Bonwit Teller — The Luxury Name Handed From Owner to Owner Until It Was Gone

Summary

Bonwit Teller was one of New York's great upscale specialty department stores — a name synonymous for most of the twentieth century with high-end women's fashion, discreet service, and a Fifth Avenue address — and by 1990 it had been passed through so many owners that there was almost nothing left to close. The firm dated to 1895, when Paul Bonwit opened the store that the company always treated as its founding; Edmund D. Teller joined as partner soon after, and the business incorporated in 1907. From a series of Manhattan locations it built a reputation for taste and quality that put it in the same conversation as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, and in 1929 it crowned that reputation with a celebrated Art Deco flagship on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street, an eleven-story building whose limestone reliefs of dancing nude figures became one of the avenue's small architectural treasures.

The store's most famous moment, however, was its destruction. In 1979 Bonwit Teller's flagship building was sold, and the developer who bought the site, Donald Trump, demolished it in 1980 to build Trump Tower. The Art Deco friezes and the great decorative grille over the entrance — which Trump had publicly indicated would be salvaged and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — were instead jackhammered to rubble during demolition, a widely condemned act that became the building's epitaph. The store itself relocated to space within the new tower, but the demolition was the visible beginning of an invisible decline: the institution survived, diminished, while its most distinctive physical presence was reduced to rubble for a higher use of the land.

What actually finished Bonwit Teller was not a single dramatic failure but ownership churn — a luxury nameplate traded from one parent to the next, each with its own agenda, none able or willing to sustain it. Genesco, Allied Stores, and then the Australian developer L.J. Hooker each held it; Hooker, having paid around $101 million for the chain in 1987 and briefly expanded it, slid into bankruptcy in 1989, putting Bonwit on the auction block. In 1990 most of the stores — including the flagship in Trump Tower — were liquidated, and the name and a handful of locations passed to a mall developer, The Pyramid Company, which kept a shrunken remnant limping for another decade. By any meaningful measure the great Bonwit Teller closed in 1990, a casualty less of changing fashion than of having been owned by too many people who did not need it to exist.

Timeline

A Name on Fifth Avenue

Bonwit Teller belonged to a now-vanished tier of American retail: the upscale specialty department store, a notch more exclusive than the broad-line department stores and built entirely on taste. From its 1895 beginning the house sold fine women's apparel and accessories, and it cultivated the things that distinguished a carriage-trade store from a mass merchant — quality of merchandise, attentiveness of service, the sense that to shop there was to belong to a certain world. Through the first half of the twentieth century it moved up Manhattan with its clientele, and in 1929 it announced its arrival at the very top with the Fifth Avenue flagship at 56th Street.

That building was the company's signature. Eleven stories of restrained Art Deco, it carried at its upper reaches a band of limestone bas-reliefs depicting stylized dancing figures, and over its entrance a large, ornate metal grille — decorative flourishes that made the store a small landmark on an avenue full of them. The flagship opened with Eleanor Roosevelt present and remained Bonwit's heart for half a century, the address that the name evoked. A store like Bonwit Teller traded on permanence and refinement; the building embodied both, and for fifty years it was the physical argument for why a shopper should choose Bonwit over the competition.

The trouble with a business built on a single great address is that the address can become worth more than the business. By the late 1970s the Fifth Avenue site — prime Manhattan land at the center of the luxury district — was an asset whose development value dwarfed the profits of the store occupying it. That calculus, more than any failure of fashion sense, set the stage for the most notorious chapter in the company's history.

The Friezes Come Down

In 1979 the flagship building was sold to the developer Donald Trump, who intended to replace it with the high-rise that became Trump Tower. The store was to relocate into space within the new building, so the demolition was framed as a transition rather than a closing. What turned a routine redevelopment into an enduring controversy was the fate of the Art Deco ornament. Trump had publicly indicated that the limestone reliefs and the decorative entrance grille would be carefully removed and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had expressed interest in preserving them. Instead, during the 1980 demolition, the reliefs were jackhammered apart and the grille destroyed, the salvageable artwork reduced to rubble rather than rescued.

The destruction was widely condemned at the time and has been recounted many times since, with Trump offering shifting explanations — that the works had been judged of little artistic value, that careful removal would have cost too much and delayed the project. For the purposes of Bonwit Teller's own story, the episode matters as a marker: the most recognizable thing about the store, the building that had been its identity for fifty years, was gone, and the institution that continued was a tenant in someone else's tower rather than the owner of a landmark. The store relocated, but the demolition was the moment the name began to detach from anything solid. An upscale department store is partly a stage set — the architecture, the address, the sense of occasion are the product as much as the merchandise — and Bonwit had just lost its set.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The closure of Bonwit Teller did not produce the mass layoffs of a national chain — by 1990 it was a modest, sixteen-store operation, and the remnant that Pyramid kept alive was smaller still — but it removed a genuine New York institution, and the staff and longtime customers of the Fifth Avenue store lost a place that had anchored a particular idea of the city's retail life for the better part of a century. The flagship's former site, of course, became one of the most famous addresses in Manhattan; the store that had stood there for fifty years left no physical trace, the Art Deco reliefs that might have survived in a museum having been destroyed instead.

The brand's afterlife was minimal: a few mall stores under Pyramid through the 1990s, then a final bankruptcy that ended the name around 2000. Bonwit Teller endures today mostly in two registers of memory — as a vanished name from the golden age of the Fifth Avenue specialty store, recalled alongside B. Altman and other departed grandees, and as the unwitting subject of the friezes controversy, a recurring reference in accounts of how a developer disposed of an Art Deco landmark. The lasting mark is less a retail cautionary tale than a preservation one: the most-told story about Bonwit Teller is not how it sold dresses but how its building came down, and what came down with it.

Lessons

References

• Bonwit Teller Wikipedia
• Bankruptcy court approves sale of Bonwit's UPI Archives
• Donald Trump Has a History of Pulverizing Historic Buildings Artnet News
• History of New York's Bonwit Teller Department Stores ClassicNewYorkHistory.com