December 7, 2007: Apple opens its magisterial retailer on West 14th Road in New York Metropolis. The brand new Apple Retailer includes a three-story glass staircase deemed probably the most advanced ever made.
The shop is Apple’s largest in Manhattan (and second-largest in america, after the one on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue). The primary three-story Apple retail outlet, it boasts a complete flooring devoted to companies. It’s additionally the primary Apple Retailer to supply free Professional Labs lessons to prospects.
The sheer measurement of this Apple Retailer — with its 46-foot Genius Bar — proves spectacular. Nonetheless, its astonishing spiral staircase steals the present as its most iconic design function.
NYC Apple Retailer stuns with 3-story glass staircase
“We predict New Yorkers will love this beautiful new location and the extremely gifted group we’ve assembled to make the Apple Retailer West 14th Road a spot the place individuals can store, be taught and actually be impressed,” Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vp of retail on the time, stated in a press release.
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 Road retailer in Glasgow, Scotland. Nonetheless, 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 advanced glass staircase ever constructed on the time.
(Three-story glass staircases later confirmed up in at the very least two extra Apple Shops, together with one on Boylston Road in Boston and one other on Wangfujing Road 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 the same 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 modern NYC Meatpacking District
Photograph: Fdocbc/Flickr CC
From the skin, the Apple Retailer on West 14th Road 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, nevertheless, one other instance of Apple selecting a hip retail space during which to arrange store. With its giant warehouse areas, the previous house of New York slaughterhouses rose to prominence within the late Nineteen Nineties. That coincided properly with Apple’s post-iMac G3 return to dominance.
After high-end boutiques moved into “New York’s most trendy neighborhood,” Apple turned one of many large manufacturers that adopted. Immediately, Google homes its East Coast headquarters on this nook of New York.
Have you ever visited Apple’s West 14th Road retail retailer and walked on its glass staircase? What’s your favourite Apple Retailer on this planet? Go away your feedback under.
