In 1910, Frank Woolworth—the founder of the world’s largest retail chain—began secretly purchasing properties along Broadway in Lower Manhattan. By April, he owned the entire block. His original plan was a modest 12-to-16-story office building. But after the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower claimed the title of world’s tallest structure, Woolworth kept pushing his architects higher.
The final design, by Cass Gilbert, called for 60 stories reaching 792 feet. The building was clad in cream-colored terra cotta with Gothic ornamentation inspired by European cathedrals. Its steel frame required 69 pneumatic caissons driven over 100 feet through Manhattan clay to reach bedrock. Construction topped out on July 1, 1912, two weeks ahead of schedule.
When traditional financing fell through, Woolworth paid the entire $13. 5 million cost in cash—no mortgage, no bonds, no outside investors. At the grand opening on April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph button in the White House, igniting 80,000 light bulbs that illuminated the tower from base to crown. A minister standing in the lobby called it “the cathedral of commerce.
” The building held the title of world’s tallest for 16 years. But long before that title was surpassed, something stranger was happening inside the home of the man who had built it. By 1917, servants at Winfield Hall, Woolworth’s marble estate on Long Island, had grown accustomed to a peculiar sight. The founder of the five-and-dime store wandered the corridors wearing a military uniform that had once belonged to Napoleon.
He slept in the emperor’s own bed, sat for hours in a red velvet throne, and kept a library filled with volumes on Egyptian mythology and occult rituals. At the far end of the house, behind a closed door, his wife sat in a plain room with a single bed and a rocking chair. Her mind had been gone for over a year. Frank Winfield Woolworth was born on April 13, 1852, on a failing potato farm in Rodman, New York.
The family lived near the remains of a property once connected to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother, who had spent years in exile in the United States. As children, Frank and his brother Charles were fascinated by the stories of distant empires and conquered kingdoms. For a boy stuck pulling potatoes out of cold dirt, Bonaparte represented everything that Rodman was not. Frank left school at 16.
His mother financed a bookkeeping course at a business school in Watertown, where he studied commerce but studied shop windows even more carefully. His formative moment came when he and his brother scraped together 50 cents in loose change to buy their mother a birthday present. When they brought their coins to the counter at a department store, the clerks gathered around to laugh. The boys were mocked for paying in nickels and pennies.
Walking home, Frank told Charles that one day 50 cents would be enough to buy five or ten items, and every customer, no matter how they paid, would be treated with respect. In the spring of 1873, Frank walked into the Augsbury & Moore Dry Goods store in Watertown with a bookkeeping certificate and a proposition. He would work three months for nothing in exchange for learning the trade. He proved terrible at serving customers—he froze, stumbled over his pitch, and became a liability behind the counter.
But he could do one thing nobody else could match: dress a window. Given control of the front display, he grouped merchandise by color and shape, and the storefront began pulling people off the sidewalk and through the door. Studying those customers, Frank began forming an instinct. Standard practice at the time required a clerk to stand between the merchandise and the buyer.
Nothing had a fixed tag. Everything was a negotiation. Frank saw the flaw. What if the goods were placed where people could touch them?
What if every item had a price already attached? What if the display did the selling and the clerk simply handled the money? The confirmation came from a surplus clearance sale. Leftover stock was piled onto a table and priced at 5 cents each.
The items sold quickly. Customers who would never have looked at them behind a glass case grabbed them eagerly when the price was visible and the goods were within reach. In 1879, William Moore advanced Frank $300 in merchandise—thimbles, combs, button hooks, harmonicas, baby bibs, soap, pencils, and napkins. Frank opened Woolworth’s Great 5 Cent Store in Utica, New York.
The first days were promising, but the location was poor and within weeks the operation failed. He packed up the sign and moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where thrift was a cultural value. First-day sales came to $127. 65.
Within weeks, he added a second tier of goods priced at 10 cents. Lancaster held and turned a profit. By 1889, a decade after the Utica failure, Frank had 12 profitable locations across four states. By 1900, the chain had grown to 59 outlets with annual revenue exceeding $5 million.
But the real breakthrough came when Frank began buying directly from manufacturers, bypassing wholesalers entirely. Volume purchasing gave him leverage no individual shopkeeper could match. Rather than fight the partners he had trained who launched independent chains using the same format, Frank organized them into what became known as the Friendly Rival Syndicate. Each chain operated under its founder’s name, but they pooled their buying power through Frank’s purchasing office.
The key figures were all Frank’s people—his cousin Seymour Knox, Fred Kirby, Earl Charlton, and his own brother Charles. On November 12, 1911, Frank persuaded all four rivals to merge into a single corporation under the Woolworth name. It brought 596 locations under one roof with $65 million in combined capital. It was, at the time, the largest retail consolidation in American history.
By 1910, Frank had arranged his family like a window display. He owned a mansion on Fifth Avenue and purchased townhouses for each of his three daughters on the same block. In practice, it was a row of expensive boxes occupied by women who rarely saw their father. Helena, the eldest, married a former assistant district attorney and settled into quiet stability.
Edna married Franklin Laws Hutton, a young financier with a reputation for charm and ambition—and whispers about his fidelity. Jessie fell in love with James Paul Donahue, whose family fortune came from a fat rendering factory. Frank begged her not to marry him. She married him anyway.
Frank compensated for his absence with extravagance. Every buying trip to Europe produced armfuls of presents. But the time together did not increase. By 1916, Jenny, Frank’s wife, was no longer capable of managing anything.
Her mind had begun to deteriorate, and a nurse waited outside her door. Frank rarely visited. Edna’s marriage had been deteriorating for years. Franklin Hutton drank heavily and kept mistresses with little effort to conceal them.
Edna, isolated and increasingly despairing, sought help from her father, but Frank was consumed by the construction of Winfield Hall. On the evening of May 2, 1917, Edna was at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The official cause of death was suffocation resulting from mastoiditis, an infection of the bone behind the ear. No autopsy was performed.
But rumors began almost immediately. Sources close to the family said that Edna had received a letter confirming the existence of yet another mistress, put on her finest lace dress, and swallowed a lethal quantity of strychnine crystals. She was 33 years old. Her four-year-old daughter Barbara was the one who found her.
Frank Woolworth never recovered from it. He had built an empire on the principle that every problem had a solution if you controlled enough variables. His daughter’s death was the one failure no amount of money could reverse. The Napoleon fixation had already taken hold.
Winfield Hall, completed in 1916, was a 56-room Italian Renaissance residence clad entirely in marble. The grand staircase alone cost $2 million. Ceilings were trimmed in 24-karat gold. Sixteen fireplaces warmed the twelve bedrooms.
The library held works on ancient Egyptian religion, ceremonial magic, and the occult sciences. Scarabs, serpents, and cartouches appeared in the carved stonework throughout the house. At the heart of it all was a precise replica of Napoleon’s bedroom at the Château de Malmaison, furnished with the emperor’s actual possessions. The bed had once belonged to Napoleon himself.
Woolworth wore the uniforms, sat in what he called the emperor’s chair, and spent hours alone with the door closed. Several people close to him reported that he believed himself to be the emperor reincarnated. Meanwhile, Frank had promoted a young man named Hubert Templeton Parson to general manager of the company. Frank treated him like the son he never had.
Then Parson began to compete. He built a mansion larger than Woolworth’s own, and when Woolworth bought a new automobile, Parson bought a newer one. After Edna’s death, something in Frank’s constitution broke. He experienced violent mood swings, alternating between frantic energy and weeks of near-total collapse.
His physical health deteriorated in parallel. Frank Woolworth was terrified of dentists. By 1918, several of his teeth had decayed badly, and at least one had become severely infected. His doctors urged him to seek treatment.
He refused. On April 5, 1919, the infection reached his bloodstream. Sepsis set in quickly. Frank Woolworth died at Winfield Hall on April 8, five days before his 67th birthday.
Frank had been preparing a new will. It was drafted, reviewed, and ready for signature. He had not signed it. Without a valid new will, the courts fell back on the most recent signed document—a will drawn up in 1889, when Frank was a struggling retailer with a modest income.
That will contained a single provision: everything went to his beloved wife Jenny. All of it—the estate valued at approximately $76 million—passed to a woman who could no longer recognize her own daughters. Jenny lived another five years and died in 1924. The estate, which had grown to roughly $78 million, was divided into three equal parts: one for Helena, one for Jessie, and one for Edna’s only child—a girl named Barbara, who was 11 years old when she became one of the wealthiest children on the planet.
Barbara Hutton inherited $26 million before she had any idea what to do with it. After her mother’s death, she had been passed between relatives like an unwanted heirloom. In 1930, her family staged a debutante ball at the Ritz-Carlton that reportedly cost more than $60,000—at the depths of the Great Depression, with breadlines stretching through lower Manhattan. The newspapers were not kind.
They christened her “the poor little rich girl. ”
She married her first husband at 20, a self-styled Georgian prince whose royal credentials were at best decorative. The divorce settlement cost her between two and three million dollars. Her second husband was a Danish aristocrat with a shorter temper.
The third marriage was the one the world remembers: in 1942, Barbara married Cary Grant. The tabloids called them “Cash and Cary. ” It lasted three years. Grant was the only one of her seven husbands who refused alimony.
There were four more marriages after him. Barbara was capable of extraordinary generosity. During the Second World War, she donated her London mansion to the United States government for use as the official residence of the American ambassador. She funded hospitals and schools.
But the spending never stopped, and the fortune was not infinite. In July 1972, her son Lance was killed in a plane crash near Aspen, Colorado. He was 36. His death broke something that the marriages and the money had only bent.
Barbara spent her final years at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, frail and largely confined to her suite. At the time of her death on May 11, 1979, one biographer wrote that only $3,500 remained of the Woolworth fortune. The company Frank built followed a different arc. On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University walked into the F.
W. Woolworth store in Greensboro. They bought toothpaste at the main counter and kept the receipt. Then they walked to the 66-seat lunch counter at the back of the store and sat down.
The lunch counter was for white customers only. They knew this. They sat down anyway. The four students stayed until the store closed that evening.
The next morning, they returned with 20 more students. The day after that, more than 60. Within days, hundreds of demonstrators filled the store. Within three months, 55 cities across 13 states had seen their own lunch counter sit-ins.
The movement formalized as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By midsummer, losses at the Greensboro location had passed $200,000. On July 25, 1960, the store manager gave in. He asked four of his own Black employees to change out of their work uniforms and sit down at the lunch counter as customers.
They ordered. They were served. They ate. The integration of Woolworth’s lunch counters began not with a handshake between executives, but with four employees removing their aprons and sitting down.
The Greensboro Woolworth store served all customers for another three decades. When it finally closed in 1993, a section of the counter was donated to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The building became the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. The companies that eventually killed the Woolworth chain did not invent anything new.
They took Frank Woolworth’s original ideas—fixed prices, open displays, high volume, thin margins, direct purchasing—and executed them on a scale his successors never matched. Kmart, Walmart, and Target all opened their first stores in 1962. Through the 1980s, the Woolworth Corporation tried to reinvent itself with dozens of specialty retail formats. The one that worked was Foot Locker, a specialist athletic footwear store that opened in 1974 and outlived everything else the company had built.
On July 17, 1997, the last Woolworth stores in the United States closed their doors. That same year, Walmart was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average—taking the spot that had belonged to Woolworth. In 2001, the company changed its name to Foot Locker Incorporated. In May 2025, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced the acquisition of Foot Locker for $2.
4 billion. The Woolworth Building still stands at 233 Broadway. Its lobby is intact, with the carved caricatures of Frank Woolworth and Cass Gilbert still facing each other from opposite corners. The tower is residential now.
Nobody works for the Woolworth company there anymore. Nobody has since 1999.