Landmarks Preservation Commission December 20, 2011, Designation List 450 LP-2474 R. H. MACY & CO. STORE, 14TH STREET ANNEX, 56 West 14th Street, Manhattan. Built 1897; [William] Schickel & [Isaac E.] Ditmars, architects. Landmark Site: Borough of Manhattan Tax Map Block 577, Lot 12. On July 12, 2011, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of the R.H. Macy & Co. Store, 14th Street Annex and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 1). The hearing had been duly advertised in accordance with the provisions of law. Four people spoke in favor of designation, including representatives of Manhattan Community Board 2, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, and Historic Districts Council. Summary Located near the intersection of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in the midst of New York City’s then-primary retail shopping district, Ladies’ Mile, the R.H. Macy & Co. Store, 14th Street Annex was the last phase in the expansion of the complex – including older remodeled structures and several purpose-built annexes – occupied by the famous department store during its 44-year tenure at this location. Founded in 1858 by Rowland H. Macy as a fancy goods store, Macy’s became known for innovative retailing strategies and emerged as a full-service department store, one of the city’s largest. After R.H. Macy’s death in 1877, and the acquisition of controlling interest in the business in 1888 by brothers Nathan and Isidor Straus (who had operated a china and glassware department here since 1874) and sole proprietorship in 1896, the Strauses hired the firm of the prominent New York City architect William Schickel, well known within the German-American community, for a number of commissions. William Schickel & Co. designed Macy’s 13th Street Annex (1891-94), while Schickel & Ditmars, the successor firm, designed the limestone-clad 14th Street Annex (1897). Tall at nine stories (plus basement) and slender at 25- feet-wide, the front facade of the 14th Street Annex, designed in an exuberant Beaux-Arts style and arranged in a tripartite base-shaft-capital composition, features a rusticated three-story base with a large round-arched window at the second story, classically-inspired carved detailing, balconies, a four-story midsection with decorative ironwork, a colonnaded upper section, and large copper acroteria at the roof. After Macy’s moved to Herald Square in 1902, the 14th Street Annex was occupied in 1904-14 as part of the new 14th Street Store on Sixth Avenue operated by Henry Siegel, the highly successful proprietor of the large Siegel-Cooper & Co. Store at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street. The former Macy 14th Street Annex, owned by the Straus family until 1939 and internally connected to the 13th Street Annex through the 20th century, housed a variety of firms over subsequent decades. The distinctive facade of Macy’s 14th Street Annex is a reminder of one of the city’s most prominent stores in its original location, and of Ladies’ Mile’s heyday as the city’s central retail shopping district in the second half of the 19th century.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Union Square, Ladies’ Mile, and 14th Street1 The land for Union Square, at the juncture of Broadway and the Bowery (later Fourth Avenue and Park Avenue South) north of 14th Street, was set aside as a public space by the City in 1832 and opened as a park in 1839. Residential development, on lots facing the square and on the blocks to the east, began during this period. This area emerged as the city’s most fashionable neighborhood and, by the end of the 1840s, the square was surrounded by residences. With the expansion of New York’s port in the 1840s and the introduction of railroads into Lower Manhattan in the 1850s, the drygoods trade grew rapidly and the city solidified its position as the country’s leading commercial center. As downtown business and warehouse districts expanded to handle this trade,

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