IN 1847 a ship loaded with provisions left New York for famine stricken Ireland. On its return voyage it carried a complement of new immigrants, and the man who had dispatched the vessel went out of his way to find jobs in the city for as many of them as he could.
A writer of the time characterised the philanthropist thus: "His manner is courteous to all, but reserved and cold except to, his intimate friends. He dresses quietly in the style of the day, his habits are simple, and he" shuns publicity ... Mr Stewart is not generally regarded as a liberal man in the metropolis."
In short, Alexander Tuiney Stewart was the very model of the canny Ulsterman or, as the Americans would have it, the Scotch Irishman.
At the height of his success he was the richest merchant, not just in the United States, but in the world. And yet this son of Erin is very little known to Irish history. He does not figure in the pantheon of Ulster movers and shakers with Harry Ferguson, Andrew Mellon and Timothy Eaton.
Severed Connections
The reason is that, when the dust of his homeland fell from his feet at the age of 22, Alexander Stewart severed all connections with it, except for that famine shipload, and became a lifelong New Yorker.
He was born in Belfast in 1802 and was brought up by his grandfather, who intended him for the ministry of the Presbyterian church. But when the old man died, Alexander sailed for the New World. With a $1,000 legacy from his grandparent, he bought a supply of lace "insertions" and "scollop trimmings", rented a small premises at 283 Broadway and proceeded to devote 18 hours a day to haberdashery and what were then called "Yankee notions", small items of woodware and tinware.
He had no experience in the dry goods business. But he found in himself a natural instinct for doing a deal, and he prospered, moving from one premises to another as trade shifted uptown until in 1862 he built his grandest store yet, on Broadway at Chambers Street. The Cast Iron Palace, as it was called, was the largest iron building of its day.
Here is a contemporary description, with a contemporary taste for statistics: "The ground floor is the principal salesroom. It is a simple but elegant apartment. The room contains 100 counters, with an aggregate length of 5,000 feet. Each article for sale has its separate department, and there are 30 ushers on duty to direct purchasers where to find the articles they seek."
By the end of the 1860s Stewart was one of the richest men in America. His fortune was estimated at anywhere between $30 million and $50 million. He owned two stores, textile mills, the Grand Union Hotel in fashionable Saratoga Springs, a theatre, several churches and a good part of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Only William B. Astor had more real estate.
Ostentatious Display
After four decades of toil, Alexander Stewart finally felt he deserved a little ostentatious display, something that would reflect his status as a mercantile prince of the city.
Fifth Avenue was the most fashionable address in New York. Astors lived there, and Vanderbilts, and Stuyvesant Fishes. Why not Stewarts, too? And so, on the corner of the avenue and 34th Street, he caused his Xanadu to rise. "The handsomest and costliest dwelling in the Union", wrote one chronicler at the time. That cost was put at $2 million.
"The fluted columns - purely Corinthian, and with capitals elaborately and delicately carved - which are the most striking feature of the main hall, are alone worth between $3,500 and $4,000 each," this cost conscious writer noted. "To the left of the grand hall are the marble staircase and the picture gallery."
Marble Mausoleum
And here, in this marble mausoleum, Alexander Stewart spent the remainder of his life, in solitary splendour apart from his wife, Cornelia. For he was forever to be on Fifth Avenue, but not of it.
The trouble was, he was in trade. He was self made. He was not Old Money. For all his riches the man from Belfast was doomed to be frozen out of the exclusive world of the Four Hundred.
New York's pre eminent hostess, Mrs Astor, lived just across the street, on the block where the Empire State Building now stands. And withering would be the sentence the Avenue's social sultana would pronounce on the Alexander Stewarts and their sort. "I buy my carpets from them," she sniffed, "but is that any reason why I should invite them to walk on them?"
It would be nice to report that Stewart went to his eternal rest in 1876. He did indeed die in that year, and was buried in the graveyard of St Mark's in the Bowery, close to where he had conducted his business life.
But in 1878 grave robbers dug him up and demanded of his family a ransom of $20,000. Alexander Stewart himself might have had a sneaking respect for such commercial enterprise, but his family stolidly refused to pay, and it was two years before the body was recovered.
Little trace remains in New York today of Alexander Turney Stewart. The Cast Iron Palace was sold not long after his death to John Wanamaker of Philadelphia, but is no longer part of Manhattan's streetscape.
The marble mansion on Fifth Avenue has vanished with time, too, although the Corinthian columns from its front door can still be seen attached to a Catholic church in Harlem. On its site there rises today the department store of B. Altman, by comparison a mere upstart in the world, of New York dry goods retailing.
In that world, it was an austere Belfast Presbyterian who showed the way, introducing America to the new, democratic and pleasurably communal act of shopping.