A look at any picture book of old Brooklyn will show you that Fulton Street from about 1850 all the way to about 1950 was the pre-eminent street of the borough, and featured such edifices as the Mechanics Municipal Hall, the Arbuckle Building (formerly Dieter’s Hotel), the Park Theater, and the Kings County Elevated Railroad (later a part of the BMT), which covered Fulton Street from the ferry landing all the way to East New York from 1887 to the early 1940s. Brooklyn Borough Hall (formerly Brooklyn City Hall until consolidation with New York City in 1898), Gage and Tollner’s Restaurant and the Dime Savings Bank at Fulton and DeKalb Avenues are reminders of the pre-1950 days. Theaters, printers, insurance companies, and innumerable businesses lined Washington, Tillary, Concord and Nassau Streets east of the twisting path of Fulton Street; all were eventually wiped out.
Our family made a monthly, or perhaps once every two months, pilgrimage to Abraham and Straus (A&S) in the Swinging Sixties when I was a kid, using the B37 bus, which ran down 3rd Avenue and then Fulton, where it stopped right in front of the store. I remember the elevators staffed with operators (are the elevators at that Macy’s still personally operated?) and the formal restaurant on the top floor, where I would have the Salisbury steak (actually meat loaf) and mashed potatoes. In any case I have not been inside that old A&S in what must be 40 years, though I’ve passed it often; my feeling is, I shouldn’t be stalking around inside a store with my camera unless I’m buying something.
The only survivor of Fulton Street’s golden age of shopping is Macy’s, which until about two decades ago (as of 2022) was still Abraham and Straus. A&S was begun in 1865 as a partnership between dry-goods salesmen Joseph Wechsler and Abraham Abraham and, after they moved to Fulton Street, by then under an elevated train, in 1885, Wechsler & Abraham was believed to be the largest dry-goods store in New York State. Between 1893 and 1920, Abraham was in partnership with the Strauss family of Macy’s fame, which bequeathed the store a new moniker. In the 1990s, A&S was folded into Macy’s under the Federated Department Stores banner. An art Deco addition, on the left in this photo, was added in the 1930s.
Through the decades A&S gradually took over a total of eight buildings along Fulton Street (which can be easily discerned when looking skyward at its multiform facades). The complex is now a Frankenstein’s monster of buildings that have been annexed over the decades. A plaque denoting the present Macy’s A&S heritage can be found by the entrances on Fulton and Livingston Streets.
A side note: the glass-paneled building above the cast iron facade, #181 Livingston Street (The Wheeler Building) became the new home of my alma mater, St. Francis College, in September 2022.
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7/22/23