The Bon Marché Building

E.W. Grove stepped forward and built the Bon Marché building in 1923 for the store's owner, Solomon Lipinsky, a prominent Jewish businessman and community leader. The store's name, meaning ""good market,"" came from Le Bon Marché, one of the world's first department stores in Paris. In a letter to Solomon Lipinski's son, Lewis, author Thomas Wolfe wrote that if he ever heard anything had happened to the landmark store ""I should feel almost as if Beaucatcher Mountain had been violently removed from the landscape by some force of nature."" When Bon Marché moved across the street in 1937, Ivey's Department Store took over the building and became a mid-twentieth century fixture of downtown commercial life. After restoration work in 1985, the building became the Haywood Park Hotel. W.L. Stoddart, the original building's architect, also designed the Battery Park Hotel and the Vanderbilt Hotel.