In 1979, a gaunt woman lay alone in a Los Angeles hotel room, weighing barely eighty pounds. Her name was Barbara Hutton, and she was dying. Once celebrated as the richest girl in the world, she had inherited fifty million dollars, married seven times, and been courted by princes and movie stars. Now she had less than three thousand dollars to her name.

Her grandfather had built the tallest skyscraper on earth and paid for it entirely in cash. But something had gone terribly wrong. Everyone who inherited that fortune faced tragedy—madness, suicide, broken marriages, and hollow endings. The question that lingered over the family was whether it was simple bad luck or something darker, a curse that had taken root the moment the first stone of the Woolworth Building was laid.

The story begins on the evening of April 24, 1913, when crowds gathered in the streets of lower Manhattan. Eight hundred guests filled the marble lobby of a magnificent new building. President Woodrow Wilson sat in the White House, his hand poised over a golden telegraph key. At the center of it all stood Frank Winfield Woolworth, watching his impossible dream come to life.

When the president pressed the key, eighty thousand light bulbs blazed to life, illuminating the structure with dazzling brilliance. The Woolworth Building, the tallest structure in the world, shone over the New York skyline like a cathedral of commerce. Woolworth had paid thirteen and a half million dollars in cash for this moment, every penny of it accumulated from pennies. What the cheering crowds did not know was that this tower of triumph would become a monument to tragedy.

Within four years, the man who built it was dead, his family scattered, and his fortune cursed. Frank Winfield Woolworth was born on April 13, 1852, on a small farm in Rodman, New York. His family was poor, the kind of poverty where children learn to work before they learn to read. The soil was harsh, the winters cold, and young Frank spent his childhood watching his father struggle against nature and debt.

But even as a boy, Frank noticed something other children missed. He watched how people bought things. He studied his mother haggling with traveling merchants and observed the general store in town, memorizing which goods sold quickly and which gathered dust on forgotten shelves. By sixteen, he decided he wanted nothing to do with farming.

The idea of selling things, understanding what people wanted and providing it, fascinated him more than anything else. In 1873, at twenty-one, he entered the dry goods store of Augsbury and Moore in Watertown, New York, working without pay for three months to prove himself. For ninety days, he swept floors, arranged shelves, and watched. The owners thought him slow.

He rarely spoke to customers. But Frank was not slow—he was studying. In those days, most stores operated on a simple principle. Customers requested goods, clerks retrieved them from behind counters, and prices were negotiated through lengthy bargaining.

Merchandise remained hidden until purchased, kept away from curious hands. But Frank noticed something crucial. When goods were displayed where customers could see them, touch them, and examine them without asking permission, they sold faster. And when prices were fixed and clear, customers felt more confident buying.

These observations would eventually form the foundation of his empire. In 1879, with borrowed money and borrowed courage, Frank opened his first store in Utica, New York, calling it the Great Five Cent Store. The shelves were filled with simple household items—tinware, soap, buttons, ribbons—all priced at exactly five cents. No bargaining, no confusion, just simple, honest prices anyone could understand.

The store failed within months. But Frank studied his mistake. The location was poor, the foot traffic insufficient. The idea itself, he believed, was sound.

Later that same year, he tried again in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, choosing a busy corner near the city center. He painted the storefront bright red and filled the windows with gleaming merchandise. This time, customers came. The Lancaster store succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

People loved the simplicity, the certainty of prices, the freedom to touch and examine goods without obligation. Within a year, Frank added ten-cent items, and the five-and-dime store was born. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Frank expanded relentlessly, opening store after store across Pennsylvania, then New York, then throughout the Northeast. By 1900, he controlled fifty-nine stores.

By 1905, more than two hundred. By 1911, he merged with five competing chains to form the F. W. Woolworth Company, a commercial giant with more than six hundred stores across the United States and Canada.

Millions of customers passed through Woolworth doors every week. Every purchase, no matter how small, added a few more pennies to Frank’s growing fortune. But wealth alone was not enough. Frank remembered the shame of poverty, the bitterness of being considered slow and unimportant.

Now he had more money than most of his former scoffers would ever see. He wanted something that would prove once and for all that he had surpassed them all. He wanted a monument. In 1910, Frank approached the architectural firm of Cass Gilbert with an unusual request.

He wanted to build the tallest building in the world—not merely tall, but beautiful, a cathedral of commerce that would dominate the New York skyline for generations. The chosen site was on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, the heart of American finance, just blocks from Wall Street. Gilbert drew inspiration from the Gothic cathedrals of Europe—soaring towers and intricate stonework—but this would be a cathedral dedicated to commerce rather than to God. The building would rise 792 feet, taller than anything else on earth.

Its exterior would be clad in cream-colored terra cotta, decorated with grotesque figures that seemed to climb toward the sky. Inside, the lobby would rival any European palace, with marble floors, bronze fittings, and vaulted ceilings covered in magnificent mosaics. Construction began in 1911. Workers swarmed the site, and the steel beams rose story by story, higher and higher.

Frank visited the construction site daily, sometimes climbing the unfinished floors to inspect his kingdom. The building cost thirteen and a half million dollars—equivalent to more than four hundred million today—and Woolworth paid for it entirely in cash. No loans, no mortgages, no debt of any kind. The workers nicknamed him Napoleon, partly for his short stature but mostly for his fierce ambition and iron will.

Frank had married Jennie Creighton in 1876, when he was still a struggling store clerk with no clear future. She believed in him when no one else did. They had three daughters: Helena, born 1878; Edna, born 1883; and Jessie, born 1886. From the outside, they seemed the perfect American family, richer than imagination.

But behind the gilded doors, shadows gathered. Jennie suffered from what the doctors of the era called nervous exhaustion—today we might recognize depression or anxiety. As her husband’s empire expanded, her world seemed to shrink. Frank was rarely home, completely consumed by his work.

The daughters grew up wealthy but lonely, surrounded by servants and splendor, starving for the attention money could not buy. At the grand opening in April 1913, none of that darkness was visible. The Woolworth Building blazed with light, a beacon of American optimism and achievement. The newspapers called it the Cathedral of Commerce, a phrase Woolworth loved.

But reporters noticed something else. Frank looked tired. His already thin face had grown gaunt. Some attributed it to age; others whispered about troubles at home.

Frank smiled for the cameras and accepted the praise, revealing nothing of the storms beneath the surface. Within two years, the shadows began to spread. Helena, the eldest daughter, had married C. Edward Hutton.

She inherited her mother’s nervous temperament, compounded by a life of emotional neglect. By 1916, her mental condition had deteriorated so severely that she could no longer function in the outside world. She was committed to a private sanatorium, a luxurious prison where the wealthy hid their unwanted relatives. There, surrounded by nurses and sedatives, the daughter of one of America’s richest men would spend her remaining years forgotten.

Edna, the middle daughter, married Franklin Hutton, C. Edward’s brother—two Woolworth daughters marrying two Hutton brothers, binding the families in a web of connections that would prove more curse than blessing. Edna seemed happier than her sister, with a brighter temperament and a beautiful daughter named Barbara. But Edna also carried darkness within her.

In 1917, when Barbara was just four years old, Edna died in her room at the Plaza Hotel, apparently from an overdose of pills. Whether suicide or accident, the truth was buried with her. What mattered to little Barbara was that her mother was gone. Frank Woolworth died on April 8, 1919, at his mansion on Long Island, aged sixty-six.

The official cause of death was blood poisoning from an infected tooth. But those who knew him well understood that something larger had killed him. In his final years, he had become increasingly withdrawn. His wife remained trapped in her own dark world.

His daughters were scattered—one institutionalized, the others living lives of gilded unhappiness. The pennies that built his empire now felt like weights around his neck. The funeral was a solemn event befitting a man of his stature, the church filled with dignitaries and business leaders. The Woolworth Building itself seemed to mourn, its lights dimmed in tribute.

But the real tragedy had only begun. Barbara Hutton was born in 1912, a year before her grandfather’s great tower opened. Destined to inherit more money than almost anyone else in the world, her life was marked by loss from the start. After her mother’s death, her father withdrew into his own grief and business affairs.

Barbara was raised by a series of governesses and relatives, surrounded by luxury but starved for love. By the time she reached adulthood and inherited her share of the Woolworth fortune, estimated at more than fifty million dollars, she had developed a deep suspicion of human affection. How could she know if anyone loved her for herself when her name was synonymous with unimaginable wealth? That suspicion drove her into a desperate search for love that led to seven marriages, each more disastrous than the last.

The press called her the poor little rich girl and devoured every detail of her scandalous life. Her first marriage in 1933 was to a Georgian prince named Alexis Mdivani, a lavish Paris event attended by European royalty and American millionaires. The prince was more interested in her wealth than her heart; the marriage collapsed within two years. Six more marriages followed: a Danish nobleman whose title was longer than their happiness, the Hollywood star Cary Grant, a Lithuanian prince, the notorious Dominican womanizer Porfirio Rubirosa, a German tennis champion, and finally a Vietnamese prince.

None brought the love she truly wanted. By the end, Barbara Hutton’s health had deteriorated beyond repair. Eating disorders that plagued her youth had destroyed her body. Bad investments, costly divorces, and a lifetime of reckless spending had dwindled the Woolworth millions to almost nothing.

When she died in 1979 at sixty-six, her estate was worth less than three thousand dollars. The poor little rich girl had finally become simply poor. Her death received only brief mentions in the newspapers. She was buried quietly beneath a simple stone.

The granddaughter of the man who built the tallest building in the world left behind only memories of what might have been. While Barbara dominated the headlines, her cousins lived their own dark dramas. Woolworth Donahue, son of Jessie, grew into a troubled young man, haunted by the weight of his name. Alcohol and excess consumed his years.

He never married, never found a purpose beyond inheriting his fortune. He died in 1972, another victim of wealth that seemed to poison everyone it touched. His brother Jimmy gained notoriety through his affair with the Duchess of Windsor, the woman for whom King Edward VIII had renounced the British throne. He too struggled with demons that money could not banish.

Through all the family turmoil, the Woolworth Building itself stood unchanged. In 1930, it lost its title as the tallest building in the world, surpassed first by 40 Wall Street, briefly, then by the Chrysler Building, then permanently by the Empire State Building in 1931. But losing the crown seemed only to add to the building’s dignity. In 1966, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it a historic landmark, protecting it from the changes and demolitions that befell many of its contemporaries.

In 2012, developers announced plans to convert the upper floors into luxury residential apartments, a transformation completed with careful respect for the original design. A penthouse carved from the space beneath the copper crown sold for nearly eighty million dollars. The five-and-dime stores that built the Woolworth fortune began their long decline in the second half of the twentieth century. The retail landscape Frank had revolutionized was being revolutionized again by discount chains and shopping malls.

By the 1980s, the F. W. Woolworth Company was struggling. In 1997, the last Woolworth five-and-dime stores closed their doors.

The company that had grown from a single Lancaster store to a continental empire had reached the end of its road. But the building remained. Today, the Woolworth Building still stands in lower Manhattan, its Gothic towers still embracing the sky. The terra cotta facade still glows golden in the setting sun.

The grotesques still keep their silent watch. Inside the lobby, the mosaics still gleam, and the caricature of Frank Woolworth still smiles as he counts his coins, frozen forever in a moment of triumph. Whether the family tragedies were truly a curse or simply the ordinary sorrows of human existence magnified by wealth and public attention, no one can definitively say. What is certain is that the building has outlasted everything else.

The fortune vanished. The family scattered. The stores closed.

But the Cathedral of Commerce still rises above Manhattan, a testament to what one man could build, and to what it cost him and everyone who carried his name.