For more than a century, Woolworth's five and dime stores represented Americana, mirroring the country's growth, its good times and bad, its foibles and its fads. The chain was founded by Frank W. Woolworth, who in 1879 established two stores--one in Utica, New York, which failed and was closed down, and another in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which succeeded and marked the beginning of the legacy of the Woolworth's Five and Tens. This work is a full account of the chain, its rags-to-riches founder, Frank W. Woolworth, and his flamboyant and tragic descendants. It traces the important role that Woolworth stores played in the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, as part of the Civil Rights movement (which tainted Woolworth's as the Big Business enemy of the downtrodden), and the gradual disintegration of the five and tens during the 1980s and early 1990s. The dramatic story is enhanced with important photos featuring such events as the closing of a Woolworth's in Germany by Nazi soldiers and the Greensboro sit-in as well as archival photos from Woolworth's 40th, 50th, and 60th anniversary booklets.

A century of Americana is brought to life with more than 150 photos of the famous five-and-dime--with remembrances of everything from the background of its founder, Frank W. Woolworth, to the store's legendary lunch counters and historic skyscraper. color photos.

This book, first published in 1940, is the unmissable biography of Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919), the American entrepreneur behind the F. W. Woolworth Company and the operator of variety stores known as “Five-and-Dimes”. He was also the first to use self-service display cases, so customers could examine what they wanted to buy without the help of a sales clerk. Woolworth founded an international financial empire with a short lease on a tiny store, a couple of gross of tin cans and a simple but revolutionary idea. Woolworth grew up a poor farm boy who tended his father’s cows barefoot, but he followed the great American dream by parlaying native ingenuity, business sense, and understanding of people into a huge fortune and establishing an institution that became a familiar part of America’s way of life.

The American success story of F.W. Woolworth, who with his idea for a ten-cent store, built a merchandising empire in the late 1800s.

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.

Describes the affair that the Duchess of Windsor had with the openly gay heir to the Woolworth fortune in the early 1950s.