dismissed in that final tribute. Of Brodeur we read:  "She owned and operated the former Arcade Corset Shop on downtown Main Street for 29 years." Of Edstrom: "part owner of the Arcade Corset Shop in the Slater Building for many years."

A Proper Fit (Working Title), Anne Marie Murphy. TidePool Press 2025. cityofcorsets.com