Cultural planning and for profit assets: Philadelphia's Wanamaker (Macy's) Department Store Organ

Wanamaker Grand Court organist Peter Richard Conte at the console of the organ at Macy’s in Center City, June 22, 2021. TYGER WILLIAMS / Staff Photographer

Philadelphia's Wanamaker Department Store installed one of the largest organs in the world, and it has been regularly played.  

After many mergers, the store ended up as a Macy's with part of the building sold off for non-retail functions.

Over the past few months Macy's has been closing more stores, including a preponderance of stores located in Downtowns.  The Philadelphia store will close Sunday.  There will be a gala concert on the Saturday before the closure of the Macy's ("The Wanamaker Organ is closing out the Macy’s era with a grand, daylong series of concerts," Philadelphia Inquirer).

The property owner for the rest of the building has bought the Macy's space.  While they will be keeping the organ, there is no disclosed plan of yet on how to use it.  

What happens to the Wanamaker Organ after Macy’s closes isn’t settled. It has been a reliable feature of Philadelphia musical life for decades, played in twice-daily recitals six days a week. TF Cornerstone, which owns part of the Wanamaker Building and is expected to soon acquire the rest of it, has said it will keep the massive instrument, whose components are tucked away in various parts of the building. It is often cited as the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world.

“We are committed to the preservation of the organ and ensuring it remains a cherished part of the space,” said the company in a January statement. But whether that means it will be played regularly and given the visibility it has had in the past isn’t clear.

I have a number of entries about taking a more expansive approach to community cultural planning, ranging from keeping an eye on higher education art programs that might be threatened with closure ("Revisiting entries: Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?"), to various types of music, local radio ("Community radio as an element of local cultural planning"), the history of local music, retail ("Cultural plans should have an element on culture-related retail"), etc.

L. Curt Mangel III, curator of the Wanamaker Organ at Macy's, with some of the organ's 28,482 pipes, April 29, 2013. Photo: David Maialetti.

In historic preservation, it's rare but possible to designate interiors as public landmarks, and one such place is the Grand Court and the Wanamaker Organ.  From "Is the Wanamaker Organ safe? And what does ‘safe’ mean?" (PI).:

Moreover, architecturally and socially, there’s more at stake than just the organ. The Wanamaker Grand Court may be privately owned, but it has long functioned as a public square. It is as much a public right-of-way as the Reading Terminal, Elfreth’s Alley, or Independence Hall. Any building owner or developer violates the terms of this tradition at their own risk. So it makes sense that, in 2017, the Grand Court was granted a spot on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. 

“When you stand in the Grand Court, just about everything you see that is attached to the building is protected,” says Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, which filed the 2017 nomination.

But saving a cultural resource versus maintaining its use/providing access to the public is something else entirely, when it is an interior feature of a for profit building.  Building the process for access worthy of inclusion within a community cultural plan.

But the strongest case for the organ might not rest on preservation or nostalgia. It’s about creating a lively future for this important urban linchpin. The ornate Wanamaker Grand Court is vast and impressive — 150 feet high, or about the same height as the Kimmel Center glass dome. To hear the organ there is to feel it, so strong are the vibrations. The combination of sound and sights creates a sense of awe that’s not unlike a cathedral. It is our Notre-Dame.

And it’s inherently more inclusive than a cathedral. It’s a precious community gathering space and a place for rediscovering what it means to stand elbow to elbow in a crowd and feel part of something bigger. That something is powerfully humanizing.

If you think this exaggerates what one department store organ can achieve, recall Opera Philadelphia’s visit in 2010, when hundreds of choristers showed up in the store and surrounded shoppers with the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah with organ accompaniment. The YouTube ...video still gives me chills, and others must agree. It has been viewed 9.6 million times.

... That experience sits at one end of the scale — big, public, brimming with a sense of commonweal. At the other end is the personal, like the impact of walking into the store at noon expecting sheets on sale and instead tearing up to a 10-minute organ transcription from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier.

... There’s something particularly powerful about stumbling on unexpected bolts of poetry in prosaic settings. It’s one of the things great cities have in common.

Peter Dobrin, the classical music columnist, whose purview includes great writing on cultural aspects of public space ("Great article on urban design qualities of Kimmel Center in Philadelphia | extendable to civic assets more generally"), suggests in the second PI article that the Organ needs to be more visible, and have music organizations as partners, that maybe the space should be converted from retail.  One person he quotes suggests that a Philadelphia-focused museum would work, and keep the Organ in the public domain.

-- Friends of the Wanamaker Organ 

Dobrin also suggests that The Wanamaker Grand Court and Organ are an important gateway to Market East and its future, which has been the subject of a great amount of community input since the initial proposal, since retracted, to relocate the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team to space above the Market East train station ("Bait and switch in Philadelphia: 76ers basketball team won't move to Downtown, will remain in South Philly").

Perhaps that could be an outcome of Philadelphia's renewed focus on celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country, focusing on how Philadelphia was the first capital ("Time for a civic ‘Tush Push’: We need an all-hands-on-deck, brotherly and sisterly shove to get us over the goal line in readying Philadelphia for the Semiquincentennial celebrations.," PI), a program for the lower floors of the Wanamaker Building, and a plan and program for the Organ.

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Note that here in Salt Lake, the Church of the Madeleine, the most prominent Catholic church in the region, also has a great organ, albeit not on the scale of the Wanamaker.  And one of the Eccles foundations sponsors an annual series of concerts to promote the existence of that cultural gem to the community, regardless of religious identity.  There is even an event where people with experience can play the organ.