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To relate the history of the Woolworths-owned Embassy records label is to simultaneously chart the history of the emergence and development of an authentic popular music in Britain. As cultural practice and commercial project, British popular music evolved, within a decade, from a peripheral and overlooked branch of the entertainment industry into one of the country's most prestigious and successful international activities. The years in which this change took place coincided exactly with the lifespan of Embassy records; ironically, the demise of one was caused by the ascendancy of the other. Although the silver and red label and its curious place in the topography of pop were familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in domestic popular music in the 1950s and 1960s, its history has been barely recorded and is frequently forgotten.

His family were potato growers but the young [Frank Winfield] Woolworth turned his back on agriculture for a life of business in the nearby city of Watertown. While working as a shop assistant for $3.50 a week, Woolworth noticed how, when the store slashed its prices to compete with a local fair going on down the road, people would come from miles around to snap up the bargains. He decided to apply the bargain basement approach to all his stores.[QQ]

Arriving by train, the 27-year-old Woolworth was impressed by downtown Lancaster's bustling commercial atmosphere. Years later, he recalled: \"I reached Lancaster about dusk. The sidewalks were jammed, stores filled, lights blazing, and there was an amazing air of business and prosperity. Right away, I knew Lancaster was the place for me.\" Woolworth stocked the 14-by-35-foot space with $410 worth of merchandise, all priced at five cents, and set opening day for June 21, 1879. Woolworth later called the opening the most trying day of his life. Business grew, with Woolworth expanding the store into the entire southwest corner of Chestnut and Queen streets, then moving the business to 6-8 N. Queen St., while opening stores in other towns. But Woolworth found his Lancaster success hard to duplicate. His stores in Harrisburg (opened in 1879), York (1880), Philadelphia (1883) and a 25-cent store here (1883) all folded.

According to \"Five and Ten,\" a book about Mr. Woolworth and his business by John K. Winkler, the house in Glen Cove had what Mr. Winkler called a Louis XV room, paneled in old ivory and antique gold; a Louis XIV bedroom, covered in murals and brocade wall hangings; and a French Gothic room, with vaulted ceilings and a stone mantel.

In his memoir, \"The Towers of New York\" (Simon & Schuster, 1937, written with Boyden Sparkes), the builder Louis J. Horowitz recalled visiting Woolworth at the house, and watching him play the pipe organ. According to Dr. Fenske's research, Woolworth had fits of weeping during the construction of his tower on Broadway, completed in 1913.

Randall, Monica. Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths. May 2003. 320p. ilius. St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, $26.95 (0-312-30982-1). 974.7.

Ms. [Monica Randall], of Oyster Bay, has a business renting Gold Coast mansions for films and commercials. Winfield, which is in Glen Cove, was for a time one of the more popular, appearing in hundreds of television and print advertisements and several films. No filming has been permitted for 25 years. Winfield is one of only about 100 surviving Gold Coast mansions, and even in their company, is a standout. The music room, which includes an Aeolian pipe organ and a 14-karat gold-leaf ceiling, takes up the west wing. A $2 million pink marble staircase graces the foyer, whose ceiling is trimmed in blue and 14-karat gold leaf. Monica Randall, left, has written a book about Winfield, F.W. Woolworth's estate in Glen Cove, shown above in 1917. At far left is a view of the ballroom, one of the mansion's 57 rooms. (Photo by John W. Wheeler)

The architect Cass Gilbert's combination of forceful vertical thrust and aerie filigree, in shimmering terra cotta, is indeed masterful. The glittering marble and mosaic lobby evokes medieval cathedrals. Yet the faces staring down from the ribbed vaults are not of saints but the decision-makers behind this feat built on America's nickels and dimes. Along with the engineer and rental agent are portraits of Gilbert and Frank Woolworth -- a great architect and a great client. In intensive exchanges with Woolworth, Gilbert found a new way of relating street scale and skyscape and a series of refinements to his ornamental vocabulary. The dynamic between the two minted architectural gold from that spare change. For even an architect mining a design vision desires the creative tension produced by a strong client. Just such a client enabled [Mies] van der Rohe to bring the experiments with the form and materials of the steel frame that had preoccupied him for decades to a level of perfection never surpassed. In 1954, Samuel Bronfman, chairman of Seagram's, was planning an office tower on Park Avenue when his daughter Phyllis Lambert persuaded him to jettison an unmemorable design by one of the era's productive commercial firms in favor of a bid to realize a landmark worth of his efforts. Ms. Lambert recalled that Bronfman had to be brought around to accepting the building's lofty glazed base: Mies insisted that Bronfman lean down to the pedestrian's level to see on the model just how beautiful the effect would be of entering a glazed void under a lofty tower, especially when it was encountered on a plaza that broke the great line of Park Avenue's masonry cliff face. But it was Bronfman, by saying he wanted a warmer color and effect than Mies's Chicago apartment buildings, who inspired Mies to use the tawny bronze mullions that are the trademark of the Seagram Building's classical serenity and reserve.

''In stone it would be magnificent,'' he said, but in terra cotta, ''it would look like a 5-and-10-cent store proposition.'' A 1912 ad by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in The Real Estate Record and Guide boasted, ''Cream color in another material would be dark and dirty after a few years' exposure.'' Mr. [Paul Starrett]'s misgivings were well founded. In his 1938 book he recalled, apparently from years earlier, ''the spectacle of the upper part of the Woolworth Building, wired up with metal mesh to catch the falling terra cotta.''