December 7, 2007: Apple opens its magisterial retailer on West 14th Avenue in New York Metropolis. The brand new Apple Retailer includes a three-story glass staircase deemed essentially the most complicated ever made.
The shop is Apple’s largest in Manhattan (and second-largest in the USA, after the one on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue). The primary three-story Apple retail outlet, it boasts a complete flooring devoted to providers. It’s additionally the primary Apple Retailer to supply free Professional Labs lessons to clients.
The sheer measurement of this Apple Retailer — with its 46-foot Genius Bar — proves spectacular. Nevertheless, its astonishing spiral staircase steals the present as its most iconic design function.
NYC Apple Retailer stuns with 3-story glass staircase
“We think New Yorkers will love this stunning new location and the incredibly talented team we’ve assembled to make the Apple Store West 14th Street a place where people can shop, learn and truly be inspired,” Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vp of retail on the time, mentioned in an announcement.
Apple beforehand used a floating glass staircase design at its Japanese shops in Osaka and Shibuya, in addition to its Fifth Avenue flagship retailer in Manhattan and its Buchanan Avenue retailer in Glasgow, Scotland. Nevertheless, as a result of measurement of the brand new retailer in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, and the truth that the staircase spanned all three tales, this round staircase was the biggest and most complicated glass staircase ever constructed on the time.
(Three-story glass staircases later confirmed up in no less than two extra Apple Shops, together with one on Boylston Avenue in Boston and one other on Wangfujing Avenue in Beijing.)
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was one of many inventors of the glass staircases. He began engaged on the idea in 1989, when he commissioned an analogous staircase for the NeXT headquarters in Redwood Metropolis, California. He later made it a signature architectural function of bigger Apple retail shops.
Apple strikes into the trendy NYC Meatpacking District
Apple’s iconic three-story staircase within the retailer on West 14th Avenue in New York Metropolis.Picture: Fdocbc/Flickr CC
From the surface, the Apple Retailer on West 14th Avenue with the glass staircase doesn’t appear particularly spectacular or ornate. It bears the identical warehouse aesthetic seen elsewhere in New York’s Meatpacking District, a neighborhood with a checkered previous.
The placement was, nonetheless, one other instance of Apple selecting a hip retail space through which to arrange store. With its giant warehouse areas, the previous dwelling of New York slaughterhouses rose to prominence within the late Nineties. That coincided properly with Apple’s post-iMac G3 return to dominance.
After high-end boutiques moved into “New York’s most fashionable neighborhood,” Apple turned one of many large manufacturers that adopted. Right this moment, Google homes its East Coast headquarters on this nook of New York.
Have you ever visited Apple’s West 14th Avenue retail retailer and walked on its glass staircase? What’s your favourite Apple Retailer on this planet? Go away your feedback beneath.
