The Rise and Fall of Downtown Brooklyn's Dazzling Emporiums
As retailers close and their buildings are adapted or demolished, eight Brownstoner tales reveal the history of Downtown Brooklyn’s grand stores.
A circa 1901 postcard of Fulton Street. Collection of Susan De Vries
Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street has long been a shopping mecca, home to large department stores and specialty retailers alike. An early 20th century shopper could stroll along the street and find everything from furs to furniture.
The retail corridor has certainly seen change over the centuries, and the recent announcement that Macy’s would be closing its Fulton Street location brings to mind some of the other stores that have disappeared from the street. We’ve dug into the 20-year catalog of Brownstoner stories on the borough’s history and built environment and rounded up eight tales of dazzling emporiums that once graced Downtown Brooklyn.
By the early 1900s, department store competition had intensified throughout New York City. The new R.H. Macy & Company store surpassed Abraham & Straus as New York’s largest store, but Abraham & Straus continued further expansions.
In 1905, Abraham & Straus purchased the ground rights along Livingston Street, from Hoyt Street to Gallatin Street; expanded its basement store; and increased the building by 100,000 square feet. The store was rebranded as Macy’s in 1995. In January it was confirmed that the Macy’s would close this year.
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The mammoth store on the corner of Fulton and Bond streets, at 484 Fulton Street, was five stories of shopping wonder, costing over a million dollars to furnish and stock. The Eagle, in a long front-page article on March 22, 1887, describes the store in great detail.
The store survived until 1952, when it finally closed. The building underwent a massive face lift on the Fulton Street side in 1953, the elegant Victorian windows replaced by a modern plain facade, and the building was renamed the Jowein Building.
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By the beginning of the 1890s, Fulton Street between City Hall and Flatbush Avenue was fast evolving as one of the largest and most prosperous retail shopping districts in the nation. Large department stores such as Weschler & Abraham, Frederick Loeser, and A.D. Matthews dominated, all housed in new and ever-larger multi-storied buildings along the length of the blocks.
Henry Offerman was a millionaire sugar baron, president of the Brooklyn Sugar Refining Company, a powerful allegiance of Williamsburg’s sugar businesses, the largest of which was Henry Havemeyer’s Domino Sugar company. For a time, Offerman lived in Hoboken and worked in Williamsburg, before moving to Clinton Hill, and like many wealthy men of his day, had real estate investments everywhere.
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Balch, Price & Co. was once one of Brooklyn’s most successful and well-known furriers. The company was established in 1869, producing and selling men’s fur bowler and top hats and fur-lined gloves.
The company moved to the corner of Fulton and Smith streets in the late 1800s. In 1912, they tore down the building and built this one at 380 Fulton Street, which was further altered in 1935 to its present-day Deco style. Lane Bryant moved into the building in 1950.
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In the 1920s, Lane Bryant Co. bought a plot of land that faced on both Livingston Street and Hanover Place, a one-block side street between Fulton and Livingston streets, only a block from Flatbush Avenue and Nevins Street.
They constructed a three-story-plus-basement store building, with the main entrance on Hanover Place and a secondary entrance on Livingston Street. The new Brooklyn store opened with great fanfare on October 9, 1922. The store moved to the former Balch, Price & Co. store in 1950, and, after 69 years in business, the Downtown Brooklyn store shuttered in 2019. The block is currently being redeveloped and this building is being demolished.
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Oppenheim & Collins Department Store
Albert D. and Charles J. Oppenheim started out in 1871 as Manhattan skirt manufacturers, and 30 years later opened their first women’s store, in Manhattan. They established their first Brooklyn store at 493 Fulton Street. By 1914 the store needed to expand, and architects Albert C. Buchman and Mortimer J. Fox, who were a well-known Manhattan-based firm that specialized in department stores and apartment buildings, were chosen for the new building at 471-479 Fulton Street. They designed a curved facade facing both Lawrence and Fulton streets.
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The Liebmann Brothers, Herman and Louis, were successful Brooklyn dry goods merchants. For a long time they were partners with Frederick Loeser in one of Brooklyn’s most successful stores, Loeser’s. Their partnership broke up in 1887, and both would open new, large, and successful establishments downtown. The Liebmanns opened a huge store on Washington Street, and in 1888, constructed this office building. It was to be part of a very large Liebmann complex of retail and office space with frontage on Fulton and extending along Hoyt all the way back to Livingston. Unfortunately, they suddenly went bust in 1894, and those plans were never instituted.
The first Brooklyn Woolworth store opened on Fulton Street, in 1895, at 532 Fulton Street, near the intersection of Flatbush Avenue. By the mid 1930s, Woolworth’s had moved up the street to 366 Fulton Street, the four-story brownstone building that most memorably held the Wiz electronics store in the 1980s. This space was not large enough for an expanding store, so in 1936, plans were drawn up for a new one. Headquarters hired Minnesota-based architect A. F. Winter to design an Art Deco style building, one that would be 10 times the size of their last store.
The streamlined bands of Art Deco ornament graced the facade of the building for decades. The removal of scaffolding in early 2022 showed that all the details were gone. The new look for the building, with gray and bright blue panels, was completed shortly after.
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There were also E.J. Korvettes across the street from A&S, JW Mays, and McCrory’s along Fulton Street.
Yes, so many more stores than we were able to include in this sampling, but I am glad it has sparked some comments about other stores. The list is long! I believe E.J. Korvettes was in the Oppenheim building. For those interested in what stores would have been available to a 1940s shopper this map from the David Rumsey Map Collection is a great resource – https://bit.ly/4jEcHgR
In your recent Brownstoner article on the fine stores that used to line Brooklyn’s Fulton Street, how could you omit upscale Martins Department Store, which was located diagonally across from A&S? Someone apparently did not do their research, but I certainly remember it very well.
Click the link to the story on the Offerman building – Martin’s is included!