91. A.T. Stewart Company Store

A.K.A.: The Marble Palace; The Sun Building
Location: 280 Broadway
Built: 1845-1846; additions 1850-1851, 1852-1853, 1872, 1884, 1921, and 2002.
Architect: Trench & Snook; Frederick Schmidt (1872); Edward D. Harris (1884)
National Register Number: 78001885
Listed: June 02, 1978
Visited: April 13, 2008; November 15 and 21, 2008; December 3, 2008

"This must have been at the hours when we were left discreetly to our fortitude [at the dentist's], through our aunt's availing herself of the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street." (Henry James, "A Small Boy")

As a category, the department store bleeds into other, older predecessors such as the bazaar, the general store, the French magasin de nouveauté; as such it may not be possible to pinpoint the very first. But Alexander Turney Stewart's fourth store on 280 Broadway is sometimes called that, or slightly less prestigiously, the first department store in the United States. In any case, it was home the future model for the Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylors to come--and an incubator for modes of consumption (a fancy way of saying "buying stuff") we all take for granted.

Before the emergence of the department store, customers were followed (or politely hounded) by an assistant attending to their needs, and expected to make a purchase after entering a shop; prices were not fixed, but bargained for. Today, this is barely imaginable. Shy by nature, I couldn't plunge myself into such a world. Every simple purchase of a shirt would make me want to claw my skin with broken clamshells--and that'd be nothing on a stomach-churn of a bourgeois woman in a society that saw the weaker sex and expected her to act accordingly, even in a shop. A.T. Stewart was one of the first (again, by some observers, the first) to do away with such potentially pressured selling, turning what was once a contest, a confrontation, a psyche-out for consumers into something more relaxed--something that could even be a leisure activity. The indecision of Henry James' aunt wasn't but a little crumb of liberation: without an assistant on her back, she be could indecisive as she damned well please.



A.T. Stewart was an Irish immigrant born in 1803; thirty-four years and three dry goods locations later, he'd become a millionaire. He used his wealth to construct his "Marble Palace": Tuckahoe marble in a sea of wood and brick, four stories where other stores were maybe one, stately Italianate when even the rich lived in chaste Federal- or Greek-Revival homes. The September 18, 1858 Supplement to the Hartford Courant described the store after one of its many extensions:

The marble palace of A.T. Stewart & Co. has lately been enlarged, and it is now probably the most spacious and the handsomest store of the kind in the world. With its dimensions thus extended, it is 175 feet deep and 165 feet wide. 350 men are employed in it; 100 sewing machines are kept constantly busy, and 150 women earn their daily bread by taking work from the establishment. Carpets from Persia, England and France, shawls from Cashmere and from China, silks from all the celebrated manufactories of Europe, curtain draperies and ormolu furniture from Paris, and exquisite laces from Brussels and Mechlin are here brought together as if by a fairy wand. But what is of still more interest, at least to the reflecting visitor, is the multitudinous assemblage of humanity,--men, woman, and children,--numbering between five and six thousand, who daily throng the immense bazaar, and weary the attentive salesmen with their various errands of business or of fashionable extravagance and pleasure. What a story for the moralist opens here!

Even after the multiple additions, the business outgrew its home yet again, so Stewart leapfrogged up Broadway to 9th Street and built an even larger palace in cast-iron, as was the fashion. (It later became part of Wanamaker's, then burned down in 1950.) Eventually, according to Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, he was worth what would be $70 billion in today's money, making him the seventh-richest American of all time.



With his death in 1876, the story take a hard-right turn to qrotesquerie. Some motherfuckers stole his corpse for ransom (this account uses the phrase "a trail of viscous human desquamation"); while a body was eventually returned, whether it was actually Stewart's is not definitively known. Meanwhile his lawyer, Henry Hilton, wound up with the most of the fortune and whittled it away to nothing in less than twenty years' time. Thanks to him there is no A.T. Stewart & Co. store today, even as his former competitors, Bloomingdale's and Macy's, dot the world with stores larger than the Marble Palace as a matter of course. This is bad enough, but not Hilton's only infamy: he is perhaps best remembered for turning away Joseph Seligman from his Grand Union Hotel on account of his Jewishness, a scandal that inspired other acts of exclusion by the American upper classes.



Hilton sloughed off 280 Broadway at some point early in his reign of error, and it lingered on as an office building. (Curiously, it was home to F.W. Woolworth and Company's headquarters from 1888 to the completion of the Woolworth Building just down the street.) Its current name came about when The Sun newspaper bought it in 1917. After the Sun went bust, the city took it over in 1966, hoping to demolish it for some development scheme that blessedly never happened. Amusingly, it now houses the city's Department of Buildings, as well a Modell's, a Radio Shack, and a Duane Reade--all three of which, while considerably more prole than what he had in mind, owe something to A.T. Stewart's retail genius.