Paul Bonwit - Bonwit Teller

Bonwit Teller

Wanting his own business, Bonwit established a store in New York 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.

In 1930 Bonwit chose a new address farther north on 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 who made a significant investment into the company. Bonwit agreed to let Odlum's wife Hortense serve as a consultant to the company in 1932. Two years later, dogged by poor health and saddened by the death of his wife, Bonwit sold the firm to Odlum's Atlas Corporation. Odlum promptly named his wife as the new president (she was 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.

The company enjoyed success under the direction of the Odlums. In May 1979, the developer Donald Trump acquired and later demolished the Fifth Avenue store in order to make room for the Trump Tower. Bonwit Teller would change ownership several times throughout the 1970s and 1980s until 1989, when its parent company at the time filed for bankruptcy protection, liquidating most of the company in 1990.

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.

Bonwit maintained an active interest in philanthropies and the arts. He died in Manhattan in 1939 after a brief illness and is interred in a private mausoleum in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.