The Rogers Peet & Co Journal

The story behind a Broadway building that became a New York City Landmark. At 258 Broadway, overlooking City Hall Park, stands an eight-story building that has carried the Rogers Peet Company name through more than a century of New York history. In December 2010, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission officially designated the Rogers, Peet & Company Building a New York City Landmark, recognizing its place in the architectural development of Manhattan. The decision brought renewed attention to a building whose history began with a fire. A NEW BUILDING FOR A CHANGING CITY Rogers Peet Company opened its store at Broadway and Warren Street in 1889, occupying an earlier five-story building designed by architect John B. Snook. On December 4, 1898, a major fire destroyed the property and damaged neighboring buildings, including the Home Life Insurance Building and the Postal Telegraph Cable Company Building. The incident attracted considerable attention. New York was in the midst of its first great skyscraper boom, and the fire raised questions about the safety of the increasingly tall buildings appearing along lower Broadway. Construction of a replacement began the following year. Completed in April 1900, the new Rogers, Peet & Company Building was designed by John B. Snook & Sons, the architectural firm established by the original architect's family. Its steel-frame construction, large windows and strongly defined brick piers reflected the influence of the Chicago School, whose architectural approach helped shape the first generation of American skyscrapers. The building was extended along Warren Street in 1909 by Townsend, Steinle & Haskell. ROGERS PEET COMPANY'S FOUR CORNERS By the early twentieth century, Rogers Peet Company had established a recognizable presence across Manhattan. Its advertisements referred to the company's stores as the “Four Corners”, highlighting locations along Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Among them were the stores at Broadway and Warren Street, Broadway and 13th Street, and Fifth Avenue and 41st Street. Another important location was the Marbridge Building near Herald Square, which housed a Rogers Peet store from 1906 until 1922. The addresses followed the city's changing commercial geography, as New York's principal shopping districts gradually moved northward. Historical photographs also preserve a detail that has since disappeared: the large Rogers Peet Company sign once mounted on the roof of the Warren Street building. For decades, the company's name was quite literally part of the Broadway streetscape. PRESERVED IN NEW YORK'S HISTORY The Warren Street store closed around 1976. The building remained, and its upper floors were later converted to residential use. On December 14, 2010, the Landmarks Preservation Commission recognized its architectural and historical significance. The designation was confirmed by the New York City Council in March 2011. Today, 258 Broadway remains an important example of early steel-frame construction and a surviving record of the period when New York was beginning to build upward. For Rogers Peet Company, it is also a particularly tangible part of the company's history: an original commercial address whose significance now extends well beyond retail. For another perspective on Rogers Peet Company's early relationship with New York, read “New York, 1879. A City, a Map, a Legacy.”, featuring the historic Currier & Ives panorama published for the company. Historical reference: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Designation Report LP-2432, December 14, 2010.   Rogers Peet Company — New York, since 1874.

Rogers Peet Company and Currier & Ives: a remarkable piece of American heritage. In 1879, just five years after its founding, Rogers, Peet & Co. published an extraordinary panoramic map of New York City, produced by the renowned American lithographic firm Currier & Ives. Depicting Manhattan from New York Harbor, the richly detailed illustration captures the city's architecture, bustling waterways and commercial landmarks during an era of remarkable growth. Among the landmarks identified on the map stands Rogers Peet, whose Broadway establishment was already part of New York's commercial landscape. More than a geographical illustration, the map reflects the company's deep connection to the city and its early approach to communication, bringing together commerce, craftsmanship and visual culture. Today, this remarkable document remains a testament to the origins of Rogers Peet Company and its enduring New York heritage. New York, since 1874. Historical reference: Currier & Ives, New York, 1879. Published by Rogers, Peet & Co. Original work documented by the Library of Congress, LCCN 2002710660.

The following account is based on an article published by The New York Times on November 7, 1954, in Section F, page 6. On November 6, 1874, three men combined their experience to establish a new menswear business in New York. The company would eventually bear the names of two of them: Marvin N. Rogers, a clothing manufacturer, and Charles B. Peet, a clothing wholesaler, both of whom died shortly after the business was founded. The third partner, Frank R. Chambers, went on to build Rogers Peet Company and remained closely associated with its direction until his death in 1940, at the age of 89. Looking back on the company’s development, president Phillips Roome Turnbull described its progress as slow and deliberate. Rogers Peet preferred evolution to revolution, an approach that reflected both the way the business was run and the clothes it sold. Trust as a Business Principle From the beginning, Rogers Peet placed unusual emphasis on transparency. At a time when caveat emptor — “let the buyer beware” — remained a common principle in retail, the company was among the early menswear businesses to label garments with information about their fabric composition. Cloth received from American and English mills was also tested before reaching the customer. Frank R. Chambers appears to have taken this responsibility rather literally: according to the article, he tested the weather resistance of fabrics by placing samples on the roof of the company building and leaving the elements to do the rest. It is a small detail, but an revealing one. Rather than simply making claims about quality, Rogers Peet tried to understand how a cloth would actually perform. Money Back, 1880 In 1880, Rogers Peet introduced a money-back policy for dissatisfied customers, an unusual practice in menswear retail at the time. The company also followed the fixed-price system pioneered by John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, replacing bargaining with clearly marked prices. There was one exception: members of the clergy received a ten percent discount, a practice that later became more common. Rogers Peet was conservative in some respects, but advertising was not one of them. In 1879, the company became an early retail advertiser to use illustrations of specific products and adopted a lighter, more direct tone than much of the commercial language of the period. Cartoons also appeared in its advertising at a time when they were still unusual in retail communication. The approach was practical: make the product easier to understand and make the business easier to trust. A New York Business Rogers Peet continued to grow and, at its height, operated twelve stores across New York. As retail gradually moved toward larger individual locations, the company consolidated its operations. By the time the article was published in 1954, Rogers Peet operated stores at Broadway and Warren Street, Fifth Avenue and Forty-first Street, and Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, as well as a location in Boston. Its wholesale business extended the Rogers Peet name to more than forty American cities, giving the company a presence well beyond Manhattan while keeping New York at the centre of its identity. Learning the Business Phillips Roome Turnbull joined Rogers Peet in 1920 after studying wool weaving in Scottish mills. He began in the tailoring department and later spent time across the different areas of the company, developing a practical understanding of how the business worked from cloth to customer. His progression through the company was steady. He became assistant secretary, assistant treasurer and director in 1921, treasurer in 1923, vice president in 1928 and president in 1937. His father had held the same position from 1916 until his death in 1923. During Turnbull’s thirty-four years with Rogers Peet, menswear changed considerably. Clothes became lighter as heating improved in buildings and public transport, man-made fibres found an increasingly important place in the market, and shorter working hours together with suburban life created new demand for leisurewear. The wardrobe changed because everyday life was changing with it. Looking Ahead Asked what the future might hold, Turnbull avoided making grand predictions. He expected dark colours to remain popular and believed synthetic fibres would prove most useful when blended with natural materials rather than replacing wool or silk altogether. He anticipated only modest changes to the narrow lapels and natural shoulders then in fashion, and despite the growth of suburban shopping, he believed the strongest market for better clothing would remain in the city. His view of progress was measured. Rogers Peet should remain current, but not simply for the sake of novelty. What still worked was worth keeping; what no longer did could be reconsidered. According to Turnbull, the company had managed to strike that balance. He believed both his father and Frank R. Chambers would have recognised the Rogers Peet stores of 1954 and, more importantly, approved of what the company had become.

What surviving garments, catalogues and museum records tell us. Some parts of a company’s history survive better than others. In the case of Rogers Peet, they survive in garments, catalogues, labels and museum collections. Founded in New York in 1874, the company appears today in the archives of institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Historic New England and the Kyoto Costume Institute. Taken together, these records provide something more useful than anecdote: a material record of what Rogers Peet made, sold and thought worth putting into print. They also allow the company’s history to be read through the objects themselves. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several objects associated with Rogers Peet Company, each representing a different part of the male wardrobe. Among them is an evening top hat dating from around 1900, for which Rogers Peet Company is identified as the maker. The museum also preserves an early twentieth-century silk necktie associated with the company as a department store. Elsewhere in the collection is a wool bathing suit dated between 1920 and 1929, along with a pair of wool knickerbockers from around 1930. Museum records associate Rogers Peet with the former as the retailer and identify the company as the designer of the latter. The presence of a top hat, a necktie, a bathing suit and a pair of knickerbockers gives a useful picture of the breadth of the Rogers Peet offering. The company was never concerned only with business suits; its wardrobe extended from formal dress to sport and leisure, reflecting the different ways men actually dressed. What survives is varied, which is perhaps the point. Rogers Peet and Dobbs Another object takes us to the collection of Historic New England. The institution preserves a black felt bowler dating from between 1930 and 1940. Dobbs, the New York hatmaker, is identified as the manufacturer, while Rogers Peet & Co. appears as the retailer. The names of both businesses are visible inside the hat. It is a small detail, but a useful one. The surviving evidence shows that Rogers Peet sold hats made by Dobbs, but it does not establish that the two companies designed the piece together. For that reason, it is more accurate to describe the relationship as one between manufacturer and retailer rather than use the modern language of a “collaboration”. The object already tells us enough. Clothes in Print Rogers Peet did not leave behind only clothes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also preserves a number of publications produced by the company. Among them is Personal: Being a Brief Treatise on What to Wear, What Not to Wear and How to Do It, published in 1898. The title alone offers a revealing glimpse into the way Rogers Peet approached clothing: not simply as merchandise, but as something to be explained, considered and worn with a certain degree of knowledge. Another publication, The Works of Rogers, Peet & Co., Outfitters, dates from around 1900. The museum also holds a Rogers Peet livery catalogue from 1904 and a related price book dating from approximately 1905. Together, these publications show a company interested not only in what men wore, but in how clothes were presented and understood. They provided customers with information about dress, convention and use at a time when this kind of editorial communication was far less common than it is today. Long before the idea of a brand journal had a name, Rogers Peet was already publishing its own version of one. An American Suit At the Kyoto Costume Institute, another part of the story survives in the form of an early twentieth-century three-piece suit by Rogers Peet Company. The museum places the suit alongside a British example and notes the differences in silhouette. The Rogers Peet suit is straighter and less shaped through the waist, offering a useful comparison between American and British approaches to tailoring during the period. Less shape and a little more ease would go on to become familiar characteristics of American menswear. The Kyoto Costume Institute also records something rather different: the Rogers Peet name appears in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. In the song “Marry the Man Today,” the company is referenced as a signifier of respectable, conservative and well-presented dress. By then, Rogers Peet was familiar enough that a Broadway audience was expected to understand the reference without further explanation. That cultural shorthand says something about the place the company occupied in New York at the time. What Survives Museum collections rarely preserve a complete story. More often, they preserve fragments: a hat, a catalogue, a label, a suit. Taken together, however, those fragments show a company involved in making, designing, selling and explaining men’s clothes across several decades. They also reveal a wardrobe that ranged from formal dress to leisurewear and distinctly American forms of tailoring. For Rogers Peet, the value of the archive lies precisely here. It makes exaggerated claims unnecessary because the evidence already exists in the objects, publications and records that remain. There is still plenty to look at. And, just as importantly, plenty left to find.