“That was a powerful part of American commerce,” said Michael J. Lisicky, author of “Abraham & Straus” and nine other department store histories. “It really was one of the capitals of retail in America.”

Tishman Speyer’s new development knits together three interconnected buildings that had been entirely owned by Macy’s — the cast-iron structure, a 12-story 1929 Art Deco building to its east and a nine-story 1940s addition behind it, abutting Livingston Street. The Wheeler’s centerpiece is a 10-story, glass-fronted office tower that rests atop the rebuilt, four-story, iron-front edifice and the 1940s addition. The new tower is also seamlessly connected to the upper floors of the two bigger old buildings.

Macy’s, which has occupied the three old buildings since 1995 and was previously selling on six floors plus the basement, continues to own and occupy the basement and the first four stories of all three buildings; the store has been renovated. The Wheeler, which should soon receive its temporary certificate of occupancy, has its entrance at 181 Livingston.

Andrew Wheeler, who lived on Gallatin Place, was cursed with clairvoyance. He could envision the commercial future of Brooklyn on upper Fulton Street, but unfortunately for him that future was farther off than he imagined.

In 1873, in an act of faith as preposterous as building a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield to lure major-league ghosts, as in the movie “Field of Dreams,” Wheeler constructed the ostentatious French Second Empire palace in a largely undeveloped area. His motto might as well have been “Build it, and they will come” — only they didn’t, at least not in his lifetime.

Previously the graveyard of the First Dutch Reformed Church — skeletons were unearthed during excavation — the site of Wheeler’s edifice had lately been a circus ground. In that period Brooklyn’s commercial center was closer to the waterfront, in a stretch of lower Fulton Street north of Myrtle Avenue that is now part of Cadman Plaza.