Alexander Turney Stewart

• Born: October 12, 1803
• Birthplace: Lisburn, County Antrim, Ireland (now in Northern Ireland)
• Died: April 10, 1876
• Place of death: New York, New York

American retailer

At the time of his death, Stewart was the third-wealthiest man in New York, with an estate valued at $50 million. He obtained his wealth by creating a chain of retail stores that helped make shopping and consumption essential elements of American life.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; retailing; real estate

Bequeathal of wealth: Spouse

Early Life

Alexander Turney Stewart was born in Lisburn in what is now Northern Ireland. Growing up in a close-knit Scotch-Irish Protestant community, in the heart of the thriving linen trade, reinforced a strong culture of hard work, scrupulous honesty, and responsibility. His father died when Stewart was three months old. After remarrying, his mother immigrated to the United States, leaving Stewart in the care of his grandfather, a man of some substance financially, who provided the boy with a good education and sent him to Trinity College in Dublin to study for the Anglican ministry.

Upon his grandfather’s death in 1820, Stewart quit his studies and paid passage to New York, where he secured a teaching position. In 1823, he returned to Ireland to collect an inheritance of £1000 (about $10,000, or between $80,000 and $100,000 in 2010 currency) from his grandfather’s estate. He used most of his inheritance to buy Irish linens and lace, which formed the nucleus of a small dry goods store. In 1823, he married Cornelia Clinch, daughter of a New York ship chandler.

First Ventures

Stewart’s store prospered, quickly outgrowing its narrow quarters. Early on, Stewart established the business practices that enabled him to amass a fortune as New York City’s leading retailer. By buying from the source, eliminating the middleman, and doing a larger volume of business than his competitors, he was able to cut prices and still make a profit. His reliance on cash transactions in both purchasing and selling was one factor that helped him weather the volatile economic climate of America in the first half of the nineteenth century. He personally supervised all aspects of his business and insisted on rigorous honesty in all transactions.

The opening of theErie Canal in 1825 established New York City as the preeminent port through which American raw materials were shipped overseas and manufactured goods from Europe entered the United States. The canal resulted in a rise in the city’s wealth, creating a burgeoning demand for luxury consumer goods, which Stewart readily supplied. An Englishwoman writing about New York in 1854 remarked on gold brocade selling for £9 (about $900 in 2010) a yard and a fine lace flounce priced at 120 guineas. Such wares were displayed in colonnaded marble halls, proffered by a small army of handsome young clerks well versed in polite, low-key sales tactics. Although Stewart’s store did sell some lower-end and discounted merchandise, it was preeminently the emporium of the fashionable and well-to-do.

In the mid-nineteenth century, dry goods occupied the central place in retailing that women’s ready-to-wear clothing would later assume. The Industrial Revolution made available inexpensive machine-made fabrics, enabling middle-class women to follow fashion and have more extensive wardrobes than they had before, but the usual practice was to buy yardage and findings from the dry goods store and give them to a dressmaker to be made into clothing.

Making his stores places where women enjoyed shopping was a key feature in Stewart’s success. In 1848, having outgrown a series of successively larger rented quarters, he built the Marble Palace at 280 Broadway. By building a facility with high ceilings, classical architectural details, and a glass-domed rotunda, Stewart carefully created an atmosphere that reinforced shopping as a pleasant pastime. Among his store’s innovations were periodic fashion shows, floor-length mirrors, and stools upon which ladies could sit and gossip while they examined fabric. Sometimes considered America’s first department store, the Marble Palace was predominantly a dry goods store.

Mature Wealth

After 1848, Stewart’s empire expanded rapidly. By 1869, he owned more real estate in Manhattan than anyone except the heirs of John Jacob Astor; his holdings included two major stores, the Metropolitan and Park Hotels, the Globe Theater, and Niblo’s Garden. He also purchased and expanded the Grand Union Hotel in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, making it the largest hotel in the world. Stewart operated satellite stores in Boston and Philadelphia and branches in Great Britain, France, and Germany.

The Marble Palace was a huge financial success, and it stood at the center of fashion and opulence in female dress. One of its notable customers was Mary Todd Lincoln, to whom Stewart personally presented a valuable lace shawl, with the gift serving multiple functions as thanks to a loyal customer, publicity for the shop, and an expression of support for the administration of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln.

In 1862, Stewart opened the Iron Palace, a six-story building occupying an entire city block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues on Broadway. This massive building, with its cast-iron facade, glass dome, skylight, and grand emporium, employed two thousand people in nineteen separate departments, including various categories of fabrics, furs, housewares, carpets, and toys. It was a true department store, catering to the diverse shopping needs of the well-to-do New York woman.

In 1870, the workforce of the Iron Palace consisted of one superintendent, 9 department heads, 25 bookkeepers, 30 ushers, 200 cash boys, 470 clerks, 50 porters, and 900 seamstresses. Stewart was an exacting employer, demanding diligence and honesty and by no means generous with wages. His fairness, consistency, and personal example, however, allowed him to maintain a loyal workforce. His Garden City and women’s residence hotel projects, initiated shortly before his death, represented an innovative solution to ensuring adequate living standards for employees in a high-cost urban area, with the employer taking advantage of economies of scale to provide inexpensive housing.

During the Civil War, Stewart manufactured and sold cloth for Union army uniforms at less than the going rate. He later sent a shipload of provisions to Ireland during the famine and a shipload of flour to sufferers of the Franco-Prussian War, and he provided $50,000 for relief after the Chicago fire of 1871. Although significant, these explicit charitable acts are minor compared to Stewart’s resources.

Around 1870, the New York City store began receiving mail-order requests from women in rural areas. Stewart created a department to handle these requests, which by 1876 generated profits of $500,000 annually. To supply his stores, Stewart established a carpet factory and woolen mills.

In 1869, Stewart hired the architect John Kellum to design a suitable mansion. Located on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, the five-story marble-faced structure designed in French Second Empire style was the grandest private residence of its day in New York. The house, a private art collection valued at $1 million, and excellent horses were the only outward displays of wealth in which Stewart indulged.

Publicly, Stewart took relatively little part in political life. Despite his close association with Judge Henry Hilton, his wife’s second cousin and a member of the Tweed Ring, Stewart distanced himself from the extreme corruption of New York City’s government in the 1860’s and assisted in the prosecution of “Boss” William Marcy Tweed in 1872. In March, 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant offered Stewart the post of secretary of the Treasury, but an old law barring anyone actively involved in imports from this position prevented his confirmation.

Stewart died unexpectedly of peritonitis on April 10, 1876. The terms of his will left his entire fortune to his wife, with the exception of some small bequests to individuals and $1 million to Henry Hilton, a relative and business partner. The Stewarts had three children, but they died when they were young and did not have their own children. Shortly after his death, thieves stole his body from its temporary resting place in St. Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery neighborhood and held the body for ransom. Upon payment of the ransom, Stewart’s remains were returned and interred in the new Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York.

Legacy

Stewart’s most enduring legacy is probably not what his wealth bought but the business model that made accumulation of his fortune possible. In 1823, few Americans thought of themselves as consumers, and retailing, even in large cities, focused on meeting the practical needs of plain folk. The elite looked to the Old World, especially to France, for luxury items, and conspicuous consumption of these goods was viewed as vaguely un-American.

By 1876, New York City had become established as a center for fashion and luxury, and other large cities followed suit. Shopping and consumption had become legitimate and primary aims of life, worthy of the trappings formerly reserved for theater, civic life, and worship. The store had become a palace, and the shopkeeper, a prince.

Of the edifices Stewart built, only the Marble Palace survive in the twenty-first century, as a civic building and historic landmark. The Iron Palace was acquired by Wanamaker’s, a Philadelphia-based department store chain modeled on Stewart’s stores. Wanamaker’s operated the Iron Palace as one of New York’s grand department stores until 1955. The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs fell into disrepair and was razed in 1953 to make way for a supermarket, and Stewart’s Fifth Avenue mansion was demolished in 1902.

Bibliography

Burrows, Edwin B., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Well-researched and comprehensive political and social history, providing useful background material.

“Death of A. T. Stewart.” The New York Times, April 11, 1876, p. 1. This obituary provides a good biography and contemporary assessment of Stewart.

Hendrickson, Robert. The Grand Emporiums. An Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. Solid assessment of how Stewart pioneered practices associated with later, better-known retailers.

Jackson, Kenneth, and David Dunbar, eds. Empire City: New York Through the Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. A collection of readings, several describing commercial life, including one impression of Stewart’s store in 1854.

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. A book on consumerism that treats Stewart briefly but emphasizes developments from 1890 to1920.

Smith, Mildred H. History of Garden City. Manhasset, N.Y.: Channel Press, 1963. Contains many details illustrating the scope of Stewart’s vision for the city, which subsequent developments did not closely follow.