City of Paris Dry Goods Co.

The store's history is rooted in the 1849 California Gold Rush. The company was founded by the brothers Felix and Emile Verdier in May 1850 when Emile arrived in the San Francisco Harbor from France on a chartered ship, the Ville de Paris (City of Paris), loaded with silks, laces, fine wines, champagne, and cognac. In France the brothers had owned a silk-stocking manufacturer operating in Nîmes and Paris. When the Ville de Paris anchored in San Francisco Bay, locals in skiffs quickly surrounded the ship, snapping up all the goods piecemeal then and there. Many purchases were made with bags of gold dust. Emile Verdier quickly returned to France for a second load, and when he reached San Francisco in 1851 he opened a small waterfront store at 152 Kearney Street called the City of Paris. The store's Latin motto (Fluctuat nec mergitur, "It floats and never sinks") was borrowed from the city seal of Paris. The store's final and best-known location was a Beaux-Arts building designed by architect Clinton Day, built in 1896 on the corner of Geary and Stockton streets across from Union Square. The Verdier family initially created a famous restaurant in Paris in 1839 La Maison Dorée by Louis Verdier and then the Etablissements Gaston Verdier (textile industry in France). == Branches and offshoots==

The San Diego branch of the City of Paris opened in 1886 in the Bancroft Building on the southeast corner of Fifth and G Streets in what is now the Gaslamp Quarter. The building was designed by San Francisco architect Clinton Day. In the 1940s, City of Paris opened a branch in the outlying Vallejo, California, and other locations around the Bay Area. French emigre Auguste Fusenot (French Consul in Los Angeles 1898–1907) arrived in the U.S. in 1873 and soon became a partner in the City of Paris Dry Goods Co. After learning the business, he founded the Ville de Paris department store on Broadway in Los Angeles in 1893. It later became the B. H. Dyas Co., and in the 1930s, it went out of business, its two locations becoming the Broadway Hollywood and Myer Siegel (downtown). The historic sign in Oroville, CA was refurbished in November 2023. There was also an unrelated City of Paris (Los Angeles) dry goods emporium from 1874 to 1897. ==San Francisco earthquake==

The building was one of the few in the neighborhood to survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and ensuing firestorm, although the interior was badly damaged by fire. The interior was redesigned by John Bakewell and Arthur J. Brown after the earthquake, and rebuilt with an opulent central rotunda capped with a stained glass dome. ==Closure==

The City of Paris remained under the ownership and management of the Verdier family until it closed in March 1972. The store was not bankrupt, but it was losing money. The store building was purchased by Liberty House (Hawaii) and reopened as Liberty House at the City of Paris. Liberty House built a new store at Stockton and O’Farrell streets closing the City of Paris building in 1974 and selling the site to Neiman Marcus. Joseph Magnin operated its clearance center called Magnarama, on the first floor, from 1974 to 1977. Neiman Marcus' announcement that it planned to demolish the old building to build a flagship department store of its own on the site set off a protracted preservation campaign. Despite being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as a California Historical Landmark, 66,000 gathered signatures of citizens who wanted the building preserved, and various legal challenges the building was demolished in 1981. The new building, designed by postmodernist architect Philip Johnson, was often disparaged by architecture critics, but over time has become popular with tourists and locals. The architectural centerpiece of the building is the original rotunda and stained glass skylight under a glass dome, preserved and moved to the corner of the building that faces Union Square. The old atrium is sheathed inside a modern glass wall, encircled on the top floor by a restaurant. ==References==