A short section of East 9th Street between Broadway and Cooper Square is named for John Wanamaker (1838-1922), a Philadelphian who co-founded a men’s clothing store in 1861 and with it, the principles of one set price and full-cost returns, revolutionary at the time. In 1875 he purchased an abandoned rail depot and turned it into a department store, heavily promoting it during the Centennial celebrations in 1876.
By 1896 Wanamaker was ready to expand into NYC and purchased a building on Broadway and West 9th that had formerly been part of the A.T. Stewart retail empire, and constructed an annex one block south. The Stewart property is gone now but the annex remains.
The former John Wanamaker Department Store Annex is one of the few NYC buildings that takes up an entire square block (Macy’s doesn’t; B. Altman, 5th Avenue and 34th Street, did). The main store was a block to the north and was demolished decades ago. It was Wanamaker who demolished five units of Colonnade Row (seen on this FNY page) to make way for a truck warehouse, which still has his name on it.
The Astor Place subway station still contains an entrance to the store — later a K-Mart (formerly Kresge’s) on the ground floor. It also has a bricked up entrance to the long-ago Clinton Hall on Astor Place.
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9/15/22