[1] In addition to operating stores in Philadelphia, New York City, and Paris, he was a patron of the arts, education, golf, athletics, a Native American scholar, and of early aviation.

When his father purchased the former Alexander Turney Stewart business in New York City, in 1896, he helped revolutionize the department store with top quality items and is credited in particular with fueling an American demand for French luxury goods.

[6] Wanamaker was content to live in his father's shadow and did not actively seek the limelight except for some official, largely ceremonial positions he held in New York City toward the end of his life.

[citation needed] Rodman Wanamaker suffered from kidney disease in the last decade of his life, and the toxins from this condition slowly took their toll on his health.

[citation needed] After his death, control of the stores passed to a board of trustees charged with serving the interests of the surviving Rodman Wanamaker family.

Toward the end of his life, Wanamaker gathered a huge collection of stringed instruments, known as The Cappella, that featured violins and violas from such masters as Guarnerius and Stradivarius.

In 1913 he commissioned Glen Curtiss and his aircraft company to further develop his experimental flying boat designs into a scaled-up version capable of trans-Atlantic crossing in response to the 1913 challenge prize offered by the London newspaper The Daily Mail.

The resulting America flying boat designed under John Cyril Porte's supervision did not cross the Atlantic because of the outbreak of World War I,[8] but was sufficiently promising that the Royal Navy purchased the two prototypes and ordered an additional fifty aircraft of the model—which became the Curtiss Model H—for anti-submarine patrolling and air-sea rescue tasks.

[9] The design, with some improvements from both British and Americans, rapidly matured during the war and spurred the explosive post-war growth of the flying boat era of International Commercial Aviation.

Through the American Trans-Oceanic Company he also funded efforts to increase aircraft range throughout the next decade, with a Wanamaker entry in the transatlantic challenge, the Fokker trimotor America flown by Commander Richard E. Byrd, taking to the air only a few days after Lindbergh's historic solo crossing on May 21–22, 1927 that won the cash prize in the contest.

Rodman Wanamaker was a patron of many important commissions in the field of liturgical arts, and his legacy includes a sterling silver altar and silver pulpit at St. Mary Magdalene Church, Sandringham, the church of the King's Sandringham House estate in Norfolk, England,[11] as well as a massive processional cross for Westminster Abbey, known as the 'Wanamaker Cross of Westminster'.

He made important additions to his Philadelphia parish of St. Mark's Church, notably the sumptuously appointed Lady Chapel, which was a memorial to his first wife, Fernanda.

At that time, Indians were viewed as a vanishing race, and efforts were made to bring them increasingly into the mainstream of American life, often at the expense of their culture and traditions.

Both the glass prints and film negatives of the Wanamaker Collection photographed by Dr. J. Dixon were donated to Indiana University's Mathers Museum of World Cultures.

During the meeting, Wanamaker hinted that the newly formed organization needed an annual all-professional tournament, and offered to put up $2,500 and various trophies and medals as part of the prize fund.

Jim Barnes was the first winner of the event and Thomas Kerrigan, the Head Golf Professional at Siwanoy Country Club at the time, was the first player ever to tee off.

Each year, now in early August (mid-May beginning in 2019), a top course in the United States hosts the world's best professionals, as they compete for the Wanamaker Trophy.

[17][18] Wanamaker also owned a townhouse on Spruce Street in Philadelphia, a New York residence on Washington Square, a house in Atlantic City (where he died), and a country home near his father's estate in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.