WANAMAKER'S
Fourth Avenue and East 9th Street
MARCH 6, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 74

In 1862, department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart opened this huge cast-iron emporium, which filled an entire block from Broadway to Fourth Avenue and from East 9th to 10th Streets. Abandoning his popular Marble Palace at Broadway and Chambers Street for what many considered an architectural monstrosity sited too far uptown, Stewart proved his critics wrong. The store was painted white inside and out with a dramatic central rotunda topped by a skylit dome, and became the anchor for "Ladies Mile." Twenty years after Stewart's death, the Philadelphia-based John Wanamaker Company bought the store, and in 1902 built an equally large annex across 9th Street. A second-story bridge connecting the twoŃseen at the left of Abbott's photograph--was called "The Bridge of Progress."

In 1954, Wanamaker's sold the store, at a time when Herald Square had eclipsed "Ladies Mile" as New York's shopping mecca. Just prior to its demolition in 1956, the building caught fire and burned out of control for a full day before firemen could contain the blaze. The cast-iron construction withstood the fire, only to fall to the wrecker's ball. Today, a 21-story apartment block, built in 1960 and named Stewart House, occupies the site; the 1902 Wanamaker annex is an office building.

Abbott appreciated nineteenth-century commercial buildings as proto-modern structures: their modular construction, maximized glazing, and minimal ornament foreshadowed the achievements of the modern skyscraper. Abbott's composition, however, is relatively conventional, emphasizing the bulk of the building by showing its massive corner. She may have wished to draw attention to the odd painting of the facade, with the white abruptly ending at the East 9th Street property line.

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