CHAPTER 6
This is our harvest time. Make it pay.
—FRANK W. WOOLWORTH
Just as he had set out to do, Gluck made a name for himself as a charity innovator and advocate of inspiring causes. Years had passed since his name last appeared alongside something so mundane as a customs ruling or shipping notice. But Gluck’s higher profile hurt his pocketbook. The freelance fund-raising and publicity work failed to earn him as much as he had brought in at the helm of John D. Gluck & Son, or his tastes may have just gotten more expensive. Whatever the reason, his hotel and restaurant tabs grew and those around him heard Gluck complain of being “hard up” for cash with increasing frequency.
He proved an aggressive, skilled fund-raiser for the US Boy Scout, which brought him a steady stream of income. But beyond the “honorary vice presidents” scheme, the group began to practice even more shady fund-raising ploys. Gluck took part in a campaign to solicit $6,000 from businessmen to buy turkeys for ten thousand needy scouts at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by General McAlpin. But at the dinner, just two thousand places were set, and fewer than four hundred boys showed up.
Gluck could excuse such misrepresentation partly as a way to save face against the USBS’s rival. Tensions with the Boy Scouts of America had deepened since Gluck came on board. BSA chief scout executive James E. West, a savvy administrator, solidified his control over his organization, centralizing and standardizing every aspect of the BSA: handbooks for scouts and scoutmasters, creation of merit badges, disciplinary rules, ranks, and rewards. But he viewed the USBS as a major distraction. Unlike other scouting groups, they refused to be absorbed into the BSA. Worse, they continued to create confusion among parents and donors who mistook them for the BSA.
West challenged McAlpin and USBS treasurer L. W. Amerman to create a joint fact-finding committee to study both groups. McAlpin agreed, but it fizzled as soon as his appointee got a look at the BSA offices, with some sixty employees actively working, compared to the USBS staff of three. McAlpin and his crew scrapped any cooperation with the BSA and declared open war on the group. This behavior upset a number of USBS leaders, concerned about the group’s obsession with fundraising and its disorganization under McAlpin and Amerman. Eight directors quit in protest on February 5, 1915. It was just three days before a major fund-raising event the group had planned for the middle of Boy Scout Week, the BSA’s major annual gathering.
This loss of organizers required Gluck to do more to help spread the word and raise money. He sent uniformed scouts into the streets to sell tickets to a show of music, military drills, and a “Plain Talk” to be narrated by well-known actor Burr McIntosh. All proceeds from the twenty thousand tickets being sold were to go to “the most valuable military movement of the age.” While West went to pains to make it clear in the press that the BSA had no connection with this gathering, the USBS promised the event would “show up the Boy Scouts of America” (McAlpin had asked McIntosh to explicitly denounce the rival group during his speech).
On February 8, the Century Opera House was packed, and McAlpin sat in his theater box enjoying the performance of the bagpiping Scotch Kilties. Then came the main event: McIntosh took to the stage to deliver his speech on “The United States and Its Menaces.” The general leaned forward, his eyes wide in anticipation as he waited to hear the actor stick it to the Boy Scouts of America. Instead, McIntosh struck a conciliatory note. “Why could there not be a spirit of friendly rivalry between the United States Boy Scout and the Boy Scouts of America?” he asked. “Why should not this group be known as the ‘boys with the guns’ and the Boy Scouts of America as the ‘boys without the guns’?” He spoke highly of the BSA’s work, every kind word jabbing into McAlpin’s side. Angered that the event did not embarrass the BSA as they hoped, the USBS leaders directed Gluck and the other solicitors to spread vile rumors about the group. They were told to point out that a major sponsor of the group was the YMCA and imply their rival barred Jewish and Catholic boys from membership (never mind that Mortimer Schiff, a Jewish philanthropist, was on the BSA’s executive board). It was a grubby business, but Gluck needed the money. With each new deception, he grew more comfortable with using trickery when the truth failed to get results.
So it came as a relief that Matthew Micolino, president of the Washington Market Merchants’ Association, reached out for his assistance on a very different project. The organization of seventy-five butchers, sausage makers, and poultrymen needed some good publicity. New Yorkers derided their market as a filthy wreck, while city officials sought to tear down their stalls and livelihoods and make them pay for it. Gluck put himself forward as the man to solve both problems. Micolino accepted.
Covering an entire city block of downtown Manhattan, the parallelogram bordered by Fulton, Vesey, Washington, and West Streets served for decades as perhaps the most important produce market in the city. It had operated in the same place since 1812, when its stands numbered a few dozen and a two-story watchtower stood at the center, guarding against English ships engaged in the War of 1812. The stalls expanded northward from the vast retail building to a row of wholesale stores, then westward as landfill extended the island itself, creating West Washington Market. By 1858, it stood as the largest market in the country.
Everyone shopped at Washington Market. The city’s working-class families, more fashionable members, and even tourists made a point of dropping by. Famous visitors included Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and King Edward VII. The shoppers and merchants formed a community of their own, with decades-old customs and aged passageways that made the market a city within a city. But by 1915, its age showed. The city, which owned the land and building, and rented the stalls to the merchants, decided to raze the dilapidated shopping district and replace it with a modern market. Gluck would sell the new landmark to the public.
In a happy coincidence for the founder of the Santa Claus Association, his new client had also served as a crucial site for the cultivation of American Christmas. For much of its early development, the most important feature of the holidays was not gifts, Santa, or decorations but an extravagant feast. This made the market, with its lines of butchers, bakers, and fruit peddlers, the heart of commercial activity from the earliest days of seasonal celebrations in New York.
“Finest corn-fed gobblers. Choicest thing in the market,” the poultry dealer in his starched white apron recited as shoppers pushed through the gas-lit aisles searching for the best bird to adorn their Christmas table. “Here you are, finest Christmas turkeys, just waitin’ to be et.” At the height of the holidays, the north side of the market housed as many as one hundred stalls selling turkeys, hung by their legs and displayed on high tiers of hooks. “Christmas pervaded everything,” a Sun reporter described after a visit to the market. “Peddlers on the corners offered Christmas lemons, oranges, raisins, and nuts; a little girl sold Christmas shoe ties at five cents the dozen; a youth, with an evident notion of the fitness of things, hawked Christmas toothpicks.” Whenever reporters sought to capture the bustle and merriment of New York City Christmas, to the downtown market they went.
In 1851, Mark Carr, a logger in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains looking for a way to make some money on the abundant fir and spruce trees covering his land, hauled thirty-six trees down the Hudson River by steamboat. He paid the Washington Market proprietor a silver dollar for the use of the strip of sidewalk at the corner of Greenwich and Vesey Streets. The city dwellers quickly bought up the firs, thrilled with not having to go chop down the trees themselves. With no small effort, Carr had invented the Christmas-tree lot right there at Washington Market. The steady supply of trees, easily purchased, led the practice to proliferate. By 1880, merchants sold hundreds of thousands of trees each season, costing fifty cents to one dollar, with Washington Market still a major hub.
But it was another event that played the most significant role in establishing modern Christmas, and the namesake of Gluck’s expanding association. It was on his way to Washington Market to retrieve a turkey on Christmas Eve, 1822, when the idea for a Christmas poem occurred to Clement Clarke Moore.
Bundled in his fur cap, boots, and heavy coat, pulled by his horses down the unpaved, snow-covered Ninth Avenue, the wealthy gentleman endeavored to purchase the ingredients for the family feast. As his servant Patrick drove the sleigh, Moore could relax and appreciate that everything on which his eyes settled belonged to him—with the notable exception of the avenue itself, which in 1815 had become public land. Inherited from his mother, Moore’s estate, called Chelsea House, stretched from the Hudson River to Eighth Avenue, bounded by Nineteenth and Twenty-Fourth Streets to the south and north.
The story goes that as he rode, Moore settled on the idea of a gift for his family, a poem that would enchant their minds as much as the night’s feast would please their bellies. Moore’s audience would include his wife Eliza, his mother Charity, and his six children ranging in ages from eight months to seven years. He may have also considered the numerous domestic servants and his five slaves who might overhear part or all of the recitation.
Conceiving a poem as a Christmas gift made sense for Moore. He had published a Hebrew lexicon, knew French and German, and would eventually rise to professor of Greek and Hebrew literature at the Protestant Episcopal Seminary. But when topics of romance and imagination seized him, Moore dashed off rhyming verses. Upon his marriage to Eliza, he compared her to Minerva, “With sparkling eye, with rosy cheek, / With tongue that loved full well to speak.” When satirizing New York’s burgeoning temperance movement, he wryly proclaimed, “Away with all your wine-fill’d casks! / To atoms shatter all your flasks!”
So, with the crisp winter wind blowing in his face as his coach traveled down Ninth Avenue, Moore began constructing couplets. He arrived at Washington Market and began touring the aisles, picking out the finest ingredients for the feast (though Patrick likely carried them) at the same time that he selected the most appealing holiday images and phrases he could think of. From Washington Irving’s A History of New-York, he plucked the notion of St. Nicholas flying over rooftops and “laying his finger aside of his nose.” He also gathered Irving’s descriptions of Dutch burghers with pipes, twinkling eyes, and physiques like “a beer-barrel on skids,” exclaiming “Dunder and Blixem!” (Dutch for “thunder and lightning”). For transportation, Moore selected a sleigh, that not only brought him to Washington Market but appeared in the picture book The Children’s Friend, published the year before—the first to depict Santa riding a reindeer-drawn sleigh (the book’s publisher, William Gilley, was a neighbor of Moore’s). He no doubt considered Pintard’s 1810 woodcut as well but, opting to make the poem pleasing rather than didactic, he set aside the birch switch so prominent in the original illustration of St. Nick. Into this stew he added his own special ingredients: the one reindeer in Children’s Friend increased to a more fanciful eight; the children’s parents made an appearance, waking up at first frightened, then approving of the “jolly old elf.” “A portly, rubicund Dutchman living in the neighborhood” provided Moore with a model for St. Nick himself, as he would decades later explain.
His groceries selected, Moore returned to his sleigh and headed back to Chelsea. Turning off Ninth Avenue and into his snow-covered orchards of bare apple and walnut trees, he continued to hone the lines. As his wife prepared the evening’s feast, Moore put the final touches on the poem, polishing them into rhythmic verses that even his youngest—eight-month-old Emily—could appreciate.
That night, as the merchants of Washington Market closed up shop, Moore gathered his family around the toasty fire of the vast mansion’s living room, and began:
’T was the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Moore’s audience of eight presumably relished the poem—enough to tell friends and other family members about it. After hearing of the piece, one unnamed relative copied the verses and passed them to her friend in Troy, New York, 160 miles north of Moore’s estate. This friend then passed them along to Orville L. Holley, editor of the Troy Sentinel newspaper, who happily published the work in its entirety the following Christmas under the title “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas.” It soon spread from there.
Santa would appear in wildly different forms over the decades after “A Visit” first appeared, but none had the staying power of that poem’s imagery—a “chubby and plump” Santa with rosy cheeks, cherry-red nose, and belly that “shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.” Moore proved expert at distilling the disparate ideas of St. Nick that had popped up throughout the preceding decade and pulling them together into an irresistible, highly memorable form. The poem exhibited what his biographer, Samuel Patterson, calls “a meticulous sense for the fitting word, a feeling for the precise rhyme, a sensitive regard for smooth rhythm.” Less charitable, perhaps, is Santa scholar Charles Jones’s assessment that “Moore’s imagination was derivative. . . . He was not depicting, but assembling.” But the details he selected, and the way he assembled them during his trip to Washington Market, set down the basic character of Santa Claus from that point forward.
Like Macy’s or the packed holiday markets at Bryant Park, Rockefeller Center, or Union Square today, Washington Market was once the commercial hub of Christmas activity in New York. But over the many decades of its operation, these alluring sights and sounds were accompanied by far more unpleasant ones. As New Yorkers settled further north on the island of Manhattan, newer, smaller shopping areas sprouted up, putting into obvious relief the “dirty and crowded Washington Market,” as the Sun called it. Reporters competed with one another to devise nastier ways to describe the conditions. One story headlined “Ugly Spots in Gotham That Might be Removed” and spotlighted the “dirty old Washington Market,” while another asserted that “[T]here are few large stables in this city which are not cleaner and do not smell less unsavory than Washington Market.” By the turn of the century, instead of Gotham’s Christmas spirit, the market symbolized all that was outdated and unattractive in the city.
This growing distaste threatened the livelihoods of the hundreds of merchants who had operated from the market for decades. Without a major turnaround, the whole thing would be razed and replaced by a more modern commercial area, leaving these sellers with no way to make a living. So the market men came upon an idea: They would raze the market themselves, rip out the “filthy disgrace,” and replace it with a state-of-the-art space worthy of modern New York. The plan got the support of the city, and Gluck was tapped to help tell this tale of transformation.
Gluck headed downtown to watch builders demolish the old space (the merchants moved to temporary stalls nearby), putting in a new, larger floor area and expanding the aisles. He saw them install marble-covered counters, discarding the disorderly arrangement of rails, iceboxes, and merchant gear. The builders installed systems for hot and cold water, drainage, and concealed electric lighting (making each stand “like a miniature theatre” as he described to one paper), and replaced the wooden floor with one of cement and terrazzo that could be hosed down, not just swept. Perhaps most transformative was the new refrigeration scheme. Instead of refilling their boxes with ice each day, the merchants could rely on new refrigerators, cooling each day what would take the equivalent of fifty tons of ice.
Gluck kept the papers apprised of each development, describing for reporters the refreshing color scheme of white and olive green, the porcelain tile and white marble, nickel and aluminum. But he ran into challenges. Although the market men hired Gluck, decisions required approval by the slow-moving city. Tensions simmered between the public and private interests, and Gluck found himself in a position he remembered well from his customs-broking days: trying to help his clients reach their goals but having to wade through a moat of bureaucracy and political agendas to get there. After making every major decision as the head of the Santa Claus Association, Gluck found the involvement of the borough president, controller, and superintendent of public markets on every matter a major encumbrance. He could not even get the city to approve an opening date. Initially slated for July 1914, they pushed back the grand unveiling over and over in the face of arguments over the plans’ specifics.
To make matters worse, a sensational crime on Thanksgiving week diverted press interest from gleaming new aisles of produce to tales of corruption and murder. Chicken dealer Barnet Baff, owner of several stores throughout the city and a West Washington Market stall, was visiting with a customer when he received a phone call at about 6 p.m. on November 24, 1914, asking that he return to his stall. An independent dealer, Baff had faced harsh criticism a few weeks earlier at a meeting of the poultry dealers’ association for exposing price fixing by other sellers, helping send members of the city’s Poultry Trust to jail. Men who Baff believed were hired by business rivals made threats on his life and assaulted his business associate. As he strolled over to his stand on the chilly evening of November 24, pushing through the crowded sidewalk toward Thirteenth Avenue, two men approached Baff, raised their guns, and fired. They hit the poultryman first in the left shoulder and then the chest, the second shot proving fatal. In full view of dozens of shoppers, the men escaped in a car as Baff bled out on the market’s filthy wooden floor.
The murder landed on the papers’ front pages, raising suspicions about the other poultry sellers and shining a spotlight on their suspect business practices. Gluck was frustrated by the distraction. It was hard enough trying to overcome the public’s image of the market as a dirty place; now he had to allay worries that the merchants were criminals or that a shopping trip might get one killed. He reached out to his press contacts to offer reassurance that shoppers had nothing to worry about and remind everyone of the new market on the horizon, but this could hardly compete with the drama of the poultryman murder. In December, authorities arrested a pair of chicken inspectors and known Hudson Duster gang members, but failed to convict them. After promising “we’ll have everything cleared up completely” just weeks after the murder, the district attorney remained empty-handed almost a year later as Gluck finally prepared for the market’s grand reopening.
Fortunately, the lack of new developments in the Baff murder kept the case out of the paper as the Merchants’ Association and city officials finally settled on an opening date of October 25, 1915, timed to ensure that the mobs of holiday shoppers spent their money at the revamped market. Gluck commissioned an elaborate souvenir program to be distributed over the six days of events and was in the midst of creating press announcements for the city’s papers. He determined to show Micolino and his association his skill not just at generating excitement about the new space but elevating the building to something magical as well. At the beginning of October, the major work completed, the sellers began the move from their temporary stalls to the permanent new ones. The slow-going process required hundreds of sellers to transfer all their scales, butcher’s blocks, and equipment. At the rate the men were going, the move would take right up until the official opening date.
So Gluck looked on in disbelieving anger when he opened the New York Times on October 4 to a surprising headline: “Washington Market Ready.”
Without consulting the sellers, Superintendent of Public Markets Sidney Goodacre announced that the new market was open for business. Perhaps eager to allay any rumors that the launch would again be delayed, Goodacre underplayed the fact that most of the sellers had yet to move into their new, tiled stalls, and confidently declared the shiny new market ready for customers. “Old Washington Market to Reopen this Week in new $116,000 Suit of Tiles and Concrete,” read the New-York Tribune the same day, giving most of the credit for the modernization to “the supervision of Controller [William] Prendergast, President [George] McAneny of the Board of Aldermen and Borough President [Marcus] Marks.”
Curious customers rushed downtown as soon as they heard. Pushing to get inside, they found it virtually empty except for a few half-prepared stalls. These disappointed shoppers collided with the merchants rushing to move their wares to the new market in order to meet the sudden rush, leaving their temporary stalls unattended. The Merchants’ Association members were furious to be caught flat-footed and feared the bad press could ruin months of preparations. They also wondered how their publicist let this misinformation get through to the papers. Gluck rushed down to Vesey Street to speak with reporters and save his job. “Does this look like opening today?” he shouted, waving at the chaos surrounding him. “We’ve planned great things for the week of October 25, when the opening is scheduled, and now this announcement mixes everything up.”
Despite his savvy with speaking to members of the press, Gluck’s temper raged when he felt his reputation impugned, particularly when meddling government officials were involved. He told the Tribune, in a tone the reporter described as a “growl,” that blame for the debacle rested on the city officials and their base desire for publicity. “Controller Prendergast and Sidney H. Goodacre wanted to see their names in print. So they took this matter out of our hands. Ridiculous to say the opening is to be this week. Look at us!” The market’s grand reopening hung in the balance.
After Gluck’s outburst at the superintendent of public markets and controller, the newspapers ran corrections clarifying the opening date. The Washington Market mob thankfully receded and returned to its more typical flow. Gluck took pains to shift attention to the excitement of the grand opening. He mustered all the publicity skills he had acquired to hype the grandeur and reached out to his old friend Paul Henkel to cater an extravagant buffet lunch in the mayor’s honor. Henkel’s grandfather had reportedly served luncheon to city officials when the market first opened in 1812, making his selection an easy sell. Despite the bankruptcy first of Keens and then of Henkel’s Chop House, by the time he was tapped for this catering opportunity, Henkel had returned to managing Keens under new, more fiscally responsible ownership.
To showcase Henkel’s banquet, Gluck delivered samples to the New York newspapers a week before the launch. One particularly impressed reporter at the Sun suggested the food must have been delivered by “some special means of transportation—perhaps a reinforced motor truck.” He allayed any readers’ doubts about the magnificence of the offerings under the heading “Just listen to this.”
. . . After diligent inquiry last night, it was learned in a general way that the et ceteras will consist wholly of plain, substantial, solid—and liquid—food.
The reporter concluded that the Merchants’ Association “has everything framed up to raise the very deuce.” Gluck no doubt beamed with pleasure at this description. To other reporters, he provided notices on the history of the market with prints of the crowded old stalls during a Christmas visit from Cornelius Vanderbilt, along with preview photographs of the immaculate aisles of the new space.
Despite the false start, distractions from the Baff murder, and hostility between merchants and government officials, opening day arrived as promised, on October 25, and proved indeed to be “the very deuce.” Spectators arrived by the thousands, receiving the hundred-page souvenir program commissioned by Gluck. Few of those leafing through the booklet could have imagined the opening to have been anything but a cooperative, friendly affair—just as Gluck intended. The brochure even opened with a “verse penned to commemorate the foresight, courage and ability of all those who have joined with the members of the Washington Market Merchants’ Association”:
High in the midst of this most happy land
A well-built white pyramid does stand;
By which spectators know the time o’ the day
From beams reflecting of the solar ray;
Its basis with ascending steps is grac’d,
Around whose cleanly purveyors plac’d,
Vend their most wholesome food, by nature good,
To cheer the spirits and enrich the blood.
Gluck left the poem’s author anonymous, perhaps since it was written not for Washington Market’s opening at all, but for the 1738 opening of London’s Covent Garden. Gluck (or whomever he tapped to write the program) had cribbed the lines from another commemorative program, titled “The Humours of Covent Garden.”
A band led a procession of city officials seated in luxury automobiles and forty firemen in antiquated fire engines from city hall to the site of the market. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel delivered the grand opening address, followed by Board of Aldermen president McAneny, who described with pleasure how “this building was a disgrace to the city four years ago” but now “offered as a promise that this in time shall be the standard of all markets of the city.” Even borough president Marks, away at an exposition in San Francisco, managed to drop in, via longdistance call.
Following the public pomp, the crowds enjoyed afternoon concerts of opera, singing, and dancing. The Bay Side Winne performed a fox-trot while Heck Henry offered up a pigeon walk, with McKenna’s Band closing out the evening. Special guests included a Mrs. Hackett who had served stews at the market since the Civil War, and Theodore Loges, who had sold cheeses there for more than half a century. At almost ninety years old, Loges told the crowd his secret to longevity: Eat lots of cheese. But the impressive new facilities proved the biggest attraction of the event. As the festivities continued for six more days, thousands of New Yorkers would shop in this transformed Washington Market. Gluck looked on with satisfied pleasure.
The gleaming tiles reflected a new Gotham, one moving into the modern era and building a more inviting public space for citizens to meet and conduct their business in. It also represented a new high for Gluck’s promotional work, strengthening his connections to some of the city’s most powerful merchants and politicians, among them a man who would give Gluck and his Santa Claus Association the opportunity to cross paths with another landmark in the commercial transformation of Christmas.
As the purchase of trees became customary, merchants sold things to put on them. General Electric commercially distributed the first electric Christmas lights in the 1890s and in 1903 the Ever-Ready Company introduced string lights it called festoons. They replaced the dangerous candles that had proliferated over the previous decades. But the sale of Christmas ornaments created its own industry and the man most essential to catalyzing their popularity may have been Frank Winfield Woolworth. In 1880, he opened “Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which differentiated itself by making an unabashed play for the budget-conscious shopper. The store sold out its stock in a few weeks, and within months Woolworth opened a larger store in Scranton. He sought out holiday products, partnering with Philadelphia import firm Meyer & Shoenaman, which made him a deal on American-made, glass-ball ornaments. “Most of them would be smashed before there was even a chance to sell them,” Woolworth said, but was eventually convinced and bought a few dozen. They sold out in less than two days.
Convinced of the money to be made on Christmas products, Woolworth sold gold German tinsel and hand-painted American ornaments. After a trip to Europe in 1890, he added handblown glass pieces created in Lauscha, Germany (the chief glass manufacturing city in the country, and now part of Russia) to his stock. They proved the most popular decorations yet. “Give your stores a holiday appearance!” he wrote in an 1892 letter to his now more than a dozen stores. “Hang up Christmas ornaments. Perhaps have a tree in the window. Make the store look different. This is our harvest time. Make it pay.”
While wealthy families were some of the earliest adopters of extravagant holiday ornamentation, these decorations succeeded because of their affordability. Garlands, faux evergreens, nativity sets, and toy trains soon joined them on the nickel-and-dime tables. “For good or ill, the F. W. Woolworth Co. played a large part in commercializing Christmas, forever altering the seasonal shopping patterns of the working class,” according to historian Karen Plunkett-Powell. Woolworth helped democratize the holiday. Gift giving began as a tradition among the elite, with gentlemen paying calls and exchanging cakes, meats, or oranges stuck with cloves as a token of good fortune in the new year. While the feasts sourced from Washington Market remained central to holiday celebration, they shared attention with toys, gifts, and goodies. “The great trouble is to know what to choose,” said a reporter for the New York Evening Post in 1860, cataloging more than two dozen gift categories and the stores that carried them. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, those at every social level took up the practice of Christmas celebration, and merchants, Woolworth prominent among them, happily met their demands.
By 1910, Woolworth had more than one thousand stores across the country and imported a huge volume of the ornaments, gifts, and decorations. Reaching this new level of prosperity, the self-made man decided to do something spectacular. He would build a monument—the tallest building in the world. Woolworth bought up the block on Broadway between Barclay Street and Park Place, a few blocks from the Washington Market, and tapped famed architect Cass Gilbert to design the structure. Gilbert drew on the European-inspired beaux arts style popular among New York architects, adding in unusual neo-Gothic elements. Beyond its height, the structure would boast a pyramid cap on top, with an observation deck, cream-colored terra-cotta, and hand-chiseled gargoyle figures, including bats, owls, and pelicans.
By the time it was completed, the project came in at $13.5 million, which the merchant paid for in cash. It would all be worth it to Woolworth on April 24, 1913, with the opening of the building and his ultimate moment of triumph. “55-Story Building Opens on a Flash,” the Times declared on April 25, 1913, describing the extravagant dinner where Gilbert was guest of honor. Celebrated clergyman S. Parkes Cadman dubbed the stunning new addition to the cityscape “the Cathedral of Commerce.”
Gluck borrowed this tone of grandeur and extravagance when helping to put together the opening of his own “well-built white pyramid” two years after the Woolworth’s unveiling. Though not one of the lucky nine hundred in attendance that night, Gluck had crossed paths, in his previous life at the helm of John D. Gluck & Son, with Hubert T. Parson, the treasurer of Woolworth’s. He had provided tariff expertise to the company that had proven extremely valuable to Parson, one of Frank Woolworth’s most valued advisors. The executive had been impressed with how Gluck’s “knowledge of the details pertaining to tariff questions, both legal and practical, covers a broad field,” and he was happy to do him a favor. The success of the Washington Market opening only enhanced Parson’s esteem of the Santa Claus Man.
As pleased as he had been with the Santa Claus Cave, Gluck had greater ambitions for his association. He wanted it affiliated with the building that New Yorkers could not stop talking about, even two years after its opening. Riding the success of the Washington Market’s transformation, he reached out to Parson and asked if he could cash in that favor. He sent clips of the association’s last two years and explained that it would be fitting for Santa to have a place in the world’s tallest building.
As it happened, despite the building’s fame, it was difficult to fill so many offices. The Woolworth had space to spare. Gluck received permission to bring his association into the Woolworth Building. For its third season, the Santa Claus Association was moving to the structure that represented all that was exceptional, enterprising, and remarkable about Gotham and its self-made men.