Wanamaker Organ: How the largest pipe organ in the world ended up in Macy’s Department Store, Philadelphia

In 1911 John Wanamaker decided what his famous department store needed was a pipe organ – and not just any pipe organ, he wanted the biggest in the world

By Terry Blain

Published: Thursday, 15 June 2023 at 12:00 am

On Thursday 22 June 1911, at Westminster Abbey in London, the coronation of George V took place in a ceremony packed with glorious music by Parry, Purcell, Elgar, Handel and others.

That same day, 3,500 miles across the Atlantic, another inauguration festooned with music took place, in a building whose interior could easily have passed for a cathedral – the mighty Wanamaker Department Store in downtown Philadelphia.

Inside the grandly Florentine edifice, in an imposing, seven-storey atrium flanked by colonnaded retail galleries, a vast organ had been installed to entertain and edify the Wanamaker’s many customers. Though heard for the first time in the Philadelphia store on Coronation Day 1911, the instrument was not in fact brand new.

When was  the Wanamaker organ built?

The Wanamaker organ had originally been built for the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where it adorned the Festival Hall on a massive 1,200-acre site. Billed as the ‘largest organ in the world’, with 10,000 pipes and five keyboards, the instrument staggered listeners who thronged to daily recitals. ‘Heavy chords vibrated through the immense room, causing little thrills to creep up and down the spines of the listeners,’ the Los Angeles Times reported.

When and why did John Wanamaker buy the organ?

When the Fair ended, however, the giant instrument fell silent. A plan to shift it permanently to Convention Hall in Kansas City was abandoned, and for the next five years the organ languished in storage. Enter John Wanamaker, owner of a hugely successful department store in his native Philadelphia. A massive expansion of the property was underway, and the St Louis organ would, Wanamaker reckoned, be the jewel in the crown of his palatial emporium.

And so he purchased it lock, stock and barrel – for ‘next to nothing’, it was later reported. Thirteen freight carriages were needed to transport the organ to Philadelphia, where it took two years to assemble in the Grand Court of the expanded Wanamaker building. Following its first outing in public on 22 June, the instrument was again the centrepiece when the new store was officially dedicated by US President William Howard Taft six months later in December.

There was a serious problem, however – big as it was, the organ which had roared so loudly in St Louis was struggling to make a similar sonic impact in Philadelphia. The marbled atrium at the heart of Wanamaker’s remodelled store was swallowing gulps of volume whole, and only one solution was possible. The ‘largest organ in the world’ would, it seemed, have to be made even larger.

A massive programme of expansion spanning two decades began. With money apparently no object, the  Wanamaker company opened its own organ factory in the new store’s attic, where up to 40 specialist artisans made parts and pipes for the ever-growing instrument. ‘Use everything you have ever dreamed about,’ Wanamaker’s music-loving son Rodman at one point advised the designers.

How big is the Wanamaker Organ?

The finished instrument was a 287-ton behemoth, boasting 28,750 pipes in total. Seven hundred-and-twenty-nine individual stop tablets flank six ivory keyboards ‘like multicoloured dominoes’ (as one observer noted), making an astonishing panoply of sounds and textures available to the instrument’s player.

Is the Wanamaker Organ still played?

The Wanamaker Organ remains the biggest fully functioning pipe organ in the world, and is still played twice daily (except Sundays) for shoppers and interested onlookers in the Grand Court location now occupied by the retail giant Macy’s.

‘People hear the organ and feel good, and people are in a mind to shop when they’re feeling good,’ is how one former store manager puts it. ‘It’s the ultimate feel-good experience.’