2 Moral Architecture

A building is an argument in stone.

—Peter Brown, historian1

French writer Émile Zola expressed amazement that modern department stores mimicked churches. In his 1883 ethnographic novel Au bonheur des dames (Ladies’ Paradise), he compared the architectural wonders of his semifictional Parisian department store to a cathedral, observing, “Space had been gained everywhere, light and air entered freely.” The open spaces of the stores were “as vast as a church,” and the store entrances were “as high and as deep as a church porch.”2 Zola noted the ease of movement of the shoppers “beneath the bold curves of the wide-spaced trusses,” proclaiming the department store “the cathedral of modern business” and “the cathedral of commerce.”3 He associated these new stores with the Catholic cathedrals of Paris, especially Notre Dame. His scrutiny contained admiration and critique. He wondered whether these cathedral-like stores were “producing a new religion,” and whether or not it was a dangerous one.

Zola noted that churches “were being replaced” by department stores, as the stores attracted more worshippers than the churches. Women who used to spend hours in churches now spent “thrilling disturbing hours” in department stores in pursuit of “the ceaselessly renewed cult of the body, with the divine future life of beauty.”4 Both the church and the department store catered to women and their relationships. Luxury goods and high fashion, once the obsession of the wealthy, were now accessible to the growing bourgeoisie for purchase or, at the very least, close inspection. Zola felt that department stores had mesmerized their devotees to the extent that if the stores were to close, “there would have been a rising in the street, a desperate outcry from the worshippers” as no less than their “confessional and altar” was abolished.5

To some, Zola’s assessment of department stores as churches seemed cynical, an exaggeration. Yet his keen observations described one of the major developments in Western urban architecture and consumerism. Department stores changed the landscape of the urban milieu, helping to create and structure modern consumerism and to shape middle-class, upper middle-class, and gender identities.

While Zola saw the department store as a threat to religion in the city, American department store impresario John Wanamaker saw it as a tool to extend his religious aims. With the success of his “new kind of store” at the Grand Depot, he began to dream of constructing a modern building for his Philadelphia department store. The edifice would do more than house an impressive array of merchandise and services. Wanamaker envisioned his new store building as a way to telegraph the nature and character of his business to the public and transform the urban context through architecture.

Glass and Iron

Arguably, Paris gave birth to the modern department store.6 In the West, the development of retail shop design and methods progressed slowly, with little change from the early second century to the 1830s.7 The creation of department stores symbolized the great social and economic developments of mid- to late nineteenth-century Europe and of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. New production methods, labor practices, and merchandising approaches revolutionized retail, both supporting and creating the conditions for an emerging consumer culture.8 Ready-to-wear clothing was one result of these transformations and was one of the innovations that opened up the potential of new stores.

Expanding prosperity broadened the consumption of luxury goods beyond aristocratic circles, lifting the criticism of moral ineptitude. Social classes developed, although the lines remained blurry for quite some time. Luxury consumption by the middle class became not only possible, but acceptable.9 As the middle classes grew, leisure time increased. Children moved to the foreground of family life and were viewed as a reflection of their parents’ social standing. New products emerged to meet these shifting needs.10 In turn, new merchandise “raised consumers’ standards and broadened their material wants” as stores took “careful note of consumer preferences.”11 Stores addressed these new desires by altering their retail approaches. In the 1830s and 1840s, stores in France called magasins de nouveautés (fancy or luxury goods stores) expanded the variety of materials they carried beyond dry goods and drapery.12 Some magasins de nouveautés strung together a series of shops and buildings to create multidepartments of goods.

The forerunners of magasins de nouveautés were arcades. Moving out of the medieval tradition where “one trade kept to one street,” arcades were “glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors” and narrow streets “extending through whole blocks of buildings” where an assortment of shops clustered together protected from the elements, dust, and dangers of carriage traffic on the cramped Parisian streets.13 Decorative elements, such as ornate mosaic tile floors and artful clocks, and elaborate storefronts began to multiply, attracting shoppers to experience not only the shops but the luxurious atmosphere. The glass roof invited in natural sunlight during the day, and the spaces were illuminated by dancing gaslights at night. It was an urban world enclosed.14 But these first stores were labyrinths, like the streets of old Paris.

Inside most arcades, the shops featured sumptuous luxury goods that shopkeepers found ways to enticingly display. One arcade in Paris, Le Passage des Panoramas, offered shoppers a restaurant, “reading room, music shop, Marquis, wine merchants, hosier, haberdashers, tailors, bootmakers,” and a variety of other shops and entertainments.15 This combination of goods and recreation would find its way into department stores. The arcades demonstrated how to link multiple types of spaces and goods.

Arcades invited looking. The smorgasbord of goods created a sensory shopping experience, leading an observer to compare the shops to a church: a “nave with side chapels.”16 Unhurried by the press of a crowd on narrow sidewalks, shoppers could stroll and look at the shop displays without entering a store or buying anything. Cultural observers coined the term lèche-vitrine to describe this way of looking. While the phrase is often translated as “window shopping,” its literal translation, “window licking,” captures the embodied nature and hypnotizing effect of this new form of shopping.17 It was possible to spend a day in the arcades and their shops, as they were often located near one another. Cultural critic Walter Benjamin reflected that the arcades became “dwelling places.”18 Arcades experienced their greatest popularity in France, where they were called passages; Germany, where shops clustered in passagen; and Italy, where shoppers strolled through gallerie.19 Many of the shopping customs of the arcades extended to the emerging department stores.

The roofs of the arcades featured an early application of two great advancements in nineteenth-century architecture: glass and iron. Glass had been used with stone and lead in churches and palaces. Greenhouses had employed wood frames covered in glass. With the production of stronger iron and larger sheets of clear glass, they became key ingredients in a proliferation of new architectural forms. Soon, glass roofs sheltered food markets, such as Covent Gardens in England and Les Halles in Paris, and train depots, such as the one in Liverpool and the Strasbourg Platform’s first building (now Gare de l’Est) in Paris. However, not until London’s Great Exhibition did architecture, the display and organization of goods, and the emerging consumer culture come together in a spectacular way, making the department store possible.

London’s 1851 Great Exhibition expanded the idea of the arcades by producing a grander rendition with its magnificent Crystal Palace. The palace’s designer, Joseph Paxton, was a celebrated horticulturist who had long experimented with building glass conservatories. Paxton employed sheets of plate glass to create an unprecedented structure of soaring glass-clad iron that amazed visitors. The building design enabled natural light to pour over the exhibition’s diverse exhibits and proved flexible enough for Paxton to save several mature elm trees that stood in the path of the building by enclosing them inside the structure.

An enormous structure, the palace enclosed twenty-three acres of London’s Hyde Park, giving ample room for more than eight miles of display tables. The palace’s design embodied the wonders of the Industrial Revolution. Many of its displays celebrated the superiority of British culture as the pinnacle of a great civilization and empire.20 For architects, the palace demonstrated new practical possibilities for erecting structures with large open spaces filled with light, and it became the standard for exhibition building design. Shopkeepers took note.

London’s palace inspired New York City’s first attempt at a world’s fair in 1853. Copying the design of a glass-clad iron structure, New York’s much smaller Crystal Palace also featured an adjacent observatory, where Elisha Otis demonstrated his new safety elevator to the public—an invention that would later make the multistory department store possible. Like London’s fair, the New York exhibition promoted itself as a place where innovation was on display and ideological expression at the forefront. Although Franklin Pierce, the sitting U.S. president, opened the fair and over a million visitors passed through its displays, it was not as successful as subsequent American fairs, in part because of its remote location away from the center of the city.21

An ongoing series of fairs in Europe, especially in England and France, further inspired shopkeepers. Retailers imitated the new architectural designs and technology from the exhibitions to create dramatic spaces and exhibit their wares to a greater advantage.22 In France, the magasins de nouveautés copied elements of the exhibitions and the arcades, transforming dark labyrinth-like spaces into glittering houses of sumptuous goods that cultural critics would later call “intoxicating.” The magasins became “a vertical arcade, a stack of streets lined” with a wide selection of goods.23

The great exhibitions helped transform retail practices as well. Prevailing practices actively discouraged browsing in stores. Customers entered knowing what they were looking for and were expected to make a purchase. The exhibitions introduced a different approach to display and recognized that casual looking stirred interest. Shopkeepers began to alter traditional retail practices in response: now they invited browsing.

French merchants Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut became leaders of this new approach when they creatively blended the display techniques of the magasins de nouveautés, the exhibitions, and new architectural forms. When they laid the cornerstone for Le Bon Marché (a French play on words meaning both “the good deal” and “the fair market”) in 1869, they set out to construct a building explicitly designed to be a department store instead of adapting existing space.24 Other magasins de nouveautés shopkeepers quickly followed suit. The Boucicauts’ new store turned into a twenty-year building project as it repeatedly outgrew its space.25 These new stores were called les grands magasins (literally, the large stores). Le Bon Marché also had benefited from the remaking of Paris.

Changing conditions in transportation, manufacturing, and consumption were essential ingredients in the development of department stores. Elected in 1848 as president of the French Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of remaking Paris as a modern city. Cramped serpentine streets made it difficult to traverse the city and created unhealthy living conditions for the poor. The Seine River served as the city’s sewer. Crime flourished in dark alleys and narrow streets. By 1852, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself emperor and moved forward with his vision to modernize the capital. He hired civil servant Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a man who had impressed Napoleon with his ability to lead large projects but had no urban planning or engineering experience. With the power of the emperor and the state behind him, Haussmann razed parts of “old Paris” and reassembled it. Aesthetics and politics led the redesign, guiding architectural design and layout. New wider boulevards made it possible for people to move freely through the city and protected against civil unrest by making the city more easily accessible to police. A remade Paris with wide boulevards, parks, and beautiful buildings drew visitors and spurred population growth—potential customers for les grands magasins. A similar phenomenon unfolded in other European cities and in the United States as large cities rapidly developed.

Changes that Haussmann made provided the Boucicauts an opportunity to construct a new, larger retail building. The first building constructed specifically for Le Bon Marché sported large windows and a magnificent staircase but did not employ an iron framework. They embraced the use of iron in the 1873 and 1876 store additions. For a second building expansion, they worked with the engineer Gustave Eiffel—before he had designed the famous Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Paris Exposition—to build an impressive iron-and-glass dome reminiscent of another cultural institution, an opera house.26

Ironwork skeletons, and then steel frames, enabled department store buildings to grow taller and stronger with thinner supports. The metal frames permitted the installation of massive and elaborate glass-covered roof sections. Glass roofs admitted sunlight into the center of the store and invited store designers to express a decorative flair with stunning stained-glass patterns. Iron and steel structures also permitted the installation of larger windows in buildings. The plate-glass Paxton employed in the Crystal Palace and in subsequent exhibition buildings became mainstream in retail establishments. Shopkeepers started skirting their buildings with enormous windows to bring more natural light into dark interiors and to tantalize customers with carefully orchestrated displays of the merchandise inside.27

Exhibition structures were not the exclusive source of architectural inspiration for department store buildings. European stores looked to historic palaces and cathedrals and the newer monumental designs of opera houses and train stations as examples of magisterial and permanent public buildings. The magnificent structures created for Parisian stores, such as Le Bon Marché, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre (usually called Le Louvre), Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, Samaritaine, and Printemps, sparked creativity in the design of other massive stores. Architecture began to be a defining principle of department stores.28

Department stores caught on quickly and by the turn of the twentieth century had spread across Europe. Germany had one hundred department stores by 1907 and two hundred by World War I. While England’s department store growth was slower, it launched three particularly famous stores: Harrods, Whiteleys, and Selfridge’s—although Selfridge’s was started by an American and former associate of Marshall Field, Harry Selfridge.29 The department store soon became a symbol of a new bourgeois culture in Europe and the developing middle class in the United States.30

American Department Stores

American department stores developed later than their Parisian counterparts. It was not until the 1870s when the dynamics of population growth, increased wealth, the advent of reliable transportation, and improved production made it a fertile time for the establishment of multidepartment stores in the United States. Now, there were more people with money to spend on merchandise and leisure. Trains and streetcars made movement through the urban landscape easier and more appealing.31 In turn, department stores gathered a wide variety of goods under one roof and offered lower prices.

From 1870 to 1920, American department stores sprang up in cities across the United States. Nearly every American city boasted one department store—or more—with grand displays and ample floor space for a plethora of goods, and by 1900 there were over 8,900 such stores.32 But long before them all, there was what many name as the first American department store, A. T. Stewart’s Emporium in New York City.

Alexander Turney Stewart, a transplant from Ireland working as a grade school teacher, accepted a small dry goods store in New York City as payment for a loan in 1823. To add to the store’s stock, he invested a small inheritance in a shipment of Irish linens and laces he handpicked on a trip back to Belfast in hopes that these additions to the stock would quicken sales.33 Similar retail establishments popped up around the same time, like Lord and Taylor.34

Stewart’s little shop did well, and over the next twenty-three years he moved his store to larger and larger quarters until, in 1848, he gathered enough money to build his own store at Broadway and Chambers Street. Stewart built a marble edifice with extensive street frontage. People called it the Marble Palace and found the size of the establishment exciting—the building itself was as much a draw as the merchandise. It boasted one of the most extravagant exteriors of the time, with Piedmont windows on the lower levels and other Federalist-inspired decorations.35 Shopping at the Marble Palace constituted an entirely new experience and drew retailers from England and Chicago to visit.36 At the time, it was the largest American building devoted solely to retail. However, Stewart’s Marble Palace was not a full-fledged department store—it catered only to women.

By 1859, Stewart decided to build an even larger store on lower Broadway between Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. Called the Iron Palace for its intricate iron frame, its completion made Stewart’s establishment the biggest retail store in the country, with acres of floor space to sell a wider variety of goods. This five-story building included a glass rotunda that delivered sunlight into the depths of the building, an architectural flourish reminiscent of the European department stores and great exhibitions. Two winding grand staircases accented the dome, affording access to the floors above.37 The stairs also allowed customers to see and be seen as they shopped for goods or spent the afternoon taking advantage of the growing number of services the store offered. The open space offered visual access to multiple floors of merchandise. The building symbolized the new mode of retail. It housed nineteen departments offering merchandise far beyond women’s clothing. Stewart’s impresssive new store offered a wide variety of goods for men, women, children, and the home, organized into departments.38

Yet Stewart’s Iron Palace boasted few comforts. It lacked carpet and additional elegant appointments at a time when other storekeepers started layering their interiors with luxurious touches to attract customers. The only convenience was a women’s restroom.39 Stewart’s new location drew other large-scale shops to the area, creating a shopping district along Broadway that became known as the Ladies’ Mile.40 Competitors sought to emulate and surpass Stewart’s success. New stores sprouted up, emphasizing sheer size as a marker of the variety of merchandise they had for sale.41

But Stewart did not have the first American department store. Having more in common with European forerunners, magasins de nouveautés, it lacked the variety of merchandise, services, and luxury appointments that came to define a department store. Stewart’s placement as the mythical source of the first store was in part encouraged by John Wanamaker. After Stewart’s death, the store struggled. In 1896 Wanamaker purchased the store and claimed he was the heir of the famous retailer’s legacy in store guides and signage. By 1878, only three stores in the United States had advanced from their dry goods and wholesale roots into full-fledged American department stores: Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Macy’s in New York City, and Jordan Marsh in Boston.42

By the turn of the century, there were numerous large-scale retail establishments across the United States, in buildings adapted and enlarged for that purpose, hawking a bewildering assortment of merchandise. Some even assumed the name “bazaar” or “emporium” to signal the new type of business that gathered many different types of goods together in one place. Many were highly profitable and looked to magnify their success by commissioning buildings to house their retail businesses. Large cities were the first to experience a surge in store construction, sparked by a growth in population and better transportation systems.

Building Morality

For twenty-five years, Wanamaker had made do with the complex of buildings that had been the old freight train depot as the home of his expanding store. He had added onto the Grand Depot numerous times, surging upward and outward, buying neighboring property and a small alley to protect himself from the growing incursion of other Philadelphia retail establishments and to house his swelling hoard of merchandise.

After a burst of construction that joined the various parts of the Grand Depot together into a cohesive whole in 1885, Wanamaker gathered a large contingent of his employees in the central space of the store to give a speech on the store’s progress. His staff now numbered in the thousands, and the space could no longer hold all of the employees. Wanamaker likened the moment to the biblical story of Jacob and his seven-year search for his wife Rachel. He told his staff, “I have been serving more than seven years for this night to come. It was a kind of wedding night. The old building and the smaller buildings—the Market St. building and the Chestnut St. buildings are married tonight.”43 To mask the cobbled-together spaces of the store, Wanamaker and his team of workers decorated the space lavishly inside and out. His first iteration of the Grand Depot as a Moorish sibling to the Centennial Exhibition slowly gave way to a straightforward series of storefront edifices anchored by a tall clock tower at one corner of the property. Despite these ongoing construction efforts and the ones that followed, the store maintained a thrown-together look, as if “a village of temporary shops” had popped up without walls between them.44

By the late 1890s, Wanamaker had survived a few tumultuous years in political office and another series of national financial downturns. He had purchased Stewart’s New York store, which, despite its age, remained more dignified architecturally than his Philadelphia store with its two grand staircases and glass-capped rotunda. The neighboring New Public Building (Philadelphia city hall) was finally finished after twenty years of constant construction, putting Wanamaker’s store in the shadow of the imposing and ornate building. At the corner of Market and Eighth, a cluster of department stores—Gimbels, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers—were either building or expanding.45

A visit to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 gave Wanamaker, along with millions of American and international visitors, an experience of monumental architecture and city planning. Visitors experienced a study in contrasts between the city where they stayed for the exhibition and the idealized city inside the exhibition gates. The exposition gave life to a utopian vision of the urban world. Dubbed the “White City” for the gleaming white stucco exteriors of the buildings, the fair’s stunning Beaux Arts classical architecture and visual uniformity reportedly stirred the “higher consciousness” of fairgoers and created a “morally uplifting environment” even for the “commonplace crowd.”46 Beautiful, elegant, and harmonious surroundings were believed to have contributed to the courteous behavior of the mammoth crowds.47 For many, the fair buildings exemplified the best civil architecture of the period.48

Wanamaker had grown aware that the store’s jumbled architecture did little to communicate the character of his business. On his visit to Chicago, the difference between his Grand Depot and the latest trends in architecture and design was stark. It became impossible to ignore that his building lacked the aesthetic power of the Chicago’s Exhibition architecture.

Chicago also, however, offered answers to the problem. In the city’s nascent high-rise architecture, and the design of the new Marshall Fields store then under construction, Wanamaker found new ways to think about exploiting multistoried space.49 For a while, the purchase of the Stewart store in New York delayed any building plans. By 1901, other major department stores broke ground on new buildings. In New York, Macy’s and Adams Dry Goods Company hired the same architecture firm, De Lemos and Cordes, to design palatial buildings with huge footprints.50

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wanamaker’s business, the pride he professed in 1885 to his employees had disappeared, and he now referred to the Grand Depot as “no more than a glorified shed” and an “old one-story shack.”51 Wanamaker wrote to his son Rodman that it was time to replace “this queer patchwork building.”52 Constructing a new building would modernize the store and, he believed, contribute to the moral reform of Philadelphia. The construction of a new flagship Philadelphia store offered Wanamaker the opportunity to create an edifice to serve as an instrument of moral reform in business, in the lives of his customers and employees, and in the city of Philadelphia. As his interest and support for moral reform movements grew, so too did his vision of how his store could contribute to this endeavor.

It was no coincidence that Wanamaker felt a strong impulse to use architecture for moral reform. Since the early nineteenth century, Protestant clergy, reformers, religious educators, and architects in the urban milieu sought new ways to infuse “civic uplift” into the urban environment.53 These reformers and activists saw the aesthetic design of public spaces, architecture, churches, gardens, and parks as a way to combat the city’s damaging environmental ills resulting from urbanization and the mechanization of society.54 Architecture had the power to shape and influence behavior, and the experience of “good” architecture could be a form of worship.55 Ministers such as the Reverend Frederick W. Sawyer linked together beautiful “parks and gardens” and “churches and public edifices” with the power “to mould the taste.”56 Urban aesthetics mattered.

Tenement reform, the settlement house movement, the development of city parks and playgrounds, and city planning grew out of these efforts to improve the lives of city inhabitants.57 As reformers saw these programs progress, some brought these elements together in a more comprehensive approach to urban planning and design known as the City Beautiful movement. Proponents reasoned that if parks and recreational spaces made a difference in crime, a well-planned city would have an even more powerful effect. Properly designed buildings and public spaces could morally uplift urban inhabitants. The City Beautiful movement also emphasized the role of public spaces and buildings in creating a civic spirit.

Wanamaker saw a connection between “a city’s physical appearance and its moral state.”58 He concluded that a new building for his Philadelphia store could do more than house his successful business; it would also foster a physical environment that would gently cultivate morally responsible citizens. It was a wider application of Horace Bushnell’s concept of “Christian nurture.” If a Christian home life cultivated Christian children, then a Christian building had a similar power. If the proper construction of space helped with Christian formation, why not a department store building?

After all, Wanamaker had direct experience with the effectiveness of a built environment through the Sunday school movement and especially the YMCA. Sunday school missionaries planted their schools in impoverished areas to provide basic reading and writing along with religious education steeped in emerging middle-class values. Sunday school teachers served as role models to their students, week after week exhibiting proper behavior, dress, and physical presentation.59 Some of these schools turned into churches and further influenced the neighborhoods they served, providing the benefits of settlement houses and social service centers.

Indeed, this was a point of pride for Wanamaker and his Bethany Sunday school. Surveying what he had built, he measured Bethany not by how many souls had been saved but by how the church and its services had revitalized the neighborhood. He proudly claimed that “the [Sunday] school is generally and fully credited with having made this entire section of the city what it is today.” For Wanamaker, not only did the church define the people it attracted, but it also improved the city itself and “made this parish a desirable place for residence.”60 He saw evidence that Bethany and its many programs had enhanced the neighborhood, transitioning it from a collection of run-down homes to a working- and middle-class neighborhood.61

Wanamaker’s involvement with the YMCA proved to be the greatest source of inspiration for the new building. The Y had helped Wanamaker reconcile business and religion in his youth, and now it helped him envision an attractive place of shopping leisure where customers experienced moral uplift. From its earliest days, the YMCA promoted the purposeful articulation of space as a tool for religion. Leaders of the Y in London discovered that “well-furnished” rented rooms attracted young men from less savory recreational options in the city.62 Once the young men were inside, the Y socialized them.

In the United States, the desire for YMCA buildings before the Civil War emerged as a concern for financial stability and greater permanency.63 By the time the first building plans were being drawn in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, a larger vision for the role of the YMCA had surfaced. Now, a Y building represented the organization’s values through its exterior design and the services offered inside. It would be a wholesome clubhouse that offered respectable leisure and a chance to socialize young men in middle-class, Protestant values.64 Y buildings were instilled with the potential to heal the nation after the war and to create a visible connection to the “Great Master Builder,” God.65

New York City’s building led the way for Y branches across the country. Although Wanamaker left the position of secretary to start Oak Hall with his brother-in-law, his relationship with the organization never ceased. From the position of secretary, he moved into the role of president in 1869 and shepherded the Philadelphia branch in fundraising and the construction of its first building at Fifteenth and Chestnut. Philadelphia’s Y imitated the New York City building design and offered similar amenities, including a reading room, classrooms, a parlor, and a gymnasium, as well as storefronts on the street level to produce income.66 Wanamaker was intimately involved in the Y building project. Addison Hutton, the architect who had drafted the design for Bethany’s second building and who, that same year, transformed Wanamaker’s Grand Depot into a tabernacle for the Moody revival, served as the architect for the undertaking. Wanamaker’s faith in the power of the building program grew so strong that he personally sponsored the construction of YMCA buildings for branches in Madras and Calcutta, India; Peking, China; Kyoto, Japan; and Seoul, Korea.67 As historian Paula Lupkin has traced, “From the beginning, the YMCA was invested in defining class, race, and ethnicity as well as gender through its buildings.”68 It was a principle that Wanamaker applied to his stores. As he saw it, the material world was a powerful tool and, if employed correctly, could be mobilized to do ministry.

The Golden Rule of Business

In 1896 Wanamaker wrote a letter to an R. M. Luther on his mixing of business and religion. He explained that he had done more than run a successful store; he had also “tried to be in one sense a preacher of at least good business habits” and to train his employees to be better people. The merger of business and religion was a complete one: “I would like to use my store as a pulpit on week days, just as much as my desk at Bethany on Sundays, to lift people up that they may better lift themselves up.”69 There was a lot at stake in constructing a new building. In the Grand Depot, Wanamaker had slowly assembled a store and a business model that he believed exuded a moral and, at least for him, religious ethos. Wanamaker felt that the new building could advertise the character of his retail business, and that those same values could influence the city. The structure needed functionality and moral merit.

In a speech to his employees in 1885, Wanamaker explained the connections he saw between his business and religion. He urged them to not “fail to recognize God’s Providence over us.” Although Wanamaker desired success, he wanted the store to be known by its “character” and “integrity” as well as by its new methods. Though acknowledging that some people saw the store’s extensive advertisement campaigns as “offensive,” he saw his advertising as one of the tools he used to change business. In full-page newspaper ads, day after day—except Sundays—Wanamaker penned his own “folksy” editorial columns educating his customers in understanding the quality of his merchandise, the character of his business, and his generous treatment of employees. He used advertising as a way to educate customers and competitors about a new, moral way of doing business. He wanted to expose “the old methods that have helped many to go wrong: the false tickets, the short measures.” He wanted to let shoppers know that his store was “about honesty.”70 It was more than image making, although it was that as well. Wanamaker saw it as a part of his business mission—to make business a Christian enterprise and profitable. If he was successful God would reward him.

The reputation of retail had not been good in the previous decades. Wanamaker reminded his workers of the uphill battle they were facing: “It was said, once, that a man or a woman to be a salesperson had to tell falsehoods—had to throw their conscience overboard.” His guiding principle was “anything to be done either in the counting room or the Private Office, or on the Floor or in the Basement that we cannot think of with comfort when we go to church, and when we say our prayers” was a disservice both to the firm and to those who had engaged in the action. Cheating customers did not help the store; rather, it detracted from the reputation Wanamaker had built with his employees’ help.71

Wanamaker’s impulse to align his business with his Christian principles was not an isolated one. As historians Mark Valeri and Leigh Eric Schmidt have shown, the mix of business and religion has a long history in the United States.72 From 1880 to 1925, there was an uptick in experimentation with applying Christian principles to business across the United States.73 An early leader in this movement, Wanamaker used this trend—and his acceptance of the prosperity gospel—to reconcile his decision to become a merchant instead of a minister. He sought to align retail business and his Christian values with a “Golden Rule of business.” He had learned that nonreligious means used for religious purposes inspired change in people’s lives.

Wanamaker’s efforts to infuse business with Christian values commenced at Oak Hall. Wanamaker and his brother-in-law Nathan Brown had decided to treat their customers in a manner that was different from standard trade practices. At the time, most stores did not allow customers to browse freely. To enter a store meant that the customer was expected to make a purchase, and customers were harassed until they did so. Prices depended on a customer’s ability to haggle with the sales clerk, and exchanges were not accepted. In disreputable retail establishments, “sample” goods laid out for a customer’s inspection—in a bait-and-switch move—were of a higher quality than the items sold to the consumer. To differentiate themselves, Wanamaker & Brown implemented a one-price system for all; there was no haggling—all customers paid the same price for the same item. Moreover, their store was an early adopter of price tags (some claim it was the first) and a limited money-back guarantee (for a full refund). “One Price and Return of Goods!” became their first motto, and they routinely promoted a schema with four cardinal points: “one price; cash payment (no credit); full guarantee; money refunded.” To illustrate the need for changes, Wanamaker repeatedly told two boyhood stories. When, as a child, he visited a store to look at merchandise, he had been kicked out because he did not make a purchase fast enough to satisfy the store clerk. On another shopping excursion, Wanamaker recalled purchasing a gift for his mother only to discover a better gift in another display a few minutes later. Returning to the salesperson to make the exchange, he was sternly told, “No refunds,” and left the store disappointed.74 As the shop grew, Wanamaker & Brown launched additional business reforms in 1862 and 1864, adopting the motto “A Square Deal Upon Solid Principles,” which they described as being reached “by three connecting roads—Standards of Merchandise, Standards of Value, Standards of Service.”75

Other American retailers experimented with similar practices. James Cash Penney, for example, started his career at a dry goods store run by Thomas Callahan and Guy Johnson in the 1890s. Located in Colorado and Wyoming, they called their stores the Golden Rule Stores to advertise the New Testament principles of their business. Penney eventually bought Callahan and Johnson out and made the Golden Rule Stores the basis for his franchise, J. C. Penney. Wanamaker & Brown drew on the idea of the “golden rule” and made these changes prominent as a marker of the integrity of their business.76

A pamphlet produced in 1899 made the argument that Wanamaker’s store was “more than a store—more than a money-getting business—more than a material result of individual enterprise.” Instead, the store represented a comprehensive and intelligent system, “a system capable of the widest application in the business world; and yet a unique system” capable of changing the world for the better.77 The store married “scientific business practices with ethics,” which meant “treating all people alike—of preserving their self-respect in buying, and of respecting the confidence which they have been asked to bestow.”78 The subtext was that the store’s business practices were moral and Christian. In his later years, Wanamaker explained that, through his efforts at reform, “the Golden Rule of the New Testament has become the Golden Rule of business.” This new “Golden Rule” was a way “to raise the standards” of retail that would be “tolerably free from practices that had gradually lowered mercantile character.”79 What began as four cardinal principles quickly expanded into a series of rules and regulations Wanamaker imposed on his business.

Now, he wanted his store building to message the moral character of the business through its intentional design and beauty.80 Other department stores had mobilized building design as a form of advertisement, emphasizing “no-nonsense message of thrift and bargains,” “an orgy of exuberant consumption,” or “progress, modernity, youthful stylishness.”81 During a trip to Chicago, Wanamaker ruminated on what he wanted his building to stand for and wrote down in a small diary the words “simplicity” and “straightforwardness” to signal his honesty and loyalty as a businessman. He recorded “granite” as a contender for the exterior of the building, noting that it would “stand for integrity and strength.”82 Beautiful architecture also had the capacity to increase profits—an aspect that was not lost on Wanamaker.83 Research for potential building designs took him back to Europe, where he again studied department stores, especially the new building for Printemps in Paris and the new and architecturally daring buildings in Berlin.84

The Wanamaker Building

When it came to selecting an architect for his project, Wanamaker passed over Addison Hutton, the architect he relied upon for several of his biggest construction jobs. In a surprising move, he turned to Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and his firm, whose vision he had admired at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and with whom he had a working relationship.85 Wanamaker had retained Burnham for a large addition at his New York store along with an elevated connector between the old and new buildings. The two shared an appreciation for French architecture, with Burnham relying on many designs from French architects for the 1893 exposition buildings. But Wanamaker’s selection of Burnham was not without controversy. Despite Burnham’s firm’s previous work designing the Land Title Building in Philadelphia in 1897, Philadelphia architects angrily complained that Wanamaker chose an “outsider” for his new building.86

But the tide of Burnham’s architectural influence on the American department store was too strong to turn back. Within a ten-year period, Burnham and his firm designed Marshall Field’s State Street store and related buildings in Chicago, Gimbel Brothers in New York, and Filene’s in Boston.87 In each case, Burnham adapted his famous office building high-rise design.88 Like his office buildings, the department stores featured large atriums to admit natural light into the depths of the store, and, by providing multistory open space, he carved out interior public spaces as well. The store exteriors carried various articulations of his developing classicism. Although Burnham’s store designs shared similarities in basic form, size, and stature, each building had a unique layout and differing exterior decorations, windows, and cornice style.89 Wanamaker’s building displayed the cleanest lines of Burnham’s buildings and was the largest.

From his earliest years working with John Wellborn Root, Burnham pushed American cities to new heights by designing their arts and commercial interests. Burnham’s platform, solidified by the fair, gave him a national reputation that attracted other department store merchant princes contemplating change at the turn of the nineteenth century. His massive office buildings, the Rookery in Chicago and the Ellicott Square Building in Buffalo, established him as an authority in creating large, beautiful, yet practical public buildings.

The success of the Columbian Exhibition convinced Burnham that his legacy rested on creating buildings whose beauty enhanced cities and that the classical style his team executed there should be the style for his future work.90 Burnham advocated for urban planning and was a leader in the City Beautiful movement. He felt drawn to create public spaces that conditioned the public’s morality and fostered moral order.91 However, Burnham initially saw public and commercial spaces as distinct from one another. Wanamaker challenged this perspective, understanding his building as both a commercial and public building. Burnham soon agreed.

Like Marshall Field, Wanamaker wanted his new building to be built in a series of phases so that business could continue uninterrupted. This construction process also served as a working advertisement for the new building—shoppers could buy their goods and see the new building’s progress in one stop.92 It was a challenging endeavor, with pressure placed on store employees charged with freighting merchandise from one section of the building to another as parts were destroyed, rebuilt, and opened.93

Wanamaker was intimately involved in the design of the building and traveled to Chicago to meet with Burnham and go over his specifications.94 Initial plans for the building were drawn in 1902 and worked over by Wanamaker for several months. Extensive excavations of the massive basement slowed progress at first. Construction spanned a seven-year period, with the last section finished in 1911. The length of time was not entirely due to the size or scale of the project; labor disputes and financing problems took their toll.95

Ultimately, the design Burnham and Wanamaker agreed upon echoed an Italian Renaissance palazzo with clean lines on the exterior and large windows.96 They called it “Roman Doric.” The design itself was neither inherently Christian nor moral. It was the idiom of American business and modernity: the mid-rise skyscraper dressed in granite. It was a symbol of modernity standing out in Philadelphia’s developing Center City. Through its clean lines, the design aligned Wanamaker’s edifice with other public buildings going up in this period, especially banks, museums, and courthouses with their attendant associations of discipline, balance, honesty, integrity, and respectability—the same values Wanamaker saw as Protestant and moral. By adopting this style, he not only wanted to communicate these same values but also hoped to signal “good taste.”97

Squat in comparison to modern skyscrapers, Wanamaker’s building made a memorable statement in Philadelphia’s city center in 1911. Although not as tall as the New Public Building crowned with a statue of William Penn, Wanamaker’s building was much taller and much wider than its neighbors. The building’s cornice, which differentiated Wanamaker’s store from surrounding buildings, was less ornate than some of Burnham’s other buildings, yet its detail gave the store a neat and crisp ornamentation. The uniform use of elements on the entire building made it distinctly different from neighboring buildings that were executed in more flamboyant designs. The building facade consisted of three distinct layers. Just below the cornice, small square windows punctuated the building at even intervals, giving way to a row of arched windows that spanned two stories. The middle section maintained six rows of evenly spaced windows topped by large arch windows as broad as two arched windows just above. Pilasters decorated the lower part of the building, changing into temple-like columns at the entrances.98

The fluted columned entrances, like those of a Greek temple and the new courthouses and museums popping up in American cities, lent gravitas to the store’s four entries, one on each side of the building. Emphasizing the temple connection, two fierce Japanese bronze statues flanked the main entrance. The statues were Ni-o, the traditional guardians against evil spirits at the entrances of Japanese Buddhist temples. The temple correlation continued in the gleaming brass doors, which were framed by embedded columns and panels decorated with intricate knot designs and marble panels. Here, Burnham maintained stronger historical references than in his other work because the building was situated in an older city.99 Plate-glass windows encircled much of the sidewalk level of the building, inviting shoppers into the store through imaginative displays. The spacing of the granite blocks over the whole facade brought visual interest to a building that covered an entire city block.

Burnham described the Wanamaker Building in a letter to a friend, noting that it was “in the center of the city.” Detailing the scale of the design and its beauty, he wrote, “There are three stories below the sidewalk and twelve stories above. . . . The exterior is of very beautiful granite, the Italian Renaissance style being employed in the design.” These attributes made the Wanamaker Building awe-inspiring and confident in the city landscape. Burnham declared, “The building as a whole, both inside and outside, is the most monumental commercial structure ever erected anywhere in the world. Its total cost has exceeded Ten Million Dollars.”100 Burnham was right. Once finished, it was for a time the largest retail space in the world.

Wanamaker advocated for modern technology, insisting on installing the latest in electric wiring, lighting, elevators, dumbwaiters, and fire safety. Prominently placed on the store’s new rooftop were two Marconi wireless telegraph towers. The telegraph was promoted as a service to customers, although its primary purpose was to allow the Philadelphia store to communicate affordably and quickly with the New York store. Later, the store boasted its own radio station, which Wanamaker used to promote both store and religious programming and music from the store organ. The first radio broadcast, on August 7, 1922, opened with Bethany Presbyterian’s minister, the Rev. Dr. Macauley, reading the Twenty-Third Psalm and Wanamaker giving a formal speech. Bethany’s Sunday services were also broadcasted from the station, making the store a promoter of Wanamaker’s church.101

Good ventilation persisted as an abiding concern in stores. One of the chief complaints of shoppers and store employees at the turn of the century remained the lack of fresh air in retail establishments. At the Grand Depot Wanamaker had experimented with ways to cool and refresh the air, adding ductwork and a series of fans in a bid to control the air flow and temperature in the building. In the new store, he installed a sophisticated ventilation system to keep fresh air moving through the store, continually exchanging fresh air for stale air.102

The construction of a large building brought fire safety concerns to the fore. Wanamaker worried about fire; he had nearly lost his store to a blaze that swept down Market Street in 1896. In 1906 a fire erupted under one of the store’s display windows at the height of the Christmas season when the store was packed with shoppers. A cigarette or cigar had been tossed down in a grate below the window and smoldered into a blaze. A policeman noticed smoke and helped put out the fire just as flames began to burst inside the display window.103 Fires in other cities, such as the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, raised concerns about fire safety and the importance of multiple building exits when more than 550 people died trying to escape the flames in what had been touted as a “fireproof” building. Making the threat of fire even more real, Wanamaker lost his summer home to a fire just as the new Philadelphia store neared completion.

Customers worried about fire too. In the spring of 1900 one shopper took the time to write, at length, about the lack of fire safety he had observed at the Grand Depot—listing the lack of exits and the time it would take to evacuate thousands of customers and employees.104 The concerned citizen told Wanamaker, “You May thank God you have escaped thus far, but have you the moral right to continue this public menace?” The stranger called the store a “complete death-trap,” citing only eight exits from the massive building.

Wanamaker took fire concerns seriously and resolved to solve the problem in his new building. However, the attention to fire safety did not succeed in squashing the new store’s central atrium. Rotundas and grand staircases were common features in late nineteenth-century department stores but were largely abandoned because large open spaces between floors helped fires spread quickly.105 It was the one area Wanamaker compromised on fire safety by keeping a multifloor atrium in the plan. Wanamaker was particularly proud of these achievements and consistently mentioned store technology in advertisements. In keeping with the great exhibitions’ incorporation of the latest technology, he showcased the building’s mechanics in store publications.

A year after the groundbreaking, as workers finished the first section of the building and a power plant to run the building, Wanamaker wrote a newspaper editorial expressing excitement and enthusiasm for his new building. He invited readers to “compare, if you can, the old freight station’s miserable lamps with to-night’s mighty blaze of electricity shining from the three hundred and sixty-three windows of the little section of our new building.” Light, both natural and artificial, was a major feature of the new store. With the power plant in place, the store would light up in new ways with the first Christmas light show launched that year.

With only one-third of the building complete, Wanamaker encouraged his readers to imagine the “whole place . . . when the other sections are completed.” Then, in an explosion of enthusiasm, he shared the genealogy of what stood before them: “Back of the light—electricity; back of electricity—dynamos and engines; back of dynamos and engines—MIND!”106 The store was more than just the sum of its various elements, more than just a building for that matter, “It was the idea behind it that counted.”107 It had spirit; it had mind; it had soul.

Promotional materials for the store’s anniversary and in celebration of the new building expounded on the meaning of the design, declaring, “It is the spirit that counts. . . . The great granite building that houses the Wanamaker merchandise in Philadelphia says this on the face of it.” The text asks a rhetorical question, “Suppose [the design] had been a gingerbread, fantastical sort of building, with turrets and fretwork, minarets and Renaissance carvings, and stucco gorgeousness, would it have been art?” Wanamaker answered the question clearly: “No—because it would not have been SINCERE. It would not have been SUITABLE. It would not have been SIMPLE. It would not have been expressive of the SOUL within it.”108 The soul of his store and how it got there, Wanamaker never explicitly explained. But his treatment of the store, his passion for its potential to change people’s lives, and his fondness for his employees, whom he called his “store family,” leave little doubt that Wanamaker believed that the store had a Christian “soul within it.”

With simplicity, elegance, and sturdy beauty, the new Wanamaker store did in fact stand in sharp contrast to the New Public Building, built over a thirty-year period (1871–1901) across the street from Wanamaker’s. The New Public Building boasted a French Second Empire style that was heavily ornate, with 255 sculptures and a thirty-seven-foot-tall statue of William Penn standing atop a tower.109 Where the New Public Building stood as an elaborate profusion of Victorian enthusiasm, Wanamaker’s building looked steady, reliable, modern, and inviting, and he argued that these characteristics depicted it as morally sound. In many ways, the Wanamaker Building appeared more suitable as the center of city business in its Renaissance palazzo style. From the main entrance framed grandly by columns to the granite facade, the Wanamaker Building echoed the design of museums, libraries, and courthouses popping up across the country.

A Building for the People

Six years later, when workers finished the store, Wanamaker and his son Rodman prepared for the building’s dedication by planning a spectacle of seemingly endless celebrations and visiting dignitaries honoring the achievement of the new building and Wanamaker’s fifty years in business. Thomas, the oldest son, had died unexpectedly while the store was still under construction. Rodman had returned from living abroad to support his father in running the business.

The vision for the dedication ceremonies was to inaugurate the store as Philadelphia’s newest public building. While Wanamaker had always thought of his store as a public entity, his new store better played the role of public building with its monumental architecture and size. Geographically, it was already at an advantage. The location next to the city hall marked its role as a civic building by association. Wanamaker invited Republican colleague President William Howard Taft to speak at the dedication. To Wanamaker’s surprise and delight, Taft accepted the invitation. The dedication ceremony would be an inauguration of Wanamaker’s as a public building with the blessing of the president of the United States. It was the first time a sitting U.S. president took part in the dedication of a commercial enterprise.

Other American department stores also identified themselves as public buildings, often through architecture, size, or location.110 Some stores, including Marshall Field’s and Halle’s in Cleveland, placed large clocks on their exteriors to emphasize their service role in the public square. European department stores took on the architecture of public buildings and offered a host of services, and American stores followed their example. One historian notes that department stores typically “encouraged a perception of the building as a public place, where consumption itself was almost incidental to the delights of a sheltered promenade in a densely crowded, middle-class urban space.”111

Burnham also came to understand the Wanamaker Building as a public building: “Commerce is the heart and lungs of a community.” He said at the dedication, “[Wanamaker’s] monument is his store—a thing of beauty and dignity enhancing the appearance of the city, a building that the entire community is from this time on to take the greatest pride in, for in a high sense it is theirs, and they are to use it.”112 The structure was available for the citizens to use, and its beautiful aesthetic enhanced the city.

Wanamaker imbued his new building with meaning—publicly and personally—at nearly every opportunity. At the laying of the last cornerstone in 1910, after those who had gathered sang the hymn “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” he confidently told the gathered crowd, “After many rejected plans of the exterior of the building, the one accepted faces the world on all sides with a bold and classic front. It will be unhesitatingly interpreted from the outside as meaning something good and strong.”113 When contemplating what was considered by many architects to be one of the two most beautiful and distinguished department stores Burnham designed (the other being Marshall Field’s State Street store), Wanamaker saw more than beauty. His new department store building symbolized something more permanent than the structure itself. In a vein he regularly revisited, he described the force behind the store as the human spirit: “The oak rises, flourishes and dies; the hardest granite, as time wears on, shows the sign of age; but the mind of man, renewed and cultured at each generation, grows on forever preparing for wider and nobler service.”114

It was a poignant speech, especially given that he had nearly lost everything in the economic downturn of 1907 and that he was grieving the sudden death of his heir apparent, his son Thomas, at age forty-six. Even in this moment, Wanamaker thought of education—how the building itself housed the possibility for the store customers as well as the employees to grow. Ever paternalistic and yet ever sincere, he was confident in his authority to serve as moral guide and teacher. In his speech Wanamaker solemnly claimed, “I am so glad to add to that, whatever be the attainments of the mind of man, God, the Father of us all, is saying to us, Come up higher. Come up higher. That is the everyday speech of the Maker.”115 This growth would occur in Wanamaker’s department store itself. “From today our lives must start from this new center. The blessing of all this is the permanence about us.”116

***

Protestants responded to a changing society with new architecture. Churches moved to remodel old buildings and design new ones with imposing facades, towering spires, and eye-catching designs that went up in cities across the country.117 Reform organizations like the YMCA and Sunday schools joined the building boom by constructing impressive, centrally located structures. Protestant leaders invested in these buildings by serving on the planning committees, raising funds, and seeing the projects through to completion. America’s urban landscape was changing.

Wanamaker’s new building took up more prominently his religious work of moral reform. He reimagined the space, a new building dedicated to bringing his Christian principles to bear—to morally influence the city—not only in his business practices but also in the building’s architecture. It would, he hoped, shape the city into its image, inspiring responsible, disciplined, and moral behavior by its mere presence.118 This “aesthetic evangelism” promoted Christian evangelical values through the built environment in the center of the city.119

Inside the store, Wanamaker peddled the latest fashion and home goods, and through his advertisements and displays he hoped to educate his customers in Christian taste. But the exterior of the building was as important as the goods hawked inside. Just as he hoped that the tasteful clothes, home goods, and decorations moved people toward a more genteel and moral middle-class life, he believed that his store building had the power to do the same for Philadelphia as a city. Wanamaker worked toward a cohesive approach, much as city beautification programs did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new building would house his entire store in one unified facade. He later reflected: “What profound change it has made in the city, this neighborhood, and the methods of commercial life everywhere.”120

Department stores had become a symbol and co-creator of the new bourgeois culture in Europe and the middle class in the United States. In the end, Zola’s description of department stores and Wanamaker’s were not too far from one another. At a gathering of employees, Wanamaker told a story of two bishops—one compared himself to a “little sparrow” feeling insignificant in the space of a cathedral, while the other bishop experienced the cathedral as a place of “vastness and beauty” and consequently was “filled with exaltation.” Wanamaker confided to his employees that he shared the feeling of exaltation and saw beauty all around. The store, he explained, was “a great cathedral of magnificent opportunity.”121 He believed that “men are changed by changing their environments” and that “cities are changed by changing their architecture.”122