All that remains of a legendary Astor Place department store few New Yorkers remember

The letters are large and elegant, but they’re easy to miss—set against an off-white facade above a rusty garage door on Lafayette Street.

“Wanamaker,” the letters read. You’re forgiven if the name doesn’t ring a bell. This faint signage is just about all that remains of Wanamaker’s, a top department store that arrived in New York City in 1896 and became a leading retailer through the mid-1950s.

The story of Wanamaker’s echoes the story of so many of Gotham’s legendary dry goods emporiums, as they used to be known. These highly competitive stores made huge profits thanks to the riches of the Gilded Age and the introduction of modern consumerism.

Except Wanamaker’s got its start in Philadelphia, where namesake John Wanamaker opened his first men’s clothing shop in 1861. By the end of the century, Wanamaker began branching out into other cities as well as New York.

Wanamaker’s first occupied the former A.T. Stewart store on Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets (above, in 1901), then expanded its footprint by building a much larger store at 770 Broadway, between Eighth and Ninth Streets, in the early 1900s. A skybridge reportedly connected the two structures.

“Clad mostly in terra cotta, this grand shopping palace contained thirty-two acres of retail space, an auditorium with 1,300 seats, and a large restaurant to round out the shopping experience,” states Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog. 

Unlike other major New York City department stores, Wanamaker’s never moved to Midtown. The store stuck it out on Astor Place until shutting its doors in the mid-1950s. A fire then consumed the empty older building. An apartment residence called Stewart House sits there today.

The Wanamaker sign I found isn’t on the 770 Broadway building; you can view it on the Lafayette Street side of 730 Broadway, where the company had a warehouse, according to a 1982 New York Times article.

The only other remnant of this retail giant is on New York City maps—Ninth Street between Broadway and Lafayette is still called Wanamaker Place.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

Stop and admire the Chelsea Hotel’s beautiful iron balconies

There’s a lot to love about the Chelsea Hotel: the Queen Anne (or Victorian Gothic?) style, its backstory as a failed early cooperative apartment house, the enchanting main staircase and lobby fireplace, and its cultural relevance as a home for artists, writers, and free thinkers throughout the 20th century.

But there’s one feature I can’t get past: the magnificent floral-ornamented iron balconies gracing the circa-1883 building—seven rows of delicate leaves and flowers spread across the hotel’s red brick facade.

The floral motifs bring the beauty and softness of the natural world to the harsh brick and mortar cityscape of West 23rd Street.

The balconies “lend an atmosphere of charm to this high brick facade,” as the 1966 report designating the Chelsea a historic landmark put it.

What I didn’t realize after so many years of admiring the balconies is that they were made by Cornell Ironworks—whose name I’d often seen on manhole covers and cast iron buildings across Manhattan.

The company’s roots go back to 1828. But in the late 19th century, Cornell became “one of the largest manufacturing operations in New York City, employing 1,200 at its peak,” noted a historical timeline from dasma.com. “In the 1880s, the firm provide[d] circular stairs and ironwork for the Brooklyn Bridge and the iron base and stairways for the Statue of Liberty.”

Cornell also supplied the cast iron for many of the great department stores of Gilded Age New York City, from the A.T. Stewart store on 10th Street and Broadway to the Arnold, Constable Dry Goods establishment on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, according to Walter Grutchfield.

The Chelsea Hotel has undergone lots of big changes over the past decade or so. Recently I took a walk through the new, spiffed up lobby and public rooms. While many of the art and architectural distinctions of the interior remain, the space lacks the intentional shabbiness and artistic colony feel of the pre-renovation hotel.

But you don’t need to go inside the Chelsea Hotel to enjoy its magic. Just stand outside on 23rd Street and look at the iron balconies—works of art created by a storied city manufacturer for a hotel clientele that appreciated artistic magic.

The story of the bride-to-be brought to St. Vincent’s Hospital after surviving the Titanic

The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 brought deep grief to New York City, the great ship’s intended destination. This incredible story of one third-class survivor made it into the city tabloids a week later, and it was something of a bright spot amid a terrible tragedy.

Sarah Roth (left) and Daniel Iles on their wedding day, April 1912

The passenger’s name was Sarah Roth. She was born in the 1880s in what is now Poland, but her family moved to London when she was young, and she worked as a seamstress. There she met Daniel Iles, and the two became sweethearts, then got engaged.

Wanting a better life for himself and his intended bride, Iles immigrated to New York City in 1911. He found work as a clerk at Greenhut, Siegel & Cooper, the colossal department store on Sixth Avenue and 18th Street (where Bed, Bath & Beyond is today) and rented a room at 321 West 24th Street.

A crowd at Pier 59 awaits the RMS Carpathia

The next year, he sent Roth passage money to come join him in Manhattan, and she bought a steerage ticket on the ill-fated Titanic. “Sarah managed to secure one of the last third-class tickets on the maiden voyage of White Star Line’s new flagship,” wrote The Guardian in a 2000 article.

On April 10, 1912, Roth boarded the liner with a wedding dress she made herself. Four days later, asleep in her cabin, she woke with the realization that the ship wasn’t moving, according to encyclopedia-titanica. She got out of bed and soon found herself among a glut of people in steerage, prevented by an officer from going to the deck.

St. Vincent’s Hospital’s Elizabeth Seton Building, where Titanic survivors were taken

Another officer who was smitten by her, according to a 2010 Daily News article, helped her get to one of the last lifeboats to leave the ship. Picked up by the RMS Carpathia after the Titanic went down, Roth arrived with fellow survivors at Pier 59 in Chelsea. Iles was waiting, hoping his fiancee would be among the survivors.

She was brought to St. Vincent’s Hospital along with more than 100 others in various states of health. Roth was suffering from “shock and exposure,” according to an Evening World article.

Titanic survivors recuperating at St. Vincent’s

“At St. Vincent’s, Roth and the others were welcomed by doctors and nurses who were the passionate opposite of the attitude manifested by those deadly class-dividing gates aboard ship,” wrote Michael Daly in the Daily News.

Roth told hospital staff about her engagement. “The hospital now saw an opportunity to bring some cheer amid tragedy,” stated Daly. “Iles was contacted at his room on W. 24th St. and declared himself ready. Father Grogan of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary was willing to officiate. A fellow Titanic survivor named Emily Radman agreed to be maid of honor. The Women’s Relief Committee provided a new trousseau and a bouquet.”

The headline in a front page Sun article, April 23, 1912

A week later in the hospital meeting hall, Roth and Iles tied the knot. Fellow Titanic survivors and other patients came to watch the ceremony. “Some of the sick who were able to leave their wards were put in wheel chairs and moved down the corridor so that they could enjoy the wedding. Perhaps 200 were in the crowd, and among those were black gowned Sisters of Charity, young physicians in white, and priests,” wrote The Sun.

Roth and Iles went on to have a son, and like other Titanic survivors, she disappeared into obscurity. She died in 1947, but a legacy of her trip—a Third Class menu card she kept in her purse the night the Titanic met its fate—went up for auction in 2000. The winning bid: $44,650, per Bonhams, which has reproduced the menu card here.

[Top image: NY Tribune via Encyclopedia-Titanica; second, third, and fourth images: LOC; fifth image: The Sun]

A Herald Square faded ad for a haberdashery takes you to the 1920s

When Weber & Heilbroner moved into the Marbridge Building at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue in 1923, this men’s clothing company had already established itself as a leading haberdashery—with stores throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle earlier that year.

Could this enormous faded ad looming over Sixth Avenue for the Marbridge store date back that far?

It’s hard to believe, but it certainly is appropriately faded and has an old-timey feel, with the words under the company name reading “Stein-Bloch Clothes in the New York Manner.” (Stein-Bloch was a manufacturer of men’s suits and coats.)

Weber & Heilbroner stores shut down for good in the 1970s, but this glorious ad in Herald Square refuses to let New York forget the men’s hats, suits, and overcoats they were known for through the 20th century.

The 19th century remains of a fabled Grand Street department store

Standing across the street at Grand and Orchard, you just know this unusual building with the black cornice and curvy corner windows has a backstory. Though it’s a little rundown and has a strange pink paint job, this was once the home of a mighty 19th century department store known as Ridley’s.

Ridley’s story begins in the mid-1800s. Decades before Ladies Mile became Gilded Age New York’s premier shopping district, browsing and buying fashionable goods meant going to Grand Street, which was lined with fine shops and dry goods emporiums east of Broadway in the antebellum city.

The best known of these dry goods emporiums and a rival to neighbor Lord & Taylor (located on Broadway and Grand) was Ridley’s.

Founded by English-born Edward A. Ridley as a small millenary store at 311 Grand Street in 1848, according to a Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report, Ridley’s expanded by buying many of the former residential buildings on the block. Ridley then built a new mansard-roof structure at the corner of Grand and Allen Streets accessible to street car lines and the ferry to Grand Street in Brooklyn.

In the 1880s, Grand Street was still a shopping district but no longer elite. Lord & Taylor had already relocated uptown to a prime Ladies Mile site at Broadway and 20th Street. But Ridley’s sons, who had taken over the business, commissioned a new building at the corner of Grand and Orchard Streets.

Five stories tall with a cast-iron facade, the new Ridley’s opened in 1886. The space featured a “curved, three-bay pavilion that may have been originally crowned by a squat dome, or a flagpole,” the LPC report stated.

Inside, 52 “branches of trade” sold everything from clothes to furniture to toys and employed approximately 2,500 people. Stables behind the store “provided parking for horses and carriages,” according to The Curious Shoppers Guide to New York City, by Pamela Keach.

The amazing thing is, the new block-long Ridley’s would only occupy the space for 15 years. In 1901, Ridley’s went out of business, according to an Evening World article that year—partly a victim of its increasingly unappealing location on the crowded Lower East Side.

After Ridley’s departed, the space was chopped up into smaller retail outlets. Above is the building in 1939-1941 with a housewares store on the ground floor. Today, a men’s clothing store exists there.

[Second image: LPC; third image: MCNY 261260; fourth image: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]

Two mystery initials on a 125th Street building reveal a former department store

Sometimes the ghosts of New York City put clues about Gotham’s past right under your nose.

That’s what happened on a recent walk down busy 125th Street, between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. On an empty building partially hidden behind scaffolding and a blue tarp are two letters, entwined like a logo: KC.

The initials can be seen from the sidewalk, and they pose the question: What’s KC?

Turns out these initials stand for Koch & Co., a once-heralded department store with its roots in the city’s Gilded Age, when mass consumerism was born and the idea of shopping for leisure took hold.

Henry C.F. Koch, an immigrant from Germany, founded his eponymous emporium with his father-in-law in 1860, according to Walter Grutchfield. Their first store opened at Carmine and Bleecker Streets, then made the jump the Sixth Avenue and 20th Street in 1875.

At the time, the Sixth Avenue location put Koch & Co. squarely in New York’s burgeoning Ladies Mile Shopping District, which roughly spanned Broadway to Sixth Avenue and 10th Street to 23rd Street.

Koch & Co.’s competition on Ladies Mile would have been B. Altman’s on Sixth and 19th Street, Hugh O’Neill & Co. on Sixth and 21st, and Macy’s at Sixth and 14th Street. These and other department stores sold everything from fashion to furniture to food to women who were free to browse and buy without being accompanied by male escort, as was the usual custom at the time.

In 1892, perhaps taking note of population shifts and the elevated railroads that opened uptown Manhattan to residential development, Koch relocated his store to a new building at 125th Street.

“At that time the street was residential in nature, and H. C. F. Koch & Co. were pioneers in leading the changes that converted 125th St. into a shopping street,” Grutchfield wrote.

Koch & Co. certainly got good press. In a New York Times article from 1893, a reporter wrote: “The great store of H.C.F. Koch Co. in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, is, par excellence, the emporium of the far uptown district, and consequently the announcement of its Fall opening is attracting thousands of buyers and seekers after the styles of the season.”

Still, it may have been hard at first to lure shoppers so far uptown, as this ad in The New York Times (above) from 1893 hints. Koch himself had moved to Lenox Avenue, and in 1900 he died, passing the business to his sons.

The department store continued until 1930, when it was bought out and closed. The stately building remains, with those CK initials and the name “Koch and Co” carved in stone high above the cornice.

[Third image: NYPL, 1936; fourth image: King’s Views of New York City, 1903; fifth image: New York Times, 1893]

A faded Woolworth’s store in East Harlem comes back in view

On a dreary stretch of Third Avenue at 121st Street in East Harlem is a block-long, two-story building emptied of tenants, waiting for the wrecking ball.

But hiding behind a metal frame on the exterior is a throwback to a very different New York: the faded imprint of a Woolworth’s sign against that iconic red backdrop: “F.W. Woolworth Co.”

Before Amazon, before Target, and before Walgreens there was Woolworth’s, the five-and-dime store chain that sold everything from underwear to goldfish to school supplies to sewing patterns throughout the 20th century.

Some had lunch counters, popular places to grab a cheap bite before the era of fast food and Starbucks. (Those lunch counters often attracted the down and out and lonely, as I recall from many, many trips to a Greenwich Village Woolworth’s as a kid.)

Woolworth had a strong presence in New York City. In Manhattan alone Woolworth’s occupied storefronts on Eighth Street, both ends of 14th Street, and all the major cross streets up to 125th Street.

Woolworth’s was once a regular shopping stop for all kinds of necessities; in New York City, they even played a role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Yet in it’s final decades, the store came off as shabby and doddering.

When the store at 2226 Third Avenue was built and then closed is something of a mystery. The last Woolworth’s in the US shut its doors in 1997.

I have a feeling this Woolworth’s disappeared long before that—though it existed in the 1930s, as the NYPL photo shows above, and it made it into the 1940 NYC tax photo, too.

[Third image: NYPL; fourth image: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]

A 1970s remnant of a Crazy Eddie record store

I have no idea why the original owner of this yellow paper bag from Crazy Eddie’s held onto it for so long. But when it turned up for sale at a vintage shop (pressed in plastic, no less), I couldn’t resist spending a few bucks to own a piece of 1970s/1980s New York history.

If you lived in the New York City area in those decades, then you remember the electronics store and record/tape shop Crazy Eddie—mainly for the commercials, which featured a DJ named Jerry Carroll gesturing and shouting that the store’s prices were insane. (Sometimes in a santa claus cap for the annual Christmas in August sale.)

The original Crazy Eddie was on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. But the store’s TV ad schtick and actual low prices spread franchises to the Bronx, Manhattan, upstate, and Long Island.

Unfortunately it was all over for Crazy Eddie’s owners by the 1990s, thanks to inflating sales numbers and other illegal business practices that mandated store closures and jail time. New Yorkers turned to other electronics stores like (Nobody Beats) the Wiz and J&R Music World, but these too are long gone from the cityscape.

A quick Google maps check shows that the original King’s Highway store is now a bank branch.

[Second image: New York Daily News February 22, 1980; third image: Youtube]

What remains of the Stern’s store on 23rd Street

When the Stern Brothers opened their new Dry Goods Store at 32-36 West 23rd Street in October 1878, New York’s growing consumer class was floored.

The three Stern brothers from Buffalo had outgrown their previous shop on West 23rd Street as well as their first New York City store, established in 1867, around the corner at 367 Sixth Avenue). So a new cathedral of commerce was needed, and it featured a stunning cast-iron facade and five stories of selling space.

Stern’s was now the city’s biggest department store—one that catered to both aspirational middle-class shoppers and the wealthy carriage trade. These elite shoppers entered a separate door on 22nd Street, so as not to rub shoulders with the riffraff.

But everyone who came to Stern’s left feeling like a million bucks.

”When the customer entered the store, he was welcomed personally by one of the Stern brothers, all of whom wore gray-striped trousers and cutaway tailcoats,” wrote the New York Times in 2001, quoting Larry Stone, who started at Stern’s in 1948 as a trainee and retired as chief executive in 1993. ”Pageboys escorted the customer to the department in which they wished to shop, and purchases were sent out in elegant horse-drawn carriages and delivered by liveried footmen.”

Stern’s was such a popular spot on 23rd Street—the northern border of what became known as the Ladies Mile Shopping District, where women were free to browse and buy without having to be escorted by their husbands or fathers—this dry goods emporium was enlarged in 1892.

The store was always a stop for tourists, too. “We got off [the Broadway car] at 23rd Street and Josie took us to the Stern Brothers, one of the large and select dry goods houses where we saw the latest fashions,” wrote 12-year-old Naomi King, who kept a travel diary of her visit to the city with her parents from Indiana in 1899.

King wrote that she saw “all the new spring styles [and] the new spring color: amethyst, purple, or violet in all shades [and] stripes extending to gentlemen’s cravats in Roman colors.”

But Stern’s reign as one of the most popular shops on Ladies Mile wouldn’t last—mainly because Ladies Mile didn’t last. Macy’s was the first store to relocate uptown, from 14th Street and Sixth Avenue to Herald Square, in 1903.

Other big-name department stores followed. Stern’s made the jump to 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue in 1913, leaving their old building behind, according to a 1967 New York Times article marking the store’s centennial. For most of the 20th century, the palatial building on 23rd Street was used for light industry and commercial concerns.

That 42nd Street flagship store would ultimately close in 1970, wrote Gerard R. Wolfe in New York: A Guide to the Metropolis. By 2001, Stern’s shut down all of its stores and went out of business.

Since 2000s, Home Depot has occupied the old Stern’s dry goods palace, and it seems as if every trace of Stern’s has long been striped from the building.

Except on the facade. If you look up above the Home Depot Sign, you can see the initials “SB,” a permanent reminder of this magnificent building’s original triumphant owners.

[Top three images: NYPL Digital Collection]

An elegy for Lord and Taylor—and its tea rooms

After Lord & Taylor opened its new Italian Renaissance–inspired flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 38th Street in February 1914, the legendary department store continued its reputation as a retail pioneer.

The store was built with its own electricity generator and concert hall, and in 1916, the beloved holiday windows made their debut. Later, extra mirrors were added to selling floors and dressing rooms—something now totally standard for a department store—so customers had a better view of themselves and the merchandise.

But one feature Lord & Taylor installed in the new building was definitely more old school: the in-store tea room.

Tea rooms and dining areas could be found in many stores on Ladies Mile—the trapezoid shaped enclave between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 10th to 23rd Streets where Gilded Age women could shop, mingle, and enjoy each other’s company as they partook in the era’s consumerism. (Lord & Taylor built a magnificent store on this strip in 1870 at Broadway and 20th Street.)

As the city marched northward and department stores like Lord & Taylor relocated to Herald Square and Fifth Avenue, they brought their dining areas and tea rooms with them.

What’s so special about a department store tea room? It may sound strange to our sensibilities today, but even after the turn of the last century, women didn’t dine alone in restaurants.

The presence of a solo woman who simply wanted to rest and get a bite to eat after browsing the latest fashions might suggest she had illicit motives for being there.

And she certainly couldn’t sit at a saloon; bars were all-male preserves, and proper women didn’t drink (at least not in public).

But women shoppers needed a place to rest and refuel, especially since shopping had become something of a leisure activity, and it was one of the few activities women could do without being escorted by men.

To fill the void were confectionaries and tea rooms, some of which were inside a department store itself.

These menus from Lord & Taylor’s in-store tea room, from 1914 and 1917, can give you an idea of what (mainly) female shoppers, in groups or on their own, dined on during their shopping trips.

Much of the fare is light, and all of it non-alcoholic. Coup Julia Marlowe sound very early 1900s; she was a famous actress of the time with a spectacular mansion on Riverside Drive.

The tea rooms are gone, as is the 38th Street Lord & Taylor store. This week comes news that the company—which has its roots in a humble dry goods store opened on today’s Lower East Side in 1824—is going out of business for good.

If Lord & Taylor’s time has come, we’ll have to accept it—while remembering that in big and small ways, the store helped shape shopping habits in the late 19th and early 20th city.

[Images: NYPL Digital Collection]