by Sam Roberts
Around the turn of the century, Broadway below Chambers Street was considered one of the city’s most exclusive places to live (in 1818, 122 Chambers was said to have been the first house in the city to have a bathtub). Tradesmen, like Stewart, changed that, transforming its character almost overnight and driving more prosperous homeowners to developing neighborhoods farther uptown, like Washington and Union Squares. “Trinity and Grace stood like magnificent Gothic bookends south and north on Broadway, but in between all was business,” Morrison H. Heckscher, a Metropolitan Museum curator, wrote in Art and the Empire City in 2000. “What had been in the 1820s the most fashionable residential street in town became during the 1840s the center of retail commerce.” When Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 and witnessed the everyday Broadway promenade, he was agape. “We have seen more colors in ten minutes, than we should have elsewhere in as many days,” he wrote. “What various parasols! What rainbow silks and satins!” The diarist Philip Hone marveled that “the mania for converting Broadway into a street of shops is greater than ever. There is scarcely a block in the whole extent of this fine street of which some part is not in a state of transmutation.”
By 1846, the ambitious merchant princeling had moved across the street, into his newly completed No. 280, a four-floor building on the site of what had been Washington Hall, the headquarters of the Federalist Party (designed by City Hall’s John McComb). Even the location was audacious. Until then, few, if any, multistory structures had been designed solely for stores; most retail operations had been conducted on the ground floor of buildings that had offices, wholesale departments, or even living quarters above. Moreover, other retailers scoffed that even then, Stewart’s store was too far north and, worse still, it was on what was customarily considered the less fashionable side of Broadway (the east side was known as the cheaper “shilling” side, while the west, which also got more pedestrian traffic, had traditionally been regarded as the more prestigious “dollar” side). Stewart was unfazed. Unlike the narrow bottlenecks farther downtown, Broadway—either side—was wide enough to accommodate the carriage trade that he was wooing. He envisioned a unique space, an entire structure, an opulent destination devoted solely to what he was selling and to fashion shows that would lure potential shoppers.
Trench & Snook (later in the nineteenth century, the latter would be responsible for the Grand Central Depot) designed what, given all the expansions, turned out to be only the core of his emporium in the Anglo-Italianate style, which was just coming into vogue at London clubs. They sheathed it in a gleaming white Tuckahoe marble shell that strikingly distinguished Stewart’s store from the uniformly brown and beige veneers that defined most of the brick and wooden buildings on lower Broadway. So did the innovative imported plate-glass facade at street level that would have furnished flaneurs with an entirely new pastime—window shopping—except that Stewart, short-sighted or not, preferred to have his customers enter the store rather than gawk from the outside. His palace was the nation’s first commercial building clad in marble and punctuated by plate-glass windows that were flanked by Corinthian columns and admitted flattering natural light.
A dome soared eighty feet high and seventy feet in circumference over an oblong rotunda that created a prototypical galleria. Frescoes by the Italian artist Mario Bragaldi decorated with symbols of commerce embellished the walls and the ceiling. Dazzling chandeliers dangled between column capitals that epitomized “Commerce” and “Plenty.” At the maple and mahogany counters, stools allowed shoppers to sit while they examined the merchandise, which was divided up by category in different departments (with a separate wholesale operation on the upper floor). “For many years, architectural historians have pondered the question of Stewart’s use of an architect, and, if he used one, who he was,” Stephen N. Elias wrote in Alexander T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (1992). “Stewart is generally accepted as the principal architect of his Marble Palace. He generated the design concepts and was assisted in carrying them out by men more familiar with construction practices and techniques.”
Stewart’s genius went beyond stools and frescoes. He instinctively captured the essence of urban design by distinguishing his establishment not as a private domain but as a civic space. “Stewart was the first New Yorker to understand that the department store could be seen as a public institution,” Mona Domosh wrote. “A marble store with a rotunda indicated in architectural language that the commercial prince who owned the store was indeed of the ruling class and the customers who shopped there could acquire for themselves such legitimacy by buying the appropriate items.”
The architect, whoever he was, must have felt flattered by the wealth of imitation. Stewart’s store would become a prototype for many of Broadway’s mid-nineteenth-century hotels. “The entire length of Broadway seems to have been measured for a new suit of marble and freestone—six and seven story buildings going up on its whole length, of most magnificent elegance and style,” Gleason’s Pictorial wrote in 1852, “with Aladdin-like splendor and celerity.” (Before long, Lord & Taylor and Arnold and Hearn leapfrogged even farther than Stewart from downtown.) “The architectural impact Stewart’s store had upon New York in the mid-nineteenth century was as strong and influential as the impact that the Lever House would have upon New York in the mid-twentieth century,” the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission declared in 1986.
“A few years ago, when a man returned from Europe, his eye being full of the lofty buildings of the Continent, our cities seemed insignificant and mean,” an editorial in Harper’s magazine fussed in 1854, once all the additions to the store were completed. “Even now there is, in its way, no finer street effect than the view of Stewart’s buildings seen on a clear, blue, brilliant day, from a low point on Broadway as the sidewalk in front of Trinity Church. It rises out of the green foliage in the park, a white marble cliff, sharply drawn against the sky.” The typically nitpicking Putnam’s Monthly acknowledged that only City Hall itself rivaled its “palatial magnificence.”
Stewart insisted on transplanting one lucky omen from his original store to the new one: the elderly beggar who, regardless of the weather, nestled on Broadway outside A. T. Stewart’s with her box, basket, and umbrella, selling apples. The proprietor’s luck began on opening day, September 21, 1846. “When the doors were opened there was a rush of people just like a Jenny Lind night at the opera,” Stewart later wrote. “The unexpected brightening of the day, and the concourse of people in consequence, produced a reaction on me and I confess that I withdrew quietly to my room again, and found relief in having a good cry.” Despite the apparent spontaneity of the opening, Stewart never took good luck for granted. He had actually selected the first paying customer in advance, at her request. That morning, she bought about two hundred dollars’ worth of Irish lace, the same product that Stewart had first imported with him when he returned from Ireland after his grandfather died. (Years later, when Stewart learned that she had married a man who squandered her fortune, died, and left her destitute in Europe, he leased her an apartment and provided her with a lifetime annuity.)
Opening-day receipts were enormous. Philip Hone wrote that “there is nothing in London or Paris to compare with this dry goods palace” and that its expansion in 1850 to encompass two and a half acres and a fifth floor was transforming it into “one of the ‘wonders’ of the Western World.” The Times raved that Stewart’s was “the largest dry-goods establishment” on the planet, and the Herald expressed confidence that the store would succeed because “dry goods are a passion with the ladies, and whilst they continue to remain so the business must flourish; for woe to the luckless husband who refuses his wife money for shopping.” In another sign of the times, the Herald added a compliment to the store that, in retrospect, was condescending to its female customers, pronouncing it “exquisitely chaste, classic, and tasteful,” an enterprise paying “the ladies of this city a high compliment in giving them such a beautiful resort in which to while awa
y their leisure hours.”
Other merchants would stake their claim to having originated the department store, on dates ranging from six years later, when Aristide Boucicaut assumed control of the Bon Marché in Paris, to twelve years later, when the first R. H. Macy store opened in Manhattan, to 1868 and Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution in Salt Lake City, and even Wanamaker’s, which was actually Stewart’s successor, on Broadway and Tenth Street. But A. T. Stewart’s store was arguably the true first. “A. T. Stewart never operated a department store, but he did create a highly developed transitional form of retail distribution which was in existence two to three decades before the department store as such began to develop,” Harry E. Resseguie wrote in The Business History Review (1965). “Stewart not only formulated and put into effect the main features of the department store system long before the first department store came into being, but he was also the first retailer in the world to erect a specially designed, functional, multi-floored building to house his store.”
Stewart never wavered from one business model: buy for cash (which earned him a discount from suppliers), sell a large volume at fixed prices to make a small profit, let shoppers wander unmolested by high-pressure salesmen (“you may gaze upon a million dollars’ worth of goods, and no man will interrupt either your meditation or your admiration,” he promised, a policy adopted by one of his employees, Harry Gordon Selfridge, when he launched his own successful retailing career in London), and never mislead a customer about the price or quality of merchandise.
By 1862, Stewart had become a major supplier of uniforms to the Union Army and Navy and, even after expanding, had outgrown his marble monument to retailing. He erected an innovative cast-iron palace at Broadway and Tenth Street, on what became known as Ladies’ Mile. By then, no New York importer was paying more in customs duties. He, alone, accounted for one-tenth of all the goods entering the Port of New York from abroad, and he had become the largest importer in the nation. The four hundred retail clerks at his Marble Palace were selling five million dollars in merchandise annually.
By the time he died in 1876, Stewart could boast the biggest volume of retail dry goods sales in the world. Along with William B. Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt, he was considered one of the three wealthiest men in America. He marshaled his wealth to protect his retailing empire, most notably vigorously opposing a streetcar franchise that the Tammany machine wanted on Broadway. (Seeing his opportunities, however, Stewart partnered with Boss Tweed, then the public works commissioner, and other wealthy capitalists on a proposed alternative elevated railway farther east.) “Astor owns more real estate,” Junius Henri Browne wrote in The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (1869), “but Stewart has the larger income.”
Other retail giants survived the death of their founders and owners. Stewart’s legacy did not. He had no surviving children. In 1884, his wife, Cornelia, all but handed the Marble Palace to Stewart’s executor, Henry Hilton, for a mere one million dollars. Hilton, who lacked any retail expertise, drowned in protracted litigation over the estate and eventually sold what was left of the business to John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia retailing magnate. Wanamaker converted the store into a warehouse, then offices. In 1917, Frank Munsey’s New York Sun bought the building, installing a distinctive four-faced clock on the southwest corner emblazoned with the newspaper’s motto, “It Shines for All.” When Munsey died in 1925, his estate bequeathed the building and the paper to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which sold both a year later. In 1966, the Sun Building, as it had become known, was sold to the City of New York. Plans to raze it and replace it as part of a new civic center never materialized. Instead, it was declared an official landmark, rehabilitated, and transformed into municipal offices.
Even in death, Stewart proved to be a retailing sensation of sorts, however morbidly. In effect, his remains were put up for sale. Two years after he died, his body vanished from its tomb at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. The body-snatchers demanded twenty-five thousand dollars, but Henry Hilton, the executor, refused even to negotiate. Three years later, Cornelia Stewart resorted to a tactic that her husband abhorred: she decided to bargain for a discount. She offered twenty thousand dollars for his corpse. The exchange took place before dawn in 1881 in an isolated copse in Westchester. First, a masked horseman handed a velvet triangle to Cornelia’s grandnephew. It matched a hole that had been cut in the lining of Stewart’s coffin. He traded the money for a satchel of bones—presumably Stewart’s.
According to an unverified version of events, the family secreted the bones in the Marble Palace until 1885, when they were transferred to a vault in the newly completed Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation, which was underwritten by Cornelia Stewart in Garden City, Long Island, the model middle-class community conceived by her husband. Breaking another one of A. T. Stewart’s inviolable retailing rules—always properly label the merchandise—the bones were never positively identified.
The Marble Palace, at Broadway and Chambers, was transformed into the headquarters of the New York Sun newspaper. The clock survives as its legacy. (George Samoladas)
8
21 STUYVESANT STREET
This was the original Stuyvesant Town: the Bowery that was Peter’s farm and the one street that conformed to the compass. (Library of Congress)
The three-story, red-brick Flemish-bond town house at 21 Stuyvesant Street is old and historical, but it’s even more noteworthy for what it isn’t. Completed in 1803, the Federal-style house is, to be sure, an official city landmark—what preservationists have labeled “an all but unique example of a fine New York dwelling of the period.” But the story behind the house goes to the heart of two bugbears that both drive and bedevil New Yorkers: overdevelopment and getting around town. Stuyvesant is the sole diagonal Manhattan street between Eighth Street and Central Park. It is also the only street in the borough that runs directly between the compass points of east and west.
That may sound counterintuitive when Manhattan has 220 streets that are labeled east or west. But the fact is, when the city’s street commissioners imposed their no-frills matrix that transformed New York into the City of Angles, in 1811, they aligned the avenues to the waterfront, rather than to the points of the compass (notwithstanding the fact that the sailor on the official city seal has been wielding a plummet and sextant for hundreds of years). The streets are actually twenty-nine degrees off the actual east-west latitude. That accounts for the astronomical phenomenon in May and July that has come to be celebrated as Manhattanhenge, a latter-day vista for non-Druids when the borough’s crosstown streets align perfectly with the setting sun.
Some historians believe Peter Schagen’s 1626 letter to the West India Company directors recounting what Peter Minuit, the director of New Netherland, considered his purchase of Manhattan a few months before to be the most important document in New York City’s history. They even call it the city’s birth certificate. But others say unequivocally that the map establishing the rigid ninety-degree-angled grid that spawned unprecedented development, spectacular growth, and unimagined wealth (and gave birth to vehicular gridlock and defiant jaywalking) surpasses even the Schagen letter as the single most significant catalyst to the growth of Greater New York. Hilary Ballon, the architectural historian, hailed the grid as “the first great public works in the city’s history and a landmark in city planning.”
At the time and ever since, no one was neutral about imposing a one-size-fits-all grate that would flatten an elongated, craggy island into a two-dimensional plane. City officials enlisted the state to create a street commission because they feared the political backlash themselves. Recruited by the commission, John Randel Jr. and his surveyors methodically traipsed through backyards, orchards, and fields for four years to mark what soon would become the intersections of Manhattan’s streets and avenues. New Yorkers, displeased with the trespassing and its implications, pelted the surveyors with cabbages and sicced dogs on them.
If some N
ew Yorkers considered it folly to map the island as far uptown as 155th Street when, for good reason, Houston Street was still known as North Street, the commissioners explained without irony: “To have gone further might have furnished materials to the pernicious Spirit of Speculation.” They predicted, though, that in as little as fifty years the city would be developed as far as Thirty-Fourth Street and grow in population from sixty thousand to four hundred thousand. They underestimated. By 1860, Manhattan had twice as many people.
The grid was unforgiving. It was relentlessly linear. It allowed for a few open spaces, but deliberately shunned circles and ovals as fripperies. The commissioners reasoned that “a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.” They plotted the intransigent geometry of the grid not to ease transportation—they assumed that people would ordinarily travel up and down the island by boat on the adjacent rivers—but to rationalize real estate development, which had proceeded haphazardly since the seventeenth century on the crooked Dutch lanes at the southern tip of Manhattan and in established villages like Greenwich on the west side.