Books about Woolworth from Amazon.com

Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York.
             Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them.
            As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

Monica Randall grew up on the Gold Coast of Long Island and was fascinated by the massive estates and their tantalizing stories. Millionaire F. W. Woolworth built Winfield, the grandest of its manors in the 1910s. On a clear day, you can see the New York City skyline from its balustraded roof, yet for nearly a century few have been allowed to enter its gates.

In the 1960s Monica was living in one of the fabled mansions built by a Five-and-Dime heiress. While there, she began a career scouting locations for movie; she used many of the surrounding estates including Winfield. After a brief incarnation as a charm school, Winfield was closed and auctioned off. At the auction, Monica met a mysterious European businessman, who bought the house. After a whirlwind romance, they became engaged, and Monica moved in to Winfield, only to have her suspicions confirmed: Winfield is haunted. Amid magnificent gilded carvings and marble, a labyrinth of secret passageways, hidden chambers, and deserted tunnels help reveal the true nature of its eccentric builder.

Through exhaustive research and countless interviews, Monica gradually uncovered stories of the Woolworths’ sad past: the suicide of Edna Woolworth (Barbara Hutton’s mother), Woolworth’s obsession with Napoleon and the Egyptian occult, and the rumors surrounding the unsolved fire which burnt the first Winfield to the ground. This riveting memoir explores the culture and history of an era gone by, filled with enthralling stories of infamous scandals and breathtaking Gilded Age tales of New York society. Captivating and impossible to put down, this book will enchant readers everywhere.

Throughout the last fifty years the Gold Coast mansions were regularly razed for subdevelopments; Winfield is the last of the marble palaces still standing.