Sixth Avenue above 14th Street is a hodge-podge stretch of Manhattan, with enormous buildings that once housed the great shopping emporiums of the late 19th century interspersed with seen-better-days walkups.
And then there’s this curiosity on the northeast corner of West 16th Street.
Just four stories high, with a crowning cornice and a floor-to-ceiling show window across the second story, it’s a tender jewel box that managed to survive intact on this stretch of the former Ladies Mile.
If you’re a fan of the Gilded Age, you’ve heard of Ladies Mile—an enclave between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 10th to 23rd Streets where women of means could shop the fashions and furnishings on display in New York’s “palaces of trade” like Arnold Constable, B. Altman, and Stern’s.
On an average weekday, hordes of well-dressed women, some accompanied by maids and drivers, would pass this corner on their way to and from these grand emporiums.
With so much foot traffic, the corner made for the perfect place to construct a glittery jewelry store—which the Knickerbocker Jewelry Company did in 1903.
The final building, completed in 1904, was rectangular-shaped, with the long end and its first floor show windows facing 16th Street (third image).
Architect Simon B. Eisendrath wisely made the most of the Sixth Avenue side, which sat directly in line with Sixth Avenue elevated train riders. The decorative elements and ornamentation conveyed style and class.
What was it like inside? A 1904 article in the Brooklyn Times Union gushed over what it called one of the “show palaces” of Manhattan.
The lights “throw in clear relief the magnificent chandeliers, the tinted posts looming up as did the Coliseum of olden times, an ivory and gold ceiling, the rotunda, with verd-antique railings,” reported the Times Union.
“Out of town people never fail to visit this store to view the architectural beauties, the magnificent furnishings, the variety of jewels worthy of a king’s ransom.”
“The basement is given up to art goods, the main floor to jewelry and gold goods,” continued the Times Union, noting that the third floor featured an “ocularium” where customers could have their eyes tested and fitted with glasses by a Dr. Freed, “among the foremost oculists of the day.”
Ladies Mile began to vanish by the 1910s, as department stores like Macy’s relocated to Herald Square and Fifth Avenue in Midtown.
By 1905, the Knickerbocker Jewelry Company moved on from its jewel box as well, according to a Landmarks Preservation Commission report—which doesn’t note if the company opened a new store somewhere else in Manhattan or focused on its Brooklyn store across Fulton Street from Abraham & Straus.
Perhaps the move was hastened by a robbery that same year. It was an inside job; police found $1,000 worth of jewelry in the East 13th Street home of an employee, according to the New York Times.
In the depths of the Depression, a notice of dissolution of the Knickerbocker Jewelry Company was filed in 1931. By 1940 (fourth image), the company’s former store was occupied by a rug retailer.
Today, the jewel box houses a gym on its upper floors, At street level sits the old-school Hollywood Diner, luring in hungry and harried shoppers of contemporary Sixth Avenue’s big-box stores and national retailers.
[Second image: Wikipedia; third image: 1896 painting by Alice Barber Stephens; fourth image: New York Historical; fifth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]; sixth image: Wikipedia]