The Men Who Make (and Unmake) the Star

Visiting Macy’s rooftop to witness a seasonal ritual.

It’s a mid-November afternoon and the sky is clear. Fickle sunlight shines  through the afternoon; the Northwest’s perpetual winter gloom has not yet settled in. Downtown, in the thick of the shopping corridor, Macy’s, Inc., area maintenance manager Jerry Aalbu is glad of such weather. This is his biggest workday of the year. On the roof of the flagship store, high above Fourth Avenue, he and his team are preparing to assemble a well-known, gargantuan piece of metal: the Christmas star.

The job requires fifteen men. Aalbu, who manages Macy’s facilities from Bellingham to Bellevue, has pulled these workers from other stores to accomplish the job. He has done this every December for twenty-five years, as the store has changed names from Bon Marché to Bon-Macy’s to finally just Macy’s. Against the workaday world’s law that companies absorb other companies, it is charming that the star has stayed — as a star must — constant. This afternoon the half-assembled thing, with its gangly, gunmetal-gray arms, lies near the edge of the roof, and the men surround it. There’s John from Puyallup, and Ken from North Seattle. A man named David stands away from the roof’s edge: Aalbu explains that David’s afraid of heights. David smiles, unashamed of his fear. After all, we’re eight stories up, and the view straight down is a little nauseating. Yet the wind is light and pleasant.

Earlier in the morning the men assembled the star’s “streamers” — aluminum and mesh poles studded with rows of lights. These hang from the roof down the length of the building, much longer than the 160-foot star. The entire ensemble contains 3,800 little lights and a velvety aluminum center illuminated by a 1000-watt metal halide bulb.

Now that the streamers are finished, the team grapples with the center of the star, bolting it to the rest of the metalwork. Once this is done, they’ll hoist the behemoth off the southeast corner of the store so the public can partake of its light pulses throughout the dark holiday season.

Most of Aalbu’s employees have done “star duty” many times. They know the history: the thing was built in-house for the Bon Marché, and Aalbu and his coworker Ken recall the metal sculptor, although they only remember his first name: “Yeah, Fred built it about twenty-five years ago,” Ken says. “It was originally made of steel. Then they remade it into aluminum.”

As we talk the employees contemplate the enormous star’s half-assembled arms. Semi-flat, the star lies there, a metal object of untold weight, unglamorous as a fallen alien in War of the Worlds.

During most of the year, the star’s pole, center, wiring and other parts lie dismembered in a warren of locked rooftop storerooms. Today the storeroom doors are open to the breeze. A jumbo-size jar of Vaseline sits open on a workbench; the stuff is smeared on the little glass domes that fit over the lightbulbs in order to seal the weather out.

Finally all the arms’ sections are bolted together. The men plug the bulbs into the arms, one by one. It takes hours. Some of the workers stand around at various times, smoking, joking. As Aalbu says, “There’s a lot of hurry up and wait. But it’s still kind of nerve-racking.”  As the manager in charge, he always gets slightly twitchy when the time comes for his team to lower the sharp-edged metal monstrosity over the lip of the roof while pedestrians roam, oblivious, on Fourth Avenue, eight stories below. 
 But nothing’s ever gone wrong. Through the years, Aalbu’s installed and dismantled the star in all kinds of weather, and it has always settled into place without any trouble.

It’s almost three o’clock and the star is finished. It lies on the edge of the roof, its gray spokes poking out into space. With a four-ton capacity winch and just a few cables, the workers hoist the thing into place. Slowly the star becomes visible to the world.  It will remain there, shining, until the day after Christmas, when the team performs the whole procedure in reverse. But for now, on Macy’s rooftop, there’s a good mood in the air: the inevitable sense of expectation that comes before the holidays, to be followed by a starker sense of reality after New Year’s.

The mood on the rooftop seems to carry over at street level. At Fourth and Pine, a man in a sweatshirt intently eats a ham sandwich out of cellophane wrap, a current of shoppers laughing behind him. A clutch of teenagers tries out dance moves in the center of Westlake Mall. A girl in black platforms circles a big hula hoop around her waist, then her neck. “I am so in my head, I’m awesome,” she says, walking back to her friends, starting in on her twirling again, looking for an audience. Brief yellowsunlight on the Nordstrom building one block away makes the façade look ivory-soft, shale-like.  We won’t see that kind of light again for months. •

Photograph by Greg Plumis for City Arts.