The Bonwit Teller store is another lost landmark of the time when the 57th Street area was the home of suave and sophisticated shops instead of the brash hyperscraper. Designed in 1929 as the Stewart & Company store, it had an entranceway that was a stupendously luxurious mix of limestone, bronze, platinum and hammered aluminum.

Although there was a small outcry, the building was demolished for the Trump Tower in 1980. Protest came both too late and too early.

By the 1910s Bonwit Teller & Company was one of the most prominent women’s retailers in the city. But it was still on Fifth Avenue and 38th Street in 1929, when Stewart, another women’s store, built an emporium at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in the new luxury retailing district.

With 12 stories of severe, almost unornamented limestone climbing to a ziggurat of setbacks, the Stewart store was the antithesis of the conventional 1928 Bergdorf Goodman one block north.