Siegel Cooper Company
| Department Store | |
| Industry | Store |
| Founded | 1887 |
| Founder | Henry Siegel, Frank H. Cooper and Isaac Keim |
|
Area served
|
Chicago, New York City, Boston |
The Siegel-Cooper Company was a department store that opened in Chicago in 1887 and expanded into New York City in 1896. At the time of its opening, the New York store was the largest in the world.
Siegel-Cooper began as a discount department store on State Street in the Loop. It was founded by Henry Siegel, Frank H. Cooper and Isaac Keim in 1887. Four years later, the store moved into the eight-story Second Leiter Building at State and Van Buren Street, designed by William Le Baron Jenney.
In September 1896, the company opened a store in New York City, a huge emporium in the Ladies' Mile Shopping District, joining the other major department stores in the neighborhood. Their steel-framed building, the first department store in New York to be so constructed, was the largest store in the world at the time, and was designed in Beaux-Arts style by DeLemos & Cordes, who would go on to design the R. H. Macy's store in Herald Square, which then took the title of largest. The six-story Siegel-Cooper store was located at 616-632 Sixth Avenue between West 18th and 19th Streets, and was built between 1895 and 1897, then expanded in 1899.
The steel-framed construction of the "Big Store", as it was called at the time, enabled the building to have large interior spaces with uninterrupted selling floors, and allowed for skylit courts. Siegel-Cooper took full advantage of the novelty – to New York City – of steel-framing by advertising the building as "the only and absolutely fire-proof and perfectly safe store in New York City."
The store offered a wide variety of dry goods in its 18 acres (7 ha.), as well as other amenities such as a grocery department, barber shop, theatre, telegraph office, art gallery, photo studio, bank, dental office, a 350-person restaurant, and a conservatory which sold live plants. The main floor featured a copy of Daniel Chester French's statue The Republic inside a marble-enclosed fountain. This was a popular meeting place, giving rise to the phrase "Meet me at the fountain," which the store used as a slogan, along with "A City in Itself" and "Everything Under the Sun".
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Wikipedia