Saks Fifth Avenue Flagship (New York City, New York)

 store / shop, interesting place, commercial building

10-story Renaissance-revival department store originally completed in 1924. Designed by Starrett & Van Vleck with metalwork by the Wm. H. Jackson Company, it expanded into a 9-story extension to the east that serves as the base of the adjoining office tower (formerly the Swiss Bank Tower) that was added in 1990. The administrative offices occupy the less visible setback stories above the 7th floor at the original building.

Saks Fifth Avenue had its origins in Washington, D.C. in 1867, when 19-year-old Andrew Saks opened a small menswear shop with earnings from his newspaper delivery route. By the mid-1880s Saks had expanded his D.C. establishment and opened satellite stores in Richmond, Virginia, and Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1900 Saks bought a site on Herald Square, and opened a department store. When he died in 1912, his son Horace Saks took over the management of the company. By 1921 Saks was earning profits of one million dollars per year. When in 1922 the landlord of Saks's Herald Square building doubled the rent, Horace Saks decided to revive earlier plans to move to Fifth Avenue and open a new store. To distinguish between the two stores, Saks dubbed his new establishment "Saks Fifth Avenue".

The building is faced in Indiana limestone, brick, and cast-stone. On the Fifth Avenue facade, the ground floor level is a rusticated granite base into which are set twin entrances flanked by large display-windows. This level reads as one-and-a-half stories tall, and corresponds to the store's first floor within. The twin entrances, as opposed to the more usual grand central entrance of other department stores, emphasize the broadness or length of the building along its full-block Fifth Avenue frontage. Each entrance is set in a rectangular frame, embellished with carved spiral moldings and topped by a plain cornice. Each entranceway includes two sets of double-doors in the lower half and windows set behind elegantly detailed metal grilles in the upper half. Running the full length of the facade, interrupted only by the twin entrances, are the famous Saks display-windows. These are enormous sheets of plate-glass, set in bronze frames of slender Corinthian piers set on elongated tapering pedestals. Between each window is a narrow section of marble wall. Running along the top of the windows and wall sections is a continuous bronze grille composed of panels of four quatrefoils; the grille is supported as an entablature by the slender Corinthian piers framing the windows. The bronze grille entablature is capped by a freestanding frieze of alternating urns and floral motifs. Set into the rusticated limestone facing above the display-windows are small paired square-headed windows with ornamental metal grilles.

Above the entrance and the display-window level rises the main element of the facade's design: a 14-bay wide, double-story order of fluted pilasters supporting an architrave. The treatment is flat and restrained, but the capitals and architrave frieze are adorned with inventive ornament. The divisions between the 2nd-and 3rd-floor windows, bracketed within the double-height pilasters, are marked by an architrave with a balustrade, supported on single-story engaged piers flanking the 2nd-floor windows.

The 4th-6th-floor levels of the facade form the next portion, set between the architrave at the 3rd floor and a sill molding below the 7th. Here the facade is faced in brick, with rectangular windows. Only the windows at the 4th-floor level have cast-stone surrounds; they are also topped by plain cast-stone panels flanked by flat volutes.

The windows in the 2nd-6th-floor levels are each composed of a pair of 2-over-2 sash, each with a transom above, separated by a heavy center mullion; the transom is a casement with two lights. The 7th floor is the last before a series of setbacks begins, and acts as a crown to the facade. Also faced in brick, it has windows with cast-stone surrounds and cornices; alternating with the windows are simple stone roundels with ornamental carving at their top and bottom. The 7th-floor windows are similar in configuration to those below, but narrower. This level is capped by a cornice with a balustrade above.

The 8th, 9th & 10th floors are progressively set back from Fifth Avenue and also from the side-streets. The 8th floor is brick-faced; its windows comprise 2-over-2 sash topped by a blind lunette. A 5-bay-wide addition on the north projects almost to the 7th-floor balustrade. At the 9th floor the single-window bays of the lower floors are replaced by bays consisting of paired narrow windows separated by a slender colonnette. The pairs of windows are in turn separated by cast-stone rectangular panels. This level is topped by a heavy stone cornice supporting a plain brick parapet, whose bays are marked by simple squat brick piers. The 10th floor, the final level, is brick-faced, with simple paired window openings; it is topped by a cast-stone cornice and a final stone balustrade.

The north and south facades are identical in design to the Fifth Avenue facade, with the following exceptions. The 49th-Street facade has only one entranceway, set in the 8th bay from the west; its design is identical to that of the twin entrances on Fifth Avenue, but it also has an original metal canopy hung from the wall above the entrance. On either side of the canopy are raised letters spelling "SAKS & COMPANY", set between squares with quatrefoil designs; it is topped by a bronze frieze of urns and floral motifs. The rows of large light bulbs on the canopy's underside are not original. There is a loading dock at the east end bay of the original building's facade, and two sets of metal service doors between it and the entrance. It has openings half the width of their neighbors; in the 4th-7th floors there are shallow projecting horizontal brick bands.

The 50th-Street facade also has only one entranceway, with a canopy, identical to that on 49th Street. In addition, it has a loading bay in the 13th and 14th bays at the east end of the facade, in place of display-windows. The windows above the loading area in the 14th bay are open, looking onto a shaft; this bay is otherwise identical to its counterpart on 49th Street.

Both the northwest and southwest corners are chamfered, with single bays matching the design of the main facades. The east extension that serves as the base of the office tower is described under the entry for 623 Fifth Avenue, the former Swiss Bank Tower.

The three of the interior floors were renovated in 2019 by Rem Koolhaas/OMA in collaboration with Gensler and Saks Store Planning & Design. The centerpiece of the renovation is multicolored escalator covered in a colorful iridescent dichroic film.

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