280 Broadway

The building you are approaching at 280 Broadway is known as the Marble Palace, a structure that fundamentally changed how Americans shopped. When it opened in 1846, it introduced the concept of the department store to the United States. Its founder, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart, broke from local tradition by offering fixed prices on goods, rather than the common practice of haggling. The building itself was a radical statement of wealth and innovation, as it was the first commercial structure in New York to be clad in Tuckahoe marble and designed in an elaborate Italianate style.