Abraham & Strauss Building

"A beautifully restored cast iron, landmark building. A New York Times article reads: By John Freeman Gill Nov. 22, 2019 Andrew Wheeler, who lived on Gallatin Place, was cursed with clairvoyance. He could envision the commercial future of Brooklyn on upper Fulton Street, but unfortunately for him that future was farther off than he imagined. In 1873, in an act of faith as preposterous as building a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield to lure major-league ghosts, as in the movie “Field of Dreams,” Wheeler constructed the ostentatious French Second Empire palace in a largely undeveloped area. His motto might as well have been “Build it, and they will come” — only they didn’t, at least not in his lifetime. Previously the graveyard of the First Dutch Reformed Church — skeletons were unearthed during excavation — the site of Wheeler’s edifice had lately been a circus ground. In that period Brooklyn’s commercial center was closer to the waterfront, in a stretch of lower Fulton Street north of Myrtle Avenue that is now part of Cadman Plaza. The new Wheeler Building was an instant white elephant ridiculed as “Wheeler’s Folly” for its size and the perceived foolishness of believing the retail corridor would ever move so far up Fulton. The nickname was surely also a snarky reference to an architectural folly — an extravagant, impractical structure erected purely to beautify a natural landscape. Wheeler’s hoped-for high-end tenants never materialized. Instead, he rented to a saloon and a Barnum knockoff called Bunnel’s Dime Museum, which promoted curiosities like “Leopard Boy” and “the wonderful Benoit twins” — “she has two heads, four arms and two feet, that in one perfect body meet.” On the top floor was an assembly room called Gallatin Hall. Below were lodge rooms. Newspaper ads of the day reveal a motley tenant roster that included the Sons of Temperance and an auction house selling odds and ends like seashells, opera glasses and pistols. The Wheeler Building was still an underused grandiosity in 1881, when a dry-goods merchant named Abraham Abraham had an epiphany that would transform not only his own business but all of Brooklyn retail. The Brooklyn Bridge was two years from completion, and as Abraham walked past Wheeler’s Folly — as he recounted to The Eagle years later — “it came to me like a flash that when the new bridge opened, that part of Fulton Street could be made the trade center of Brooklyn.” He and his partner, Joseph Wechsler, who had outgrown their store on lower Fulton, bought the building on the sly through a broker. They rebuilt the interior and added an eastern extension and a western wing with a Gallatin Place entrance. The 1885 grand opening of Wechsler & Abraham’s department store was a lavish affair. Crowds thronged the edifice, which an advertisement described as towering above its neighbors “like a Lebanon pine over the hillside shrubs.” In a show window, gawkers beheld Cleopatra’s 20-foot-long velvet barge riding a ruffled sea of blue silk waves. The entrance to this “fairy palace,” as The Eagle called it, was a soaring iron arch. At the ground floor’s center was a spacious rotunda, flooded with light from a dome five stories above. In this generous court, a great clock rested atop an ornamental bronze pillar. Brooklyn was still an independent city, and The Eagle chauvinistically tweaked its larger rival across the East River by describing a store lounge “where a Brooklyn lady can tenderly lay out her country cousin from New York … after she has … been overpowered by the scenes in a great metropolitan store.” Other retail emporia soon followed to upper Fulton, and a dynamic new commercial center was born. The company became Abraham & Straus in 1893, after Isidor and Nathan Straus, owners of R.H. Macy & Co., bought out Wechsler. A. & S. thrived and kept growing, ultimately encompassing eight interconnected buildings."