In a horse-and-buggy age, it rose as a 12-story temple to retailing. It stands today as a place of worship for a metropolis of pedestrians, poets, and holiday shoppers enchanted by the tradition it embodies and the majesty of its architecture.

One hundred years ago Friday in Philadelphia, William Howard Taft stood on a stage above the bronze eagle statue inside the Wanamaker Building and dedicated the city's first modern department store. The presidential visit capped seven years of construction on the monolith at 13th and Market Streets that, after renovations through the decades, is now one of the largest office buildings in the 21st-century city.

Much can be said of its longevity. It housed John Wanamaker, a department store name that became as famous as Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbel Bros., and Lit Bros. a few streets over. It outlived them all, as shopping went suburban and corporate and those names vanished.

But the true marvel of this anniversary is that the very building that houses the only remaining department store in downtown Philadelphia (now a Macy's) has itself to thank for its salvation.

The nearly 1.9 million-square-foot edifice of granite walls framed with steel was constructed with such spare-no-expense vision it has inspired awe among generations of Philadelphians who flowed through it.

That emotional power inspired even the moneyed investors who bought and sold the building in tenuous years and who lovingly transformed it for a modern-day economy.

"It's a fantastic building . . . one of the most incredible," said Stephen J. Gleason, executive vice president of Amerimar Enterprises Inc. in Philadelphia, whose company owns the building and who visited the famous Wanamakers light show as a child.

"It's a cliche, but they don't build buildings like this anymore," Gleason said. "From the gold leaf in the lobby to the beautiful column capitals and the dentil moldings throughout the space, the ceiling height, it would be cost-prohibitive, if not impossible, to replicate."

"Astonishing," is how David Hollenberg, an architect who worked on its $250 million restoration in 1989-92, breathlessly described it. "It's an incredible building."

The man who persuaded Brickstone Co. to buy and restore it back then, John J. Connors, can barely conceal his love for the building he wishes he could say was still his. Brickstone lost ownership to Amerimar in 1997, when an investment partner pushed to divest.

"If you're going to be in the historic-rehab business, Wanamakers is the brass ring," said Connors, who recalls building specifications like ingredients in a favorite recipe. "It's the holy of holies."

In May, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects bestowed its Landmark Building Award on the soon-to-be-centenarian. One member of AIA's preservation committee praised it for more than its architecture.

"You can be a 21st-century Philadelphian looking at what appears to be a 1950s light show but being within a 100-year-old space," said committee cochair Shawn Evans. "That is what Philadelphia is about."

Constructed over a city block, the building was conceived not just as a majestic linchpin to the burgeoning Wanamaker retail chain, but as a world-class destination.

The structure, designed by renowned Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, stands in the shadow of ostentatious City Hall, itself completed just a decade before Taft's visit to the eagle.

"I joke that it and some of its neighbors were the box that City Hall came in," Hollenberg said. "City Hall is very flamboyant, and this is just a very chaste, serene, dignified, solid, masculine building as a backdrop to it."

John Wanamaker's lavish financing and vision are reasons the building has enduring value. Another is Burnham's imagination: "It's a tribute to him and to all the people who have owned it before us," Gleason said, "that it's still functioning 100 years later."

The sheer size of Burnham and Wanamaker's creation can be underestimated against the contemporary skyscraper-dominated skyline.

Each floor is about the size of three football fields; if constructed at street level, they would swallow 12 city blocks.

"Wanamakers was, literally, the engineering marvel of its time," Connors said.

When it opened, it was the city's first fully sprinklered commercial structure and had nearly four dozen elevators, most of them hydraulic and powered by pistons that shot 250 feet into the earth. It had cooling and heating systems that prevented weather damage for decades, too, he said.

Sales areas were organized around a central court that rose five floors and overlooked the bronze eagle below - the statue had been at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The Crystal Tea Room, with its towering ceilings and two long banks of elevators, beckoned on the ninth floor.

John Wanamaker had a colossal pipe organ shipped to Philadelphia on 13 railcars, then rebuilt in the grand court and played publicly for the first time in June 1911.

In 1956, Wanamakers unveiled its towering atrium display of Christmas lights.

With suburbanization, however, came shopping malls and decline for Wanamakers and its peers. In 1978, John Wanamaker's heirs sold the chain; the flagship store was added to the National Register of Historic Places.