A Last Formal Portrait

The photo above shows the rear, Fourth Avenue side of the Wanamaker store in Greenwich Village. Berenice Abbott took it in 1936 as part of her “Changing New York” project. She had no way of knowing that the store would be abandoned less than twenty years later and would burn down shortly after that in one of New York’s most spectacular fires of the mid-1900s.

Wanamaker’s was a Philadelphia department store that opened a branch in New York in 1896. The building in the photo was constructed in 1862 as the uptown branch of the New York-based A.T. Stewart department store and later sold to Wanamaker’s; the original Stewart store was at 280 Broadway and is now the home of the New York City Department of Buildings. Stewart’s new store covered the entire block between 9th and 10th Streets, Broadway and Fourth Avenue. If that facade looks a little too regular in its machine-like precision, there’s a reason for that, which the construction date hints at: it was cast iron. Like most cast-iron buildings, the interior floor structure was wood.

Business was good, and in 1907 Wanamaker’s opened an annex directly to the south. The bridge on the far left side of Abbott’s photo connected the original store with the annex. I’m reluctant to call the older building the “main” building because as the photo below shows (and I apologize for the jpeg artifacts blurring it), the annex was quite a bit bigger than the original building. In the picture below, we’re looking to the southeast past the bend in Broadway at 10th Street. The 1862 building is just behind Grace Church, and the annex beyond it.

Wanamaker’s closed the New York store in 1954, in favor of new branches in the suburbs. The steel-frame, fire-rated annex building was converted to office space; the older building was sold for demolition. The building burned completely in July of 1956. Given that it had already been scheduled for demolition, the fire is best remembered for a secondary effect. Controlling and extinguishing a fire in a six-story, full-block building took more than a day, with an estimated 50 million gallons of water pumped onto the site. The adjacent IRT subway under Fourth Avenue flooded to an extent that there was structural damage to the tunnel. A view after the fire shows the last remnants of the old building being demolished, with the annex building on the left:

I’m not sure there’s a deep lesson here other than there were good reasons that people embraced “fireproof” construction in the late 1800s. At the time that the Stewart store was built, New York was, like every other city in the country, a pile of wood waiting to burn. The annex building survived because it was larger and therefore had an economic reuse, but part of the calculation in saving a building like the old store would have been how to make such a large building safe to something like the standards of modern codes.