The store that would become B. Altman and Company began on Manhattan's Lower East Side as a family-owned store, which by 1865 had come to be solely owned by Benjamin Altman, one of the brothers in the family, and was located at Third Avenue and 10th Street. In 1877, the store, wanting to expand, relocated to 621 Sixth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets. This neo-Grec building was put up in four stages, and was designed by David and John Jardine, William Hume and Buchman & Fox. By 1906, though, Altman's had moved to a new block-long building at 351-57 Fifth Avenue running from 34th to 35th Streets, which was expanded in stages through 1913 to 188-89 Madison Avenue. The original Fifth Avenue building and the extensions were all designed by Trowbridge & Livingston in Italian Renaissance style. Altman's was the first big department store to make the move from the "Ladies' Mile" shopping district, where the dry-goods emporia had been located, to Fifth Avenue. That neighborhood was still almost entirely residential at the time, and the design of the new building, across the street from the grand residence of department-store rival A. T. Stewart's and diagonally across the avenue from the residence of Mrs. Astor, was planned to fit in with these palatial mansions around it. Following Altman's example, the other big stores, like Lord & Taylor in 1914, followed and made the move uptown as well. In the 1930s, Altman's made one of the early entries in the suburbs, with branches opening in East Orange, White Plains and Manhasset. The foresight of the organization in geographical selection can be seen in that the Short Hills location is now The Mall at Short Hills, the White Plains location is now The Westchester shopping mall, and the Manhasset location is adjacent to the Americana Manhasset, which opened nine years after the Altman's store.
After Altman's death
When Benjamin Altman died in 1913 at the age of 73, his stock in the stores was placed in a foundation, the Altman Foundation. In 1985, due to changing IRS rulings, the foundation sold the stores to an investor group that included members of the Gucci family and two principals from financial firm Deloitte & Touche. Altman's art collection, which included many Rembrandts, went to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1987, Australian real estate development company L.J. Hooker and its chief executive officer, George Herscu, purchased the controlling interest in the B. Altman stores to use these chains as anchors in poorly located, yet extravagant, new shopping centers across the country. With Hooker and Herscu knowing virtually nothing about how to operate these various retail chains, and then placing them in locations with no regard for market recognition or demographics, their strategy failed miserably, and in August 1989 B. Altman filed for bankruptcy protection, with the last store closing in 1990. The suburban Buffalo location at the huge Walden Galleria complex was, in fact, fully completed and fixtured but never occupied by Altman's. It would later be occupied in 1991 by local department store AM&A's and eventually a Bon-Ton, which vacated in 2006. This former never-opened Altman's location was demolished for a new cinema complex and mall expansion. The Carousel Center Mall location in Syracuse was under construction at the time and redesigned to house a succession of several discount anchors, one on each of the two floors. The store had a reputation for gentility and conservatism. It was regarded as similar to Marshall Field & Company in Chicago. Highlighting its sober reputation, the stores included a satellite location of Colonial Williamsburg's that sold classic colonial reproductions. Two lost treasures from the store are the famous Christmas windows, which rivaled those in the Lord & Taylor Building, a few blocks up Fifth Avenue, as well as the Charleston Gardens restaurant, which housed a full-sized facade of a Tara-like Charleston home. The St. David's location also had a Charleston Garden restaurant, as did the other branch stores.
The Manhattan B. Altman store featured in the storyline of the 2017 Amazon Studios television series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in which the main character, Midge Maisel, takes a job on the shop floor. Exterior scenes were filmed at the store's former Fifth Avenue building, while interior scenes were shot in a disused bank in Brooklyn.
