Paul Bonwit

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Paul Bonwit (September 29, 1862 – December 11, 1939) retail merchant and founder of Bonwit Teller department store in New York City.

Born Paul Joseph (or Josef) Bonwit near Hanover, Germany, the son of Bernard Bonwit. He moved to Paris at the age of 16. He found work with a local export house as a clerk and continued his studies at night. At 21 in 1883 he emigrated to the United States. He moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he worked in a department store. He returned to New York when a position opened with Rothschild & Company eventually becoming a partner, which was renamed Bonwit, Rothschild & Company. He married Sarah Woolf in 1893 and they had two sons.

Wanting his own business, he opened a store at Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in 1895. Two years later Edmund D. Teller, and he relocated their establishment (now known as Bonwit Teller) to Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. The partners incorporated their firm in 1907 as Bonwit Teller & Company and in 1911 relocated yet again, this time to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. Announcing:

"an uncommon display of wearing apparel from foreign and domestic sources... which will appeal to those who desire the unusual and exclusive at moderate prices."

In 1930 Bonwit chose a new address farther up Fifth Avenue--the former A.T. Stewart & Company building at Fifty-sixth Street. In 1931 the company drew the attention of noted financier Floyd Odlum. Bonwit agreed to let Odlum's wife Hortense serve as a consultant to the company in 1932, and two years later--dogged by poor health and saddened by the death of his wife--he sold the firm to Odlum's Atlas Corporation. Odlum promptly named his wife as the new president (she became in the process the first woman to hold such a position in New York), with Bonwit's son Walter Bonwit staying on as vice president and general manager.

During his business career, Bonwit sat on the boards of both Harriman National Bank and A. Sulka & Company, while he also maintained an interest in philanthropies and the arts. He died in Manhattan after a brief illness. Paul Bonwit is interred in a private mausoleum in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. The firm bearing his name enjoyed something of a revival under the direction of the Odlums. In May 1990 the developer Donald Trump demolished the Fifth Avenue store in order to make room for the Trump Tower, and the firm of Bonwit Teller no longer was in business.