“Black Friday,” when major retailers turn the corner from “in the red” to “in the black” on the day after Thanksgiving, would have been a very interesting phenomenon to Bradford Peck.

If the founder of “The Great Department Store” in Lewiston were alive today, he might be saying, “I told you so.” After all, Peck had a theory that the whole world could be run on the same principles that you would use to manage a big department store.

This is the time of year when many long-time residents recall traditional signs of Christmas in L-A, and the five-story B. Peck Department Store on Main Street at the head of Lisbon Street was at the center of it all. The historic store – largest in New England outside Boston when it was built in 1899 – was thriving around the middle of the 1900s.

Marvelous life-size animated Christmas displays appeared in the large storefront windows. Decorations filled the store’s five floors, and even the overhead maze of piping for the pneumatic tube cash-transport system was festooned in garland and glitter. Shoppers thronged Hulett Square and surged in and out of the twin revolving doors at Peck’s main entrance.

For most of us, the primary destination at Peck’s was the basement level. That’s where Santa held court on his throne overlooking the fish pond – a round enclosure filled with wrapped presents where (for a fee) a kid could snag some likely treasure with a little fishing pole supplied by the supervising elves.

Of course, this yearly ritual didn’t come without its downside. The lines were long, it was very noisy and it was incredibly hot under all that winter clothing.

Nevertheless, mothers from miles around endured this for the sake of their youngsters’ minute or two on Santa’s lap – and that flash of the store’s official camera to immortalize the moment.

It was about 1950, I guess, when my mother took my brother and me to Peck’s for the annual picture. We were wearing our Cub Scout uniforms. I wonder how many of those Peck’s pictures of kids with Santa still appear among the family Christmas decorating schemes each year.

That remarkable store at “the head of the street” paralleled Peck’s high ambitions, if not his precise utopian vision.

Wallace Evan Davies wrote about Peck’s life in a December 1947 edition of New England Quarterly.

Davies said Peck’s life was a “Horatio Alger pattern” of rags to riches accomplishment.

Peck was born in the Charleston district of Boston in 1853. He left school at the age of 12 to become an errand boy at the large Jordan Marsh’s department store. He later was vice president of the Joliet Dry Goods Co. in Illinois.

Peck’s book, “The World a Department Store,” was self-published in 1900 as an initial step in launching a social experiment known as the Cooperative Association of America, Davies said.

Peck set his utopian novel in Lewiston. There, in 1900, his protagonist, a harassed capitalist whom Peck named Percy Brantford, took a double dose of a sleeping powder that put him in a coma for 25 years, according to an outline of the book from Cornell University.

“On his awakening in 1925, he found his native city transformed under a system of cooperative enterprise that had replaced the capitalistic system with which he was familiar,” the outline said.

In his book, Peck described his utopian view of Lewiston.

He wrote, “Mr. Brantford, looking out of his parlor windows, was aesthetically impressed with the view before him.” Peck recalled big-city tenements, and wrote, “Here these old-time backyards, so familiar to him, were transformed into a regular system of parkways … and it seemed as if Paradise dawned before him.”

The book has 10 line drawings of the new Lewiston that Peck envisioned. He includes a detailed plan of a typical city block with sites for eight apartment buildings. Streets were laid out in grids with occasional diagonal streets and numerous parks.

He also had a plan for neighborhood financial cooperatives to make all this happen.

Although Peck’s utopian dream may still be considered under development, his store prospered for a good part of its life. It was owned for a few years by Filene’s. Recession took a toll on profitability and Peck’s closed in 1982.

Platz Associates undertook renovation of the building’s 100,000 square feet of interior space, as well as restoration of the facade to its original lines within the framework of more recent construction techniques. Since 1988, the building has been home to an L.L. Bean telephone order center.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].