<p>Despite the beleaguered stock market, Duane Reade is turning to Wall Street to make a profit.
On Wednesday, the chain will open a roughly 22,000-square-foot pharmacy in the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street. Joe Magnacca, president of Duane Reade and Everyday Living Solutions at the Walgreen Company, which owns Duane Reade, said it is the largest Duane Reade ever built.

The drugstore occupies 40 Wall Street’s cavernous old bank space, with vaulted ceilings rising two stories above the marble floor. It includes opulent amenities like a hair salon for shampoos, blow dries and blowouts; a nail bar for manicures and massages; a pharmacy with a doctor on hand for consultation during the week; and a grocery market featuring sushi and smoothie bars. There is also a stock ticker.

The Wall Street store’s extensive services are an attempt to rethink the American pharmacy model, which Mr. Magnacca said “hasn’t changed much since the removal of soda fountains 50 years ago.”

“We believe it’s the most exciting drugstore in the world,” he said in an interview last week.

Mr. Magnacca said this Duane Reade cost around 20 percent more than usual to build. It is the company’s latest effort to custom-fit a store to the surrounding neighborhood, a strategy that has touched off controversy in the past. One that opened last year on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, drew threats of a boycott from residents who feared it would force out independent pharmacies and homogenize the neighborhood.

But the Williamsburg store, which features a bar that sells 64-ounce bottles of beer called growlers, proved so popular that Duane Reade adopted the growler bar at a second pharmacy on the Upper West Side.

Mr. Magnacca said the new store was designed to preserve relics like black marble columns and gilded escalators from 40 Wall Street’s former life as the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building. He said he did not think financial district customers would see this Duane Reade as an encroachment; after all, there are already 14 locations around the neighborhood.

Michael Fram and Tom McDonnell, who work at 40 Wall Street, were chatting outside the building Thursday afternoon. Both men said they were unaware that the store was opening, despite the gigantic banners that flapped directly overhead. Told of its arrival, they said they thought the store would be convenient, but they were not sure they would go there for lunch.

“I don’t know about the sushi,” Mr. Fram said. “I’d have to smell it first. But I’ll try anything once.”

<a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/at-duane-reades-newest-outpost-sushi-and-hairstyling/" target="_blank">http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/at-duane-reades-newest-outpost-sushi-and-hairstyling/</a>