When Apple Computer Inc. opened its first Apple retail store in 2001 in a shopping mall in McLean, Va., critics saw the initiative as an expensive, dubious gamble. But as Apple prepares to take the wraps off its latest, most ambitious store yet -- on New York's Fifth Avenue, opposite the Plaza Hotel and Bergdorf Goodman -- there are few doubters left about Chief Executive Steve Jobs's retail strategy," Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal. "On Friday evening, five years after opening its first store, Apple will unlock the doors to a subterranean store that sprawls beneath the plaza in front of the General Motors Building, just across from Central Park. In keeping with Mr. Jobs's penchant for eye-catching designs, all that will be visible from the street is the entrance, surrounded by a roughly three-story-high glass cube jutting from the ground, reminiscent of I.M. Pei's glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre museum in Paris.
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