Former Downtown Brooklyn Woolworth's Gets New Look, New Discount Store

The remake of the former Fulton Street F.W. Woolworth store is complete and the building, which once had a streamlined Art Deco limestone facade, is now wrapped in gray and bright blue panels and a new discount retailer has taken over the upper floor.

The new look resembles the Gap across the street.

After scaffolding around the building at 408 Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn came down, the new cladding was visible last month as workers prepped to install a new facade. Plans for exterior repairs on the building, which houses a Foot Locker on the lower level, were approved in April of 2021. Steven Gambino of Architectural Collaborative is the architect of record for the work. The building has been owned by Wharton Properties since it was sold by Macy’s in 2001.

The upper windows were filled in with cement block by the summer and a portion of the upper floor opened as a Five Below on February 4. The brightly lit, but windowless, interior of the store has the bargain goods the retailer, which opened its first store in Pennsylvania in 2002, promises in its slogan of “$1 to $5 & Beyond.” It’s a bit of an expected inflation jump from the original five-and-dime occupant, Woolworth.

Construction originally began on the building, designed by Arthur F. Winter, in 1936 and it opened to some fanfare in June of 1937 as the “largest and most elaborate” of the Woolworth stores in Brooklyn. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, deluxe appointments included its own bakery, a lunch counter, air conditioning, marble floors and walnut counters. On the exterior, zig zag-ornamented aluminum window spandrels and vertical details decorated the upper stories of a limestone facade.

It wasn’t the first Woolworth on Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street; the company had grown out of two prior buildings before constructing this new store on the corner of Gallatin Place. The retailer operated out of the building until the struggling company closed the last of its remaining stores in 1997.

Work continues on other projects set to transform the traditional shopping spine of Fulton Street. Two blocks away, construction fencing has gone up around a portion of the Fulton Street block at the corner of Red Hook Lane where five buildings, including a mid-century bank, will make way for a 45-story mixed-use tower.

[Photos by Susan De Vries]

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