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Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building

Frank Woolworth

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The Seagram and Woolworth Buildings as Architectural Translations of Business Success The commission of the Woolworth and the Seagram buildings was like those of most skyscrapers of their time; they were statements of power, commercially for the corporations they housed, and personally for the patrons whose names were associated with them. The Woolworth Building was constructed to honour its client Frank W. Woolworth. It was meant to showcase his business success while the Seagram Building also had a corporate affiliation with the Seagram company and CEO Samuel Bronfman as the client.

The Woolworth Building was commissioned by Frank Woolworth who became wealthy after founding the well-known chain that was F. W. Woolworth & Co. Five and Ten Cent Stores. His stores were a new development in commerce as he created a chain with a dominant position in a sector of a market.[1] Woolworth stimulated consumer desire and promoted the type of consumerism that reached across many social classes with consistent pricing for desired goods.[2] It was through this talent in merchandizing and a large ego that fueled him that he accumulated such wealth to pay for the Woolworth Building. Woolworth sold goods for amounts that appealed to price-conscious people and yet price consciousness was not on his mind or in his plans while imagining the Woolworth Building. A chain with a particular identity was a new idea, and Woolworth embraced the attention this business model was attracting and was obviously comfortable converting its identity into a head office building which he conceived as an “imposing urban monument.”[3] The Woolworth Building was undoubtedly built with the intention of being a visible reflection of his business success. Frank W. Woolworth was supposedly quite head strong and driven and once he captured an audience economically, he wanted to further extend this gesture with “his seemingly sudden decision to build a gigantic and extremely visible Gothic Skyscraper, the height of which topped all earlier records, and he did.”[4] Woolworth’s head office space only took up one and a half floors in total (floors 23 and 24) while the rest was retail space for tenants. Interestingly, a gigantic structure was not needed for the company’s size but, instead, it was needed to showcase the power of the Woolworth name in the skyline of New York City.

The Seagram Building was built with similar intentions as the Woolworth Building. It was to be an iconic structure in the city of New York, but for a different corporation and patron and designed by a different architect. The Seagram Building was commissioned by Samuel Bronfman, the CEO and founder of the Distillers Corporation Limited which acquired the Seagram Distillery Company and kept its name, both of which having Canadian roots.[5] Bronfman was a business man who valued organization and hard work all the while following the motto he “tried to live by: Integrity—Tradition—Craftsmanship.”[6] In the 1930s, Samuel Bronfman took sole and full control of Seagram from his brothers and continued to ensure its dominant position in the liquor industry of North American.[7] This was possible due to Bronfman’s entrepreneurial skills as he was “an exceptional industrialist and strategist.”[8] The head office space for Bronfman was in downtown Montréal, Québec. Bronfman established the subsidiary Seagram, of parent company Distillers Corporation Limited, in the United States by purchasing distilleries and moving into office space in New York City, which happened not long after Prohibition was repealed in 1933.[9] Bronfman extended his entrepreneurial skills into advertising and marketing as he branded Seagram products while instilling his belief of “valu[ing] quality in all things.”[10] As his company’s success and visibility grew, the single floor it occupied in the Chrysler Building no longer provided enough space. Bronfman, like Woolworth, understood you had to spend money to obtain it, a philosophy that is reflected in the former’s plan for Seagram’s new head office. The intention behind the Seagram Building was to be more than just a head office. Phyllis Lambert captures in her book, Building Seagram, what the Seagram Building truly stood for: “The Seagram building was to be more than a company headquarters: I believe [Samuel Bronfman] came to see it as a monument to the opportunities business afforded in the New World, a monument to his company, which was his own doing, and therefore, ultimately, a monument to himself.”[11]

Although the two buildings were conceived and constructed in very different times and for different corporations, they were, as skyscrapers, “meant to be correlated with the appearance of large-scale enterprise on the American economic scene.”[12] The Woolworth and Seagram Buildings were intended to demonstrate not only business success but actually stand as monuments of power for their privately-held corporations and to act as signatures in the city for their patrons. Their commissions played a large role in the constellation of factors that brought them into being and ensured their lasting impact. The two patrons not only invested a great deal of money but also lent their names to a large structure. They obviously wanted the design of their skyscraper to be in the hands of someone who could carry out and translate their vision into reality with impact, power, and skill.

[1] Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895-1915," in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940, (JHU Press, 1997), 129-159.
[2] Gail Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City: the Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[3] Fenske, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building," 143.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Phyllis Lambert and Barry Bergdoll, Building Seagram (New York: Yale University Press, 2013).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Graham D. Taylor, "“From Shirtsleeves to Shirtless”: The Bronfman Dynasty and the Seagram Empire," Business and Economic History Online 4, no. 1 (2006): 1-36.
[9] Lambert, Building Seagram, 7.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, 2.
[12] Fenske, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building," 130.

Nina Christianson