Primary Resources: Retail

11. 14th Street Store

• Address: 510 Sixth Avenue
• Architect: Cady, Berg & See
• Date: 1903

The building located at the southeast corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue was only known as the 14th Street Store for eleven years- from the time it was built in 1903 to when it went out of business in 1914. The building was owned by Henry Siegel, a notorious developer of department stores at the turn of the last century, and designed by the architects Cady, Berg & See. The 14th Street Store is significant because it is one of last surviving commercial buildings by these architects, because it represents the southern-most point of Ladies Mile, and because it is a manifestation of the architectural interaction between Chicago and New York during the turn of the last century. However, the most important argument for its significance is the presence it maintains on the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, continuing to represent a transitional piece of architecture moving from the arcaded commercial style of the late nineteenth century towards a more modern expression.

12. (Former) Macy's Site

• Address: 56 West 14th Street
• Architect: Schickel & Ditmars
• Date: 1898

The building just east of the 14th Street Store is the final remnant of the original site of R. H. Macy’s & Co. on 14th Street. In 1858 the first Macy’s Dry Goods Store was located on the southeast corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. This was one of the first stores to enter 14th Street and therefore helped to create the retail hub for which 14th Street is known even today. Macy’s did not become a successful department store until 1877 and went through many expansions on the site on 14th Street. Before Macy’s relocated to 34th Street and Herald Square in 1902, the building on 14th Street occupied the equivalent of 11 buildings. The building located at 56 West 14th Street was built in 1898 and was of the final addition to the Macy’s site. It was commissioned by the owners of R. H. Macy’s & Co., Isador and Nathan Straus, who hired the German architects Schickel & Ditmars to design this new addition. Schickel & Ditmars were well-known architects in New York City by the end of the nineteenth century mostly for their buildings commissioned by German-American clients, such as the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital located on Second Avenue.

The 1898 addition to the Macy’s site on 14th Street was clad in limestone, a stark contrast to the department store which was a cast iron building. Due to this fact it is unclear as to whether or not the building was actually meant to serve retail purposes or if it was meant for something else such as offices or a different type of building venture. Regardless of its original intent, the building is extremely significant to New York City 14th Street.

13. (Former) Schirmer's Store

• Address: 35 Union Square West
• Architect: D. & J. Jardine
• Date: 1880

Gustav Schirmer’s store (D & J Jardine, 1880) is one of the few almost intact vestiges of the high end retail building, built particularly for music goods, that once occupied Union Square and served the musical and theatre community that developed there. Schirmer’s was a prominent business, noted for being the first to publish the works of Wagner in America. Founded in 1861, it was in continuous operation until 1968 when it was considered the largest musical publisher in the world, and absorbed into Cromwell Collier. Schirmer was an early resident of the Dakota Apartments, and a popular story relates that Tchaikovsky was a visitor in his home while on an American concert tour. Not understanding Schirmer’s English, the composer was said to have written in his diary that the publisher owned the entire building, an explanation for why composers were so poor. The Schirmer store contributes to the architectural eclecticism of its unique block by employing a stripped, almost abstracted classicism in its facade. The building reflects the transitional nature of architecture in the 1880s as it moved away from facades of cast iron toward brick, here experimenting with the structural expressivity of the Neo Gréc and the ornament of Queen Anne (sunflowers bookend the spandrels, and a triangular parapet once crowned the cornice). The Jardines’ design is a singular survivor that conveys a largely lost piece of Union Square musical history.

Theme: Cast Iron

As a significant part of 14th Street, from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and Union Square, this area embraces a group of buildings with full or partial cast iron facades, vivid examples of late cast iron techniques. From these late cast iron fronts, we can trace the development of commercial New York, when 14th Street became an important commercial thoroughfare, where a great number of department stores and retail businesses developed and thrived, around the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s. They are themselves physical evidences of this “shopping paradise period”, portraying the aesthetic revolution towards an honesty of material and ornamentation that communicated new found luxury and prosperity.

14. Baumann Brothers' Store

• Address: 22 East 14th Street
• Architect: D. & J. Jardine
• Date: 1880

The Baumann Brothers’ Store is significant both as an artifact of 14th Street’s retail past and as a marker in the evolution of the oeuvre of architects D. & J. Jardine. The building represents the Jardines’ later work in cast iron— a period in which they had broken with mimicry of Italianate forms in iron and embraced the possibilities of the material. In 1880, 14th Street resident and New York business icon James McCreery commissioned the building to be built through the block on a large merged parcel of land in what was then a bustling retail district. The mostly intact structure records the vertically integrated furniture business that first occupied it—having moved there from Hudson Street—and that operated in New York under the Baumann name until the 1950s.

Invoking elements of the Aesthetic movement and the Queen Anne style, the building freely integrates rich classical motifs with contemporary design elements, including Corinthian columns with sunflowers embedded in their capitals, cabled and reverse-cabled pilasters, garlanded spandrels, minutely detailed window enframements featuring wave motifs, and decorative panels evoking themes from the decorative arts. The exuberant façade distills a unique moment in New York architecture—one in which the moribund technology of cast iron was used with unconventional design inspiration to create a building bound to the past but also breaking with it. The masonry 13th Street façade, spare and conventional by comparison, describes the building’s simultaneous industrial use and relationship to the 12th treet livery that was essential to the function of the building. The evolving Jardine aesthetic of cast iron is still visible in New York’s built fabric, starting with the remaining Thomas Twin (1869), progressing to B. Altman’s 6th Avenue Store (1877), and ending with the Baumann Brothers’ Store (1880).

15. (Former) George C. Flint & Co./Later Cowperthwait & Co.

• Address: 104 West 14th St.
• Architect: William Field & Son
• Date: 1875

This five-story Renaissance Revival commercial building, located between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, contains a late-cast iron front designed by architects William Field & Son in 1875 for the furniture emporium of George C. Flint & Co. It later became Cowperthwait & Co. in 1894. Its façade is divided into seven bays flanked by columns resting on high bases and rendered in a heavy, unadorned Tuscan order. Its large metal-framed windows feature arched fenestration ornamented with curvilinear forms at the spandrels. Inside, each floor followed a free plan layout, which made it easy to locate several departments within each floor. Departments could be easily moved, changed or rearranged, always aiming towards the needs of the shopping public. The use of cast iron columns that were slim and not visually intrusive, allowed good orientation and practical circulation amidst the premises.

The building was erected at a time when 14th Street was part of “Furniture Row”, also known as “Homemaker’s Heaven”, a part of lower Sixth Avenue where furniture stores dominated and flourished, in an area stretching from 13th to 18th Streets, overflowing into 14th Street. During the 1890s and the early-1900s, many soon-to-be or married couples furnished their home with purchases from this store, Sheppard Knapp, Baumann Brothers’ and Macy’s. An important remnant of 14th Street’s history, this building is a vivid example of the spirit of the times.

16. (Former) J.G. Johnson Department Store

• Address: 8 East 14th St.
• Architect: Alfred Hoe
• Date: 1879

This nineteenth-century building is located on 14th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Union Square. It is an early, almost intact, four-story, thirty three-foot wide, seventyfoot high and one hundred-foot long warehouse/office building. Its front elevation bears a cast iron façade, designed and built by architect Alfred Hoe in 1879 following the Renaissance Revival Style, very popular in the 1870s and 1880s. The use of cast iron made it possible to have large openings, hence its use in most commercial and manufacturing buildings such as this one. While the first floor has been significantly modified with a contemporary window display for retail purposes, the remaining three stories portray the original cast iron design without any visible alterations. The symmetrical iron front features arched fenestration over large metalframed windows, Corinthian columns in between and highly ornamented cornices that line each of the floor levels. The façade also portrays the use of elements with a classical-inspired ornamentation, paired down and repetitive, placed along the building’s sides, making it look proportionate, balanced and grand. Each of the floors has a free plan layout, held by slim cast iron columns in the Doric order. Erected at a time when 14th Street was a busy commercial thoroughfare, it is a significant remnant of the time.

17. (Former) Ludwig Brothers Dry Goods Store/Later Rothenberg & Co. Department Store

• Address: 34-42 West 14th Street
• Architect: William Wheeler Smith
• Date: 1878

This five-story Renaissance Revival commercial department store building, located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, contains a late-cast iron front designed by prominent architect William Wheeler Smith in 1878 for the dry goods company of Ludwig Brothers. Later that year, Wheeler Smith would design the Lincoln Building, on the corner of 14th Street and Union Square West, trading cast iron for a masonry structure. The building was later altered in 1899 to include three twenty fivefoot wide regular bays on its left side when it became the Rothenberg & Co. Department Store.

Its dignified original design has a slightly projecting central pavilion supported on pilasters with modified Corinthian capitals and emphasized by a bracketed roof cornice above the fifth floor that projects above the central section of the façade. Framed by piers, its facade is divided into six bays by slender columns resting on high bases and topped by imposts decorated with stylized paterae. These support lintels decorated with incised ornament and simple projecting cornices.

Erected as a grand emporium catering to a middle and upper-middle class clientele, the Ludwig Brothers Dry Goods Store was one of several grand department stores constructed along 14th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, and is representative of a time when that area was a fashionable shopping district.

18. 26-30 Union Square East

• Architect: Henry Fernbach, unknown
• Date: 1860s-1890s

The buildings at 24-30 Union Square East were originally part of a block of bow-fronted, Greek Revival townhouses, built in 1832 by prominent developer Samuel Ruggles, as part of the rapidly developing residential area around Union Square. After the Civil War, the area around Union Square hade changed from high-class residences to functional commercial buildings. The 1860’s conversion of Number 30 Union Square East is an example of the fashionable use of cast iron to mimic masonry forms on commercial buildings. In 1872, the two middle townhouses, Numbers 26-28, were demolished and new, five-story, cast iron commercial buildings were constructed.

The architect of these two buildings was Henry Fernbach, a Prussian immigrant who was well-known for the use of cast iron on commercial buildings in SoHo and Tribeca. Fernbach’s use of the material is representative of the evolution of cast iron: it is light, delicate, highly ornate and has much structural strength, as is evident by the larger window openings on later cast iron buildings. Around 1890, the masonry townhouse at number 24 was also converted into a brick commercial front. Though the buildings around it were evolving with the latest fashion, number 24 retained the fourstory townhouse form and decorative brickwork well into the twentieth century.

The buildings continued their use through the political uprisings at the turn of the century and as an expansion of Klein’s discount department store from the 1930s to the 1970s. Klein added two stories to the Fernbach structures and also built a two-story storefront across the base of the buildings.

Today, these buildings stand as an indicator of rapid change and development of Union Square. This layering effect of its architecture, with physical clues to its past, creates a meaningful palimpsest of significance. These building forms and materials are the vestiges of change at Union Square over the past two-hundred years.

19. 242 West 14th Street

• Architect: Unknown/Franklin Bayliss
• Date: 1853/1897

This nineteenth-century building is located on the south side of 14th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The original building, a brick rowhouse built in 1853, was altered in 1897 to accommodate its new usage, no longer a single family dwelling but a store on the ground floor and offices on the stories above. For this purpose, architect Franklin Bayliss added the imposing cast iron storefront to its basement, first and second floors, as well as new show windows and a stoop, appealing to the needs of the business at the time. Its dignified façade is divided into two bays flanked by columns resting on high bases and rendered with heavy, slightly adorned capitals. These support lintels decorated with incised ornament and simple projecting cornices. Large metal-framed windows divide the bay on the right in a tripartite manner with clear, slender lines. This cast iron storefront exemplifies 14th Street’s character at the time, no longer the site of residences but rather a bustling, commercial hub.