JUST as Macy’s moved uptown from its original location, so did Lord & Taylor. The store’s third location was in this French Second Empire building, on the southwest corner of 901 Broadway and West 20th Street. L&T was here from 1873-1914 in one of NYC’s larger cast iron front buildings. British immigrant Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor established their first dry goods store on Catherine Slip on the Lower East Side in 1826.
A department store fixture on 5th Avenue between West 38th and 39th Street for decades, L&T closed at the end of 2018. The building will remain, but became offices including a WeWork shared workspace franchise. I don’t know if that particular branch survived the work from home boom that picked up steam during the pandemic.
Samuel Lord (1803-1889) was a British foundry worker from Yorkshire who came to the USA with dreams of entrepreneurship, opening a drapery-dry goods shop on Catherine Street in what is now the Lower East Side in 1826, and after struggling for over a decade, he sent for his wife and children to join him in the USA. At about the same time his brother-in-law, George Washington Taylor, joined him as a partner and investor.
Lord and Taylor opened a larger store near the docks at Grand and Chrystie Streets in 1854, at a time when Grand was among the city’s busiest shopping streets — it was close to the east side docks along South Street, making importing goods a simple matter. The business became wildly successful, both men were millionaires by the early 1860s, and were then able to retire and return to England. The store moved to East 20th Street and Broadway in 1902 and then to 5th Avenue and West 38th Street in 1914, where it continued an over 150-year run of success, until 2018.
Another Samuel Lord remnant is Claremont Terrace in Elmhurst, where Lord owned property and built a number of opulent townhouses. The last one, which had deteriorated to a dilapidated state, was razed in the early 2000s.
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6/20/23
11 comments
For many years L and T had the best NYC Christmas windows–often mechanical old-school, with a NYC theme.
All surviving L&T stores were gone by early 2021. Hudson’s Bay Company, its former owner who still held the leaseholds, announced grandiose plans to convert several of the properties to co-working spaces, but nothing came of it.
That is not a picture of the L&T building in NYC
It is the former L&T building on Broadway and 20th Street, as stated in the piece.
This is the store before they moved to 5th Avenue. I remember one of the Christmas windows at the 5th Avenue store had a miniature recreation of this store in a winter scene representing Christmas 1902
I seem to recall L&T are buried near each other in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
The first law firm I worked for (now long gone) was general counsel to the Associated Dry Goods company, which for many years owned Lord & Taylor, and which (justly) considered Lord & Taylor to be its crown jewel. When May Department Stores bought out ADG, some of the partners of my law firm were deeply saddened by losing their ties to Lord & Taylor, even more than ADG.
Lord and Taylor had the classiest store on Northern Blvd. in Manhasset Long Island.
They had a house outside on the side of the store which was their Christmas house
which once a year was where you would visit Santa instead of having it inside the store
with all the usual congestion.that that entailed.
Remember it well as part of the “Miracle Mile”. My sister worked there for a couple of years.
Lived a stones throw from that store for 30+ years. It was a wonderful place, with a restaurant and hair salon. So very sad to see it go down like so many other stores.
In the late 1980’s I got to visit the L&T in-house advertising department located upstairs in the 5th Avenue building. Here they created the distinctive L&T print ads which were usually large ink wash drawings of the fashions with a blurb in a corner. A style that was their signature look for years, if not decades. The finished art sent to papers like The NY Times were stats photographed from a mix of cut and paste using text printed out from the earliest versions of QuarkXPress. Even though they had the latest computers, at that time sending ads to the newspapers was still easier with physical artwork rolled up in a tube. The impressive looking workshop was a mix of computers with enormous analog RGB monitors, old-style photographic stands and large format printers that put out wet photographic paper that had to be dried before rolling up to ship. This was the first place I saw a large drum scanner. They used this to scan the original ink wash artwork, which was quite large, for use in smaller QuarkXPress friendly ads that the computers could handle. It was a bustling place with quite a few workers, however I heard a few years later that many of the people were fired as the computers got advanced enough that they didn’t need any of the photo equipment or printers anymore, artwork was now sent to the papers by portable drives (SyQuest drives, anyone?).