The Cornelius Vanderbilt residence, Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street.
Edwin Goodman could never have fathomed what lay ahead when he left Lockport, New York, borrowed some money from his uncles, and purchased a stake in Herman Bergdorf’s Manhattan atelier. The year was 1901, and Bergdorf, a gregarious Alsatian immigrant and gifted tailor who lacked ambition, spent much of his time at Brubacker’s wine saloon, leaving his clients to wait.
Goodman, at just twenty-five, was handsome and serious, with a drive and dedication beyond his years. He seemed, at first, to be the ideal partner for Bergdorf. The ladies’ suit had just come into fashion, and from its modest perch at Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, the newly formed Bergdorf Goodman was turning out some of the city’s finest. As orders rolled in, Goodman urged his elder partner to move the operation uptown, to a bustling stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Ladies’ Mile.
Shortly thereafter, while Goodman was honeymooning in Europe, Bergdorf did move the store—but not to the swanky address his young partner had been envisioning. Instead of opening directly on Fifth, next to prestigious dry goods emporiums and department stores such as B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, and Best & Co., Bergdorf leased a sleepy spot at 32 West Thirty-Second Street. A man whose lone indulgence was a bottle—or three—of Alsatian wine didn’t see the point of spending on Fifth Avenue frontage.
The out-of-the-way location irked Goodman from the moment he returned to New York. He bought out his partner, and Bergdorf headed off promptly thereafter to Paris to retire happily a free man.
In 1914, Goodman upgraded to a five-story building at 616 Fifth Avenue, constructed to his specifications. Though he initially sublet some of the square footage to help cover his costs, he still had far more space than the cramped quarters on Thirty-Second Street. However, once he hired Ethel Frankau, a stylish schoolteacher-turned-dressmaker, his client list quickly grew to fill up every floor.
Goodman had never been satisfied to follow trends in women’s couture. He toyed with convention, adding box pleats to hobble skirts, encouraging clients to discard the Victorian jabots around their necks and constricting corsets about their waists, cutting furs to the body so they were no longer bulky and unflattering, and, most important, introducing quality ready-to-wear in the twenties.
Frankau was every bit his equal. She emphasized the bias cut before others caught on to its importance and devised a new bateau collar—or boatneck—for the flapper silhouette. As the store’s couture buyer in Paris, she displayed a nearly flawless eye for what would sell in New York, choosing just the right looks to import and duplicate for her customers in the Bergdorf Goodman sewing rooms.
Under Goodman’s tutelage, the former schoolmarm became a legendary fashion director, consulted for her trusted advice and opinion by style icons no less than Jacqueline Kennedy. Together, Goodman and Frankau were unstoppable. There seemed to be no limit to Bergdorf Goodman’s success.
But then Goodman learned of a significant threat to 616 Fifth Avenue. A major development project—Rockefeller Center—was in the works that would necessitate leveling several blocks of prime Midtown real estate, including his own.
Once again, he would have to move the store.
A few blocks north, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s widow, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt, had begun a long and agonizing debate over what to do with 1 West Fifty-Seventh Street, the 130-room turreted mansion her husband had left to her in 1899. The house, built by architects George B. Post and Richard Morris Hunt and modeled on the stately chateaus of France, was the largest private residence ever to be constructed within an American city. Louis Comfort Tiffany had designed its opulent Moorish tiled smoking room, with inlaid mother-of-pearl walls. A Louis XVI music room had been imported straight from Paris. And the entrance facing Central Park featured a tower and grand porte cochere.
But sprawling as it was, Alice’s home was being engulfed by neighboring commercial towers. The 250-foot rebuilt Plaza Hotel had opened October 1, 1907, joining the nearby Savoy Plaza and New Netherland. Alice was also no longer grieving just for her husband. She lost three of her sons before the first quarter of the twentieth century was out, leaving her home at 1 West Fifty-Seventh Street feeling increasingly like a cavernous empty nest.
In 1925, just as the Savoy Plaza, Sherry-Netherland, and Pierre hotels were rising up the street, Alice sold the mansion to the Braisted Realty Corporation for $7.1 million. The following year, in one of the great travesties of Manhattan real estate, the former home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II was razed.
The Cornelius Vanderbilt residence, Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street.
Before the wrecking crews set to work, Alice arranged to let the public tour the mansion for a fifty-cent admission, with the proceeds going to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Today, very little remains. An Augustus Saint-Gaudens mantle is with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A bas-relief from the porte cochere now sits at the entrance to the Sherry-Netherland. Movie tycoon Marcus Loew salvaged a Tiffany Moorish smoking room from another Vanderbilt mansion (at 660 Fifth Avenue) and moved it to the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, but its equivalent at 1 West Fifty-Seventh Street was too ornate to disassemble and relocate. (Loew did, however, snag its fanciful chandelier for the foyer at the Loew’s State Theater in Syracuse, New York.) Thanks to Alice’s daughter, Gertrude Whitney, a pair of the mansion’s carriage gates was preserved and installed at the Conservatory Gardens in Central Park, at 105th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Nearly everything else was pulverized and carted to a landfill in New Jersey.
In the Vanderbilt location, Goodman saw a golden opportunity. Here, finally, was the site for his dream atelier. With sweeping views of Central Park, and just steps from the moneyed travelers now frequenting the surrounding luxury hotels, this would be a dressmaking business unrivaled in New York City—a true Parisian house of couture. Its entrance would adjoin the proud carriage walk encircling Grand Army Plaza and the cascading Pulitzer Fountain, bequeathed by publishing tycoon Joseph Pulitzer in 1911. And after leapfrogging up Fifth, four times in less than three decades, Goodman would now be at the leading edge of the Midtown shopping district. No other store could venture farther north without landing in the pond at Central Park.
Working with the architectural firm Buchman & Kahn, Goodman helped design an elegantly understated nine-story Beaux-Arts beauty to occupy the full block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-Seventh and Fifty-Eighth Streets. According to legend, he himself sketched out the restrained mansard-roofed edifice on a cocktail napkin in the bar at the Plaza. The building was constructed to function as a series of townhouses, carved up and let to various vendors. Bergdorf Goodman would be the anchor tenant, occupying the prime corner at Fifth and Fifty-Eighth, at an annual rent of more than six figures.
On the day Goodman signed the papers, he was visibly calm, but inside, he was a wreck. He now had a wife and two school-age children to support. He wasn’t sure he could afford payments on even a fraction of the space. For the first time in his life, he felt as if his reach might have exceeded his grasp.
Once again, Goodman gambled, and once again, it paid off. The new store opened in 1928 to an almost instant profit, and soon Goodman was able to buy outright the portion of the building he had recently feared he wouldn’t be able to lease.
Just a year after Bergdorf Goodman on the Plaza opened, Black Tuesday hit, bringing with it the horrific stock market crash of 1929. By all reasoning, Goodman should have been wiped out. Instead, his business thrived. Women still needed dresses, and Bergdorf Goodman was now just steps from Manhattan’s burgeoning Upper East Side. Rather than venture downtown, past vacant storefronts and endless breadlines, members of Manhattan’s surviving classes escaped to Bergdorf Goodman, where they could still feel safe, as if the world wasn’t collapsing around them.
Bergdorf Goodman, 1935.
Goodman did so well during the Depression that the building’s other mortgage holders came to him with generous offers, and by the time Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II, Goodman owned the entire block.
Only the finest materials had been used during the building’s construction. In lieu of limestone, Goodman insisted on importing white marble for the facade, at an additional cost of $60,000. “The architects really understood this was not just a place to shop,” Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic for The New Yorker, says. “It was on an important corner and would affect the spirit of the city. The Vanderbilt mansion was a great building, but it was replaced by another truly good building. Bergdorf Goodman is dignified. It connects to everything around it and enriches Grand Army Plaza. It was never as grandiose as some of the other department stores, like B. Altman or Hugh O’Neill on Ladies’ Mile. There’s something almost domestic about it, and I think that was very deliberate.”
Indeed, Goodman designed the Renaissance Revival interiors—with soaring ceilings and intricate plasterwork—so that his privileged clients would feel they were in an extension of their own homes. They did. So did he. He moved his family into the penthouse above the store.
The Goodman apartment was unlike any other in New York City. Occupied continuously by members of that family for sixty-five years, it was frequented by a parade of luminaries, including Benny Goodman, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Barbra Streisand. Edwin and his wife, Belle, raised their daughter, Ann, and son, Andrew, there. Then Andrew and his wife moved in with their four kids.
Entering from the street, visitors passed through a set of huge brass doors “that would close like a tomb behind you,” according to one frequent guest. Inside, a long Art Deco hall led to an elevator containing fresh floral arrangements and the ultimate luxury: a telephone line, wired upstairs, to the store and to the outside world.
A second lift reached the apartment through the main Bergdorf Goodman elevator banks. “There were a few customers who got on the wrong elevator and occasionally ended up in the family’s dressing rooms,” says Susie Butterfield, a former senior vice president. “But the Goodmans were always very charming and relaxed about it.”
Because much of the store’s inventory was sewn on-site, the building was classified as a factory and had to adhere to strict fire codes. The bones of the apartment were therefore flameproof. Windows were steel casement. Floors were terrazzo, marble, tile, or carpet over concrete. The drawing room only looked like it was paneled in rich walnut—its surfaces were actually plaster, painted trompe l’oeil to look like wood.
In the early years, in order to live there legally, Edwin and Belle were designated as janitors—though it’s doubtful either of them ever wielded a mop or broom.
“What I remember most is just the space,” Joshua Taylor, Edwin Goodman’s great-grandson, says. Most New Yorkers live in tiny, cramped apartments, but this was a rambling seventeen-room abode, with a proper dining room, a living room, enormous bedrooms—each with their own changing rooms and bathrooms—and spacious service areas, including a huge kitchen with a butler’s pantry and a dumbwaiter.
“When I was sixteen and working at the store as a stock boy for the summer, the other guys would sneak off someplace to have their sandwiches,” Taylor says. “But I would head upstairs for lunch. Of course, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going—I didn’t want to be treated differently. There was always something clandestine and fun about going up there.”
Edwin’s son, Andrew, had a striking presence, much like his father. Groomed almost from birth to take over Bergdorf Goodman, he was a spirited bon vivant. After his sophomore year at the University of Michigan, Andrew was sent by his parents to work with the designer Jean Patou in Paris. But the Bergdorf Goodman heir apparent spent most of his time in the City of Lights assisting the French police in a sting operation to break up a forgery ring, zipping around in his red Delange sports car, and wooing young French lasses with Bergdorf’s discarded couture samples. “Really, you could faint sometimes,” Susie Butterfield says. “Andrew Goodman was such a divine man and charmed everyone.”
The Andrew Goodman family penthouse above Bergdorf Goodman, photographed for House Beautiful, 1965.
It was a vivacious Cuban divorcée who finally charmed him right back, on a yacht in Havana. Andrew persuaded Nena Manach to move to New York, and despite his father’s early reservations, they married—though only after Nena signed a prenuptial agreement. A lively, carefree couple, they drew designers and other notables into their inner sanctum.
Nena and Andrew Goodman, Palm Beach, Florida, 1939.
“I have the memory of a mosquito, but I do remember going up to the Goodmans’ apartment for dinners,” designer Oscar de la Renta says. “Nena and I got along very well—she was Cuban and we spoke Spanish to one another. Andrew Goodman was a friend. I don’t really know how they managed to separate private life from public life, but I think it gave to Bergdorf Goodman an identity that no other store has. There is a feeling when you walk in that you are being welcomed into a home.”
Sometimes, the effect could be jarring, like when Andrew would venture downstairs in his smoking jacket to check up on employees who were working late, or when Nena sashayed through the store to shop.
“I was doing a trunk show at Bergdorf in the eighties,” designer Michael Kors says. “I was probably twenty-two or twenty-three, with shoulder-length blond hair—full Peter Frampton insanity. And I looked out of the corner of my eye and I saw this very glamorous woman come walking through the third floor in marabou slippers and a chiffon peignoir, with a kimono over it. She was smoking a cigarette, trailing ash, and she wanted to know if I made any caftans. And I thought, ‘How fabulous is this woman shopping dressed like this?’ It was Nena Goodman. She was still living upstairs.”
Nena stayed in the apartment until Andrew passed away in 1993. When she moved permanently to their home in Westchester, the store absorbed the penthouse. Its interiors were kept intact for a brief period, as Bergdorf Goodman fashion shows and events once again filled those grand rooms. But in the end, the apartment was dismantled. The space became the John Barrett Salon.
“I was lucky enough to see the apartment before they tore it down,” James Lopilato, a longtime Bergdorf Goodman doorman, says. “I got close to the guys doing the demolition, and when they were throwing stuff out, they let me keep some things—wall sconces, pendant lights. My mother’s address is two, so I got the metal number from the old entrance, for 2 West Fifty-Eighth Street.”
The removal of the Goodman apartment wasn’t the only significant change the building has seen since it first opened in 1928. There have been major and minor renovations at 754 Fifth Avenue at many points over the years, including weaving new wiring, central air-conditioning, and sprinklers up through the historic space. Escalators were added in 1983. More recently, senior vice president of the fashion office and store presentation, Linda Fargo, oversaw a reorganization of the main floor. “It took me about seven years of lobbying our principals of the company,” Fargo says. “But I feel it was an inventive renovation.”
“I love that Bergdorf is always changing,” designer Alber Elbaz says. “It’s a very organic place. Every time you come, it’s something else.”
One of the more remarkable additions happened in 1969. In the midst of a storewide update, Andrew Goodman was searching all over the world for just the right chandelier to crown his restored rotunda at the Fifty-Eighth Street entrance. He finally found it right under his nose.
Ludmila “Lida” Turek, a fitter who worked at Bergdorf Goodman for forty-three years, tells the story: “The chandelier was made at a small factory in Bohemia, to represent Czechoslovakia at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York City. But it never made it to America, because the Nazis were bombing any boats leaving Europe. My father, who was a glassmaker and owned several factories, bought the chandelier and stored it in our cellar for many years.
“In 1947, I got married. My husband was a Czech diplomat living in Paris, and already there was a good possibility that he would one day become ambassador to the United States because he spoke perfect English. So my parents shipped the chandelier to us in ten cases as part of my trousseau, thinking it would one day hang in the Czech embassy in Washington.
“After the communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, my husband resigned. I convinced him to come for a visit to the United States. We never left. The chandelier was finally shipped to New York.
“I began to learn the business of dressmaking, because I knew I would have to be doing something useful—not just entertaining guests at state dinners. So I started making custom designs from our home, and then I went to work for Bergdorf Goodman as a fitter. That was 1957.
“Much later, when the Goodmans were renovating the store, and Mr. Goodman was searching for the right chandelier, a friend of mine told him about ours. The architect took one look at it and said, ‘Perfect.’ And that’s how our chandelier came to hang in Bergdorf Goodman. I believe when the Goodmans sold the business, they specified that the chandelier was part of the building. It can never be removed.”
In 1972, Bergdorf Goodman was sold to Carter Hawley Hale, and in 1987, it was spun off as part of the Neiman Marcus Group. Even today, Neiman Marcus controls only the business and the name. The Goodman family still owns the building, right down to its well-traveled chandelier.
The site is, quite possibly, the last family-owned block on all of Fifth Avenue. Amazingly, it has never been landmarked—not by the city, state, or federal governments, though it was proposed to the New York Landmarks Conservancy as a historic site in 2002.
Real estate maven Barbara Corcoran estimates she could list the property tomorrow for up to $2 billion and no one would blink. “There really are only two premier spots on Fifth Avenue,” Corcoran says. “One is the Plaza Hotel and one is Bergdorf Goodman, and if anyone ever touched that Bergdorf building, I think they’d be shot on sight. Because the truth of the matter is, it now belongs to New York.” Or at least to the women of New York.
The Goodman family at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fiftieth Anniversary Ball, 1951, featured in Look. Back row, third from right: Edwin Goodman. Far right: Andrew Goodman.
At any time, Bergdorf Goodman could have expanded with franchises all over the country, or even the world, but there is still only one store, in one city. “What’s great about Bergdorf is that it hasn’t changed—twenty Bergdorf stores didn’t pop up all over the country,” Lucky editor in chief Brandon Holley says. “It didn’t follow the trend for more, more, more, which I think is very rare. Because stores seem to either shut down or proliferate like mad. And the fact that Bergdorf stayed where it was, as it was, is very special.”
“The minute you try to replicate something, it’s less authentic,” Lauren Bush Lauren, whose charitable FEED bags are carried at Bergdorf, says. “The fact that this remains just what it is—it’s quite beautiful. Even though styles change and trends change and this designer is hot one minute and out the next, it’s nice to shop somewhere that has a feeling of permanence.”
“We are on the border of a new tomorrow,” Karl Lagerfeld says. “Fashion is coming from the Internet more and more now. But a place like Bergdorf still has a reason to exist. There is nothing more appealing than to go to a beautiful shop, touch the things, see the things, try the things on, get it all in a beautiful shopping bag. It is like a cultural activity, something the Internet is not.”
Princesses shop here. So do Hollywood’s royals. But at Bergdorf Goodman, celebrity sightings rarely register a second glance (except for, perhaps, Lady Gaga, who went on a Christmas shopping spree sans pants). “As a woman, I just love shopping here,” style expert Mary Alice Stephenson says. “You walk in and instantly get goose bumps. You feel the rush of what I think is the best kind of fashion. It makes you feel good, excited, inspired, aspirational. Even if you can’t afford to wear it, you can look at it and you can be moved by it and see the art in it.”
“Bergdorf is everything to a girl,” Nicole Richie adds. “I’ve been shopping there since I was little. The main feeling that I get is that it is very welcoming. Of course it’s a big store, but it really feels like a boutique. You just want to have fun in there.”
Women feel so passionately about Bergdorf Goodman, they wouldn’t dream of letting any major moments in their lives pass without marking them in some way there. They come to find just the right look to nail a job interview or to pick up a fantastic pair of shoes or accessory to enhance their confidence on a big date. They come to plan weddings—and a lucky few have even gotten engaged right inside the store. There are even women who have considered spending all of eternity tucked somewhere under Bergdorf Goodman’s lovely mansard roof. Who can blame them? From the stunning views of Central Park to the awe-inspiring interiors to the impeccably selected luxury goods, it’s a small slice of heaven.