Bonwit Teller

Bonwit Teller was a department store in New York City founded by Paul Bonwit.

Bonwit opened a store at Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in 1895. Two years later, now in partnership with Edmund D. Teller, he relocated their establishment (now known as Bonwit Teller) to Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. The firm was incorporated in 1907 as Bonwit Teller & Company and in 1911 relocated yet again, this time to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. They announced that this new location would provide consumers with:

an uncommon display of wearing apparel from foreign and domestic sources . . . which will appeal to those who desire the unusual and exclusive at moderate prices.

The firm continued to specialize in high-end women's apparel at a time when many of its competitors were diversifying their product lines, and Bonwit Teller became noted within the trade for the quality of its merchandise as well as the above-average salaries paid to both buyers and executives. It was one of a group of department stores catering to the carriage trade on Fifth Avenue, including Peck & Peck, Saks Fifth Avenue and B. Altman and Company.

In 1930, the retail trade in New York City was moving uptown. A new address on Fifth Avenue – the former A.T. Stewart & Company building at Fifty-sixth Street. In 1931 noted financier Floyd Odlum, who had cashed in his stock holdings just prior to the stock market crash of 1929 and was acquiring and turning around solid firms that were in financial distress. Bonwit agreed to let Odlum's wife Hortense serve as a consultant to the company in 1932, and two years later – poor health and the death of his wife – he sold the firm to Atlas Corporation. Odlum promptly named his wife as the new president (she became the first woman to hold such a position in New York), with Bonwit's son Walter Bonwit staying on as vice president and general manager.

Sold to the Hoving Corporation in 1946, the store underwent several changes of ownership, beginning with Genesco in 1956, then Allied Stores Corporation in 1979, and finally the Hooker Corporation in 1987. In the early 1980s, Donald Trump demolished the flagship Manhattan location to build the original Trump Tower. It had a new location attached to the Tower's indoor mall, however it only lasted a short time, before being replaced by another short-lived department store venture, Galeries Lafayette.

The Pyramid Company purchased the Bonwit Teller chain from bankruptcy court for $8 million in 1990, since the store was planned to be one of four major anchors in the company's then soon-to-open Carousel Center mall in Syracuse, New York. The company had plans to expand the store name throughout the company's two dozen malls and to create a new flagship store in Manhattan, but those plans never materialized. Pyramid reportedly lost $60 million between 1990 and 1999 acquiring and operating Bonwit Teller. The amount was the subject of a lawsuit alleging company chairman Robert Congel illegally transferred $20 million of the debt to partners in the company's Crossgates Mall in Albany, which never housed a Bonwit Teller store.

In the history of retail trade, the name Bonwit Teller has remained synonymous with high quality in women's apparel, and through that association Paul Bonwit secured his niche in the annals of New York business.

In 2005, River West Brands, a Chicago based brand revitalization company, announced that it had formed Avenue Brands LLC to help bring back the company as a luxury brand.

Locations

New York: 2 East 57th Street Manhasset, Scarsdale, Short Hills, Philadelphia, Jenkintown, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Oak Brook, Palm Beach, Bal Harbour, Troy, Michigan, Beverly Hills, Kansas City, Palm Desert, CA

Pop Culture References

Bonwit Teller was the store that was blown up in the motion picture Die Hard With a Vengeance at the start of the film.

Bonwit Teller is the store in the movie Rocky in which Rocky bought himself his black tiger jacket and a fur coat for Adrain.

Influences

Horace Hagedorn, founder of Miracle Gro, says of his mother Blanche:

had a great deal to do with my success. An entrepreneur herself, she had her own business in the early 1900s as a dressmaker and launched her own ready-to-wear business. At the time, if a woman was invited to an affair, she would have to plan four to six weeks in advance to get the dress she wanted. My mother, who was very enterprising, would find out about upcoming events and then call friends of guests, saying, "I understand Mrs. So and So is going to this affair, are you going?" Often the woman would respond that she didn’t have time to get a dress, and my mother would say, "If you have a few hours, you can have a new dress." She would bring a valise full of new dresses to the woman's home and adapt a ready-to-wear dress to the woman's measurements. In a much shorter time than the four to six weeks for a custom made dress, these "ready-to-wear" dresses would be finished. My mother saw a need and filled it — that was the reason for her success. After she established her business, she opened a shop for her dresses; years later, Paul Bonwit made an offer to buy her out, and Bonwit Teller was born. She passed along to me her sense of independence.

Links

• Quick History of Store