Russians Invade Woolworth's | June 18

We're in what used to be the home of Frank Winfield Woolworth, the founder of the Woolworth's Five and Dime's. According to Wikipedia, he started the first store with a loan of $300 and grew it into the largest retail chains in the world through most of the 20th century. He did okay.

Woolworth's mansion, Winfield Hall in Glen Cove, Long Island New York was built in 1916. The grounds of the estate required 70 full time gardeners and the 56 room mansion required dozens of servants just for basic upkeep. The home's decor reflected Woolworth's fascinations with Egyptology, Napoleon and spiritualism (a huge pipe organ that Woolworth learned to play late in life combined with a planetarium style ceiling to provide an intentionally eerie effect) and was built with no expenses spared: the pink marble staircase alone cost $2 million to construct. The full price tag for the home was $50 million. In today's dollars, that would run you about $500 million. That's half a billion folks. That's a lot of nickels and dimes let me tell you.

In 1978 the abandoned and largely gutted mansion became the home of Monica Randall, a respected writer and photographer married to a German businessman, who wrote a memoir of her experiences there entitled Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths. Other notable residents of Winfield were the Reynolds family of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and Reynolds Aluminum.

For more info (including video of the mansion, visit Winfield Hall)

So why are we here? We're doing a photoshoot for a Russian retail client in Moscow. Our model is actually from Moscow, so we're as authentic as we can be with a Japanese photographer, Australian hair and makeup artist, Texan stylist, and a couple of New Jersey art directors in a mansion on Long Island.


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A couple of things about the house we learned. The organ in the ballroom is the largest residential pipe organ in the US. Also in that room was the first picture window ever in the US. A picture window is a large window with a huge, ornate frame built into the wall. So instead of framing a painting, it frames the view to the Italian gardens in back. The enormous marble fireplace came from a French castle.


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The shoot went fantastic. Our model was beautiful and moved well. The clothes were amazing and Stephen, our fairy queen, did his usual magic and the hair and makeup were spot on.

As usual it was a long ass day. We went up the night before and stayed in NYC because we needed to leave the city by 7am to make to the house by 9am. We wrapped the house at 6pm, caught an 8pm train which got me back to Philadelphia at 9:30pm and I got home 11pm. But I didn't really get to sleep until 1am.