THE CAMPUS : History and Architecture
Courtesy Landmarks Preservation Commission.
March 12, 1985; Designation List 176
LP-12714
B. ALTMAN & COMPANY DEPARTMENT STORE BUILDING,
355-371 Fifth Avenue, Borough of Manhattan. Built 1905–1913;
architects Trowbridge & Livingston.
Landmark Site: Borough of Manhattan,
Tax Map Block 864, Lot 1.
On February 9, 1982, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of the B. Altman & Company Department Store Building and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 5). The hearing was continued to April 13, 1982 (Item No. 2). Both hearings had been duly advertised in accordance with the provisions of law. Five witnesses spoke in favor of designation. There were no speakers in opposition to designation. Three representatives of B. Altman stated that while their preference was for no designation, they were not opposed to designation. A statement in favor of designation was received from Manhattan Community Board No. 5.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS
The dignified B. Altman F, Company Building, located at the northeast corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, is a distinguished design by Trowbridge & Livingston and one of the flagship department stores of Fifth Avenue. When the new B. Altman store opened in 1906, Fifth Avenue was essentially a small-scale street filled with shops catering to the upper crust of New York society. The opening of B. Altman catalyzed Fifth Avenue's transformation into a grand boulevard lined with many large department stores serving a broad clientele. An Italian Renaissance palazzo type design, B. Altman is elegant but reserved, stately rather than flamboyant; it is a reminder that the building was designed to blend into a neighborhood it then helped to transform.
Fifth Avenue and the Department Store
The history of B. Altman & Company, and its move to Fifth Avenue, is part of the larger history of the development of the department store as an American institution, and of the movement of commercial districts within Manhattan. The department store as a special type of store and building had its origins in the A.T. Stewart store on Broadway near City Hall built in 1846. Stewart's store, a general dry goods emporium, was a new concept, replacing the earlier specialty shops which had sold only one item, such as silks or silver. Stewart's building, though originally occupying only the corner of Broadway and Reade Street, was gradually expanded until it stretched the entire block on Broadway between Reade and Chambers Streets, and back several hundred feet east towards Centre Street. Stewart's architects, Trench & Snook, adapted elements of Italian palazzo design, added enormous display windows set between cast-iron columns, and created the first "commercial palace" in America.1
The rapid growth of the city during the 1840s and 1850s, and continuing after the Civil War, brought much new wealth to New Yorkers. A new elite, unsure of its social standing, struggled to consolidate its hegemony by making conspicuous displays of wealth. The mass production of the sewing machine by companies such as Singer enabled seamstresses to design and sew many elegant outfits which had previously been impossible.2 Hence New York society's demand for fine dry goods, and shopping as the daily pastime for ladies of social consequence.
The palazzo department store buildings increased in number and soon created whole districts. As the commercial center of Manhattan gradually moved uptown, so did the department store clusters.3 In the 1860s, the main grouping was to be found on Broadway between Canal and 14th Streets. By the 1880s, a new district had formed between 14th and 23rd Streets, along Broadway ("Ladies Mile") and along Sixth Avenue ("Fashion Row"). Almost all these department store buildings looked to the palazzo type for design, and incorporated enormous central light courts, large display-windows, and such up-to-the-minute innovations as elevators and escalators. One of the major department stores on "Fashion Row" was B. Altman & Company, at the corner of 18th Street.
B. Altman & Company (To see original engravings of store's interior click here)
Benjamin Altman was born in New York City in 1840. He joined his father in a storefront dry goods business on Third Avenue near 10th Street at the end of the Civil War.4 By 1874, the son had moved B. Altman to Sixth Avenue at 18th Street, where the store would remain for thirty years.5
B. Altman became a world leader in fine dry goods such as silks, satins, and velvets. In 1904, the Evening Sun called B. Altman "one of the greatest department stores in the world... a Bon March of the New World."6 By the turn of the century the Sixth Avenue store had grown into a block-long building with a light, refined cast-iron facade designed by D. & J. Jardine; it had been dubbed "The Palace of Trade."7 Benjamin Altman was a savvy, but unusually humane, businessman. During his career he was the first major employer to install rest-rooms and a subsidized cafeteria for his employees; 8 the first to inaugurate a shorter business day and Saturday closings in the summer; and the first actively to encourage schooling for younger employees by providing funding for their education.9 Though protective of his private life and apparently rather humor-less,10 Altman was a passionate art collector. Upon his death in 1913 he left the Metropolitan Museum of Art a 1,000-item collection of Chinese porcelains, Persian rugs, Renaissance tapestries, ivories, jades, and 75 paintings by old masters.11 It was, wrote the New York Times, "by far the most valuable gift the Metropolitan has ever seen."12
When Altman died, articles ran almost daily, full of loving tributes to his generosity and philanthropic nature. One read:
Mr. Altman was a man of two great enthusiasms, his business and his art collection...to these he devoted himself with passionate affection. He had no family...he went nowhere. It was always thought in building up his great art collection that he should contribute to the enjoyment and education of the City of New York.13
The Move to Fifth Avenue
Testimony to Benjamin Altman's business acumen was his decision to move to the Fifth Avenue and 34th Street site. Leaving the Sixth Avenue site must have seemed, to contemporaries, quite risky, for many of Altman's largest com-petitors had settled on the "Fashion Row" stretch of Sixth Avenue. Stern Bro-ther's Store, Ehrich Brother's Emporium, Adams Dry Goods, and Siegel-Cooper, all operated thriving businesses, no doubt in part because of the lively, com-petitive atmosphere created by their combined presence on the street.14
Movement of department stores northward along Manhattan Island, was, however, an established trend. New homes for old stores were being built every few decades, while their older buildings were converted to wholesale or other uses. (A recent trend has been the conversion of some surviving department store buildings to residential use.)
Despite its proximity to a large group of major department stores, Altman's Sixth Avenue location had drawbacks. The elevated subway cast a dark shadow over Sixth Avenue, and covered it with grit, as well as subjecting pedestrian shoppers to an "endless, ear-splitting clatter."15 More important, developments uptown were making a 34th Street and Fifth Avenue location ideal. By 1902, plans to construct a new building on 34 Street and Seventh Avenue for Pennsylvania Station were already underway,16 and in 1903 plans for the reconstruction of Grand Central Terminal on Park Avenue and 42nd Street were unveiled.17 These two events alone turned Fifth Avenue from 34th to 42nd Streets into prime commercial property. Suddenly that stretch of the street would be within easy walking distance of both these stations, accessible both to daily commuters and to ladies from further out of town on day-long shopping excursions into the city. Local residents would prefer a Fifth Avenue site as well, since it was on an open, light-filled avenue and within walking distance of both east and west side elevated subways.18
Benjamin Altman bought his first lot on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in 1896, but did not make a concerted effort to acquire the block-sized site he desired until after the announcements of the new Grand Central and Pennsylvania Stations.19 At the time Altman began assembling the site, the pace of change on Fifth Avenue was quickening considerably. Before the Civil War the area had been farmland; historian Benson J. Lossing reported in 1845 that he had spent the morning picking blackberries on the site where B. Altman would eventually stand.20 After the Civil War, New York's wealthy moved slowly uptown, leaving their Madison Square residences to flee the commercial enterprises which, in turn, invariably followed. From 1870 to 1900, the area of Fifth Avenue around 34th Street had gradually changed from residential to "a business thoroughfare occupied by tailors, milliners, picture dealers, decorators, and the like, whose customers consisted of a few comparatively wealthy people, and also required a small amount of space."21 Despite the new commercial uses, however, most stores occupied "reconstructed residences," so that architecturally Fifth Avenue retained its residential appearance.22
The departure in 1893 of the influential Mrs. William B. Astor to a new residence on 65th Street at Fifth Avenue helped to revive the flight of the wealthy to unsullied pastures uptown.23 The huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, and built in part on the site of Mrs. Astor's old home on the west side of 34th Street at Fifth Avenue, created a more active, less residential pace. The famous hotel quickly became the meeting place of New York's socialites and politicians, well as the location of the generation's most lavish - and infamous - parties.24 On the northwest corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue stood the elaborate French Second Empire-style Alexander T. Stewart house, designed by John Kellum in the late 1860s; but it was no longer a private residence, having been leased in 1890 to the Manhattan Club.25 Even a few larger commercial establishments had relocated, but they were still stores patronized only by the very rich. Tiffany's had moved from its earlier location on the west side of Union Square at 15th Street to an elaborate building at 401 Fifth Avenue (at 37th Street) designed by Stanford White of the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White, built 1903-05. White also designed a new home for the Gorham Company, purveyors of the country's finest silver, built at 390 Fifth Avenue (at 35th Street) in 1906. B. Altman's plans to move in 1905 were part of a new phase of commercialization of Fifth Avenue. Nonetheless, Altman's announcement signaled that the Avenue would undergo a major change. "The peculiar importance of the Altman project," wrote one astute journalist of the day,
consists in the fact that it is the first big store of a general character which has moved into middle Fifth Avenue.... With the Altman purchase a new period has begun. A store such as this finds its customers among the whole mass of well-to-do people. The range and number of its frequenters.. . include almost everybody for whom cheap prices are not the first desideratum.26
B. Altman was not built all at once. The first section fronted on Fifth Avenue, East 34th and East 35th Streets, but had to be constructed around property at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street which had not yet been acquired. This corner section was not completed until 1911, but was conceived as part of the original design. Comprising the two southernmost bays of the Fifth Avenue facade, and the four westernmost bays of the 34th Street facade, it is now indistinguishable from the original 1905-06 portions.27 By contrast, the final extension of the building to Madison Avenue, while also designed by Trowbridge & Livingston and built in 1913, is four stories taller and stylistically somewhat different from the earlier portions. Its lower stories continue many of the design motifs of the 1905 structure, but their treatment is more elaborate.
There was never any organized effort to block the building of B. Altman, but many of the property owners held on to their land as long as they could; probably because they recognized that the longer they waited, the higher the price they could get for their land, and also in protest of the changes the new building would inevitably bring to the neighborhood.28 When Altman finally acquired the first part of the site, speculation on the new shape of Fifth Avenue raged. Real Estate Record and Guide declared it "inevitable" that B. Altman's competitors would soon move too, and that Fifth Avenue would soon be quite changed:
These buildings will...when they become sufficiently numerous, give the Avenue a very different atmosphere. Its architecture will be showy and so far un-businesslike; but it will be adapted to fashionable stores, patronized by wealthy clients. It will be "smart" and "swell."29
Within a month the same magazine reported "furious real estate speculation"30 in the blocks surrounding B. Altman; in the next several years W. & J. Sloan, Best & Company, Arnold Constable & Company, and Bergdorf-Goodman, had all re-established their businesses on "middle" Fifth Avenue.
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