O'Neill Building
655 Avenue of the Americas | also 107 West 20th Street, 111 West 20th Street, 100 West 21st Street | Chelsea | built 1887
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Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1887
Hugh O'Neill opens a cast-iron dry goods emporium on Sixth Avenue
Irish immigrant Hugh O'Neill built this four-story cast-iron dry goods store on Sixth Avenue's Ladies' Mile, designed by architect Mortimer C. Merritt in a Renaissance Revival style and originally painted yellow. O'Neill raised the building by a fifth floor and added domed corner towers in 1895, and the store grew to employ 2,500 people at its peak.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1907
O'Neill's heirs merge the store with a rival before it fails
Hugh O'Neill died in 1902, and his heirs could not sustain the dry goods business on their own. In 1907 the store merged with the neighboring Adams Dry Goods Store, but the combined firm collapsed before World War I as fashionable shopping moved further uptown.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2003
The building is restored and converted into condominiums
After decades as manufacturing lofts and then offices, the former O'Neill store was bought for $37 million in 2003 and converted into luxury condominiums. Restorers rebuilt the cast-iron building's long-lost beehive domes and repainted its facade white.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- O'Neill BuildingWikipedia
- The Hugh O'Neill Dry Goods Building - 655 Sixth AvenueDaytonian in Manhattan
Nearby
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