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