The Hugh O'Neill Dry Goods Building - 655 Sixth Avenue

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the stretch of Sixth Avenue from 15th to 23rd Streets was an important shopping thoroughfare, lined with lavish emporiums.  Well-dressed women crowded the sidewalks, moving from one store to another, including the Hugh O'Neill drygoods store at 655 Sixth Avenue.

Designed by Mortimer C. Merritt in 1886 in a commercial take on Renaissance Revival.  It would be the only emporium on the district to have a cast iron building.  Rounded towers anchored the corners of the four-story, block-wide structure.  A novelty at the time, the Hugh O'Neill store was painted yellow. 

O'Neill was born in Belfast and his parents brought him to New York as a child in 1844.  After the Civil War he opened a dry goods store near Union Square where the carriage class had begun shopping in stores like Tiffany & Company.  But in 1870, the merchant set his sights on a move to Sixth Avenue and began buying up small buildings. 

The Sixth Avenue Elevated appeared around the time of O'Neill's new opening, adding incentive to the growth of the Ladies' Mile and, subsequently, the success for Hugh O'Neill.   Five years later, he had 2,500 employees and in 1895, using the talents of Merritt again, he raised the domed towers and added a fifth floor.  A triangular pediment above the central section announced the original completion date, 1887

O'Neill did not live to see the great mercantile houses leave Sixth Avenue and move north to 34th Street and beyond.  The multi-millionaire storekeeper died in 1902.

The Ladies' Mile rapidly declined.  By the 1920, all the great dry goods stores were gone.  The once lavish retail palaces became home to small industries.  Sometime before the middle of the 20th century the shiny domes of Hugh O'Neill disappeared.  And by the late 1970s, the Ladies' Mile was a eerily ghostly, a dingy stretch of mostly-empty buildings.

Historic preservation stepped in when the Ladies' Mile Historic District was established in 1989.  The once-grand emporiums began, one by one, breathing new life as they were restored and became home to modern stores . 

Hugh O'Neill's however, was not to become a store again.  In 2003 it was purchased for $37 million and recycled into luxury condominiums.  Two penthouse floors were added, invisible from street level, and the fanciful beehive domes were rebuilt.  Today the building gleams with its coat of crisp white paint.

A grand dame among the Ladies' Mile, the Hugh O'Neill store has new life.