Get your tote, double-check your credit score, and let’s go to Fifth Avenue.

We spent some time a little further north of Bryant Park earlier this year, but this stretch to the south is a little more complicated.

Together with the former Lord & Taylor flagship and the gilded stores across the street, this was the place to come for pianos, clothes, tobacco, hot desking, and everything else you needed to advance up the aspirational ladder.

Today? The high-flying billion dollar unicorns and sellers of prestige have fallen back to Earth. And the retail here is hurting: both corners at 38th street and 39th street are looking for tenants, and there seems to be a constant flow of turnover.

But there are still some signs of retail showmanship on this stretch. Let’s stroll.

(Photos were taken July through October.)

Lord & Taylor had been around for nearly a century and gradually made its way uptown before opening this Italian Renaissance temple here in 1914. It marketed itself to respectable middle- and upper-class New Yorkers (the so-called “mass with class”) and reshaped what it meant to be a modern department store.

The building, flush with limestone detailing and a copper cornice, cost much more than expected, and immediately led the company into a financial reorganization.

But, as detailed by the Bowery Boys, the grand opening was an event worth celebrating: the 10-story building had a system of conveyor belts, amenities like dentists for employees, and restaurants on the upper floors, including a little tea room called the Bird Cage featuring club sandwiches with Piff-O-Puffs. Customers could even go to the fourth floor for special driving clothes and apply for a New Jersey driver’s license or a license plate!

And obviously there was a special entrance for men to get a shave and a manicure, change from daytime to evening attire, and leave “without passing through any of the departments where women’s goods are sold.”

Lord & Taylor also helped advance the elaborate window displays that defined Fifth Avenue retail. Displays could be assembled in the basement, then lifted to the sidewalk level using hydraulic platforms. But, in 1938: scandal.

A window featuring a simulated snowstorm using cornflakes brought the ire of the Fifth Avenue Association, which had a rule against “motion or sound” in window displays, Time Magazine wrote at the time.

And the New Yorker feared the snow display would disrupt the social order and pave the way “for the advertising strip-tease,” writing: “Refinement is stationary; vulgarity moves.”

Around this time, Dorothy Shaver was making her way up the corporate ladder.

She first attracted the retailer’s attention by helping to market her sister’s handmade dolls. Her first job for Lord & Taylor was to spy on what rival merchants were doing. But she made a name for herself with innovations like organizing women’s clothes by their stages of life, developing an early version of personal shopping, and bringing modern art exhibitions to the store, according to Julie Satow’s book, “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue.” In 1945, Shaver became president and was the first woman to serve as the head of a major retail store. And under her watch, Lord & Taylor began its first suburban expansions.

By the 1970s, the store was a landmark and it became a stand-in for New York commerce.

On July 12, 1976, members of FALN, a militant group seeking independence for Puerto Rico, planted two bombs inside the store, as well as a handful of others, though injuries were kept to a minimum that day because they alerted a newspaper before the explosions. (Between 1974 and 1977, authorities would link 49 bombs to the group, according to the New York Times.)

Over the past couple of decades, the company has bounced from private-equity-owned department store conglomerate, to an investment firm, and then to another as the traditional model shifted online and, eventually, was stressed by the pandemic. This flagship closed in 2019, and after 195 years, the final 19 Lord & Taylor locations closed in 2021.

(But don’t cry into your cashmere too much; the name still survives online, and you can still buy your 8-year-old that $488 black cotton tracksuit they’ve been begging for.)

As the company was winding down, WeWork bought the building for $850 million but this was as the co-working company was itself at the peak of its expansion frenzy. Insiders told The Real Deal about conflicts of interest and that the company may have overpaid. The company planned to go public and by the time investors looked at the prospectus, the financing unraveled and this new property became an albatross.

(Of course, there’s a lot more you can read about WeWork, if you want: the staff meeting which began with firing 7% of the staff and ended with tequila shots and a Run DMC performance, marijuana-filled private jet flights, and much more.)

Ultimately, Amazon considered this a prime location for 2,000 employees, and it renamed the building “Hank” after a sewing term and incorporated garment references throughout the complex.

Downstairs, there’s a community banana stand and a “store” called Bodega, which sells art books and protein-infused popcorn. And Shaver Hall, named after the departed department store’s matriarch, is a food hall with some decent offerings, including a British-based restaurant with a cheese conveyor belt.

Sure, vulgarity moves, but here, so does the Camembrie.

Before he lost to Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses first lost to 431 Fifth Avenue Corp.

In 1944, the city planning baron proposed new zoning rules that would have restricted the size and bulk of buildings in certain “retail business” districts. This would have tied new high-rise construction to more setbacks, loading areas, plazas, and parking. (Much of this analysis comes from Jason Barr’s blog.)

Affected properties comprised as much as 20 million square feet of space and a lot of property owners were pretty angry. More than 100 landlords, businesses, labor unions, and civic groups protested, arguing that the proposal would slash the redevelopment value of their land. A group led by the owner of this building sued.

The Board of Estimate voted against the Moses plan, but not by the supermajority needed to kill it outright. But the opponents dug up an obscure provision requiring unanimous approval when enough affected owners formally protested. The case ultimately reached New York’s highest court, which struck down the plan in 1946.

“The amendment would have materially reduced the size of New York buildings, and some critics thought it would mean the end of skyscrapers,” the New York Times wrote after the court’s decision.

Moses lost here. But the city’s zoning system was overhauled in 1961 anyway, which—for better or worse—did add more rules and tradeoffs when it came to large new buildings.

Ok, who wants to talk about all this zoning? Ring the buzzer for Montasy Comics on the second floor, which is a haven for comics, cards, and tabletop gaming. One of the Backstreet Boys and DJ Steve Aoki have made appearances.

While you’re there, pick me up this $500 boxset of Marilyn Monroe collectible cards that may include worn undergarments or a strand of her hair.

Here’s a Michael Graves Legoland, which was able to leverage some neighboring air rights and a pocket-size public plaza in order to fit 175 apartments in 54 stories.

There’s not much to say, but check it out: the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recently snapped a GoPro onto one of the structural engineers who hangs off the building to inspect the face. It’s cool, even if it’s unfortunately shot vertically.

A hundred years ago, this was the Siebrecht Building, which you can see on the right side of this photo of the east side of the block from 1923.

It seems that in 1919, a brownstone here was briefly the home of an early, secret U.S. government code-breaking outfit called the Black Chamber. It quickly moved to 37th street, so we’ll have to make it there one day.

This six-story Italian-inspired palazzo was the Hardman piano shop.

At one point, Hardman was the official piano of the Metropolitan Opera House and held an annual post-season sale of used and autographed pianos used in that year’s season. In the 1920s, it claimed in an ad that one avant-garde piano caused 11,371 people to stop and look at it one day.

In 1926, they used a model kid’s bedroom to advertise a piano for kids using small furniture, blocks, and two of the design manager’s kids, aged 2 and 4, playing in the window for more than an hour as a crowd watched, according to the Music Trade Review. It worked: Eventually a little girl and her mother emerged from a limo and bought the display piano for her daughter for their Park Avenue apartment.

By the end of the 2010s, if you were looking for a high, you didn’t need to hop on a WeWork jet.

When MedMen opened one of the city’s first dispensaries here on April 20, 2018, it promised a sleek buying experience. (Think Don Draper relaxing with a vape pen instead of a scotch.) And it was either the Apple Store of weed or the Barneys of weed, depending on the media outlet’s taste for sleek retail.

"I think it makes a statement when you have a marijuana store across the street from a Lord and Taylor on Fifth Ave. in New York," a spokesman told NY1 at the time, as the company sailed toward a multi-billion dollar valuation. (Either way, probably no toddlers in the showroom here.)

But it was the early days of marijuana legalization, and only those with state-issued cards could enter, and the selection was limited to certain marijuana-derived products. A writer for Fader Magazine found the store mostly empty, with more staff than customers.

But six years after it opened, the company filed for bankruptcy, citing hundreds of millions in debt and a failed merger, combined with stiff competition from unlicensed weed vendors and allegations of mismanagement, according to Fortune Magazine. This location was one of the last remaining to close abruptly in 2024.

Over the years, this was home to, among other things, the Sommelier Society of America and Benson & Hedges tobacco. Earlier this summer, a pop-up clothing store was advertising steep discounts as it went out of business. Everything must go!

But the retail churn continues: as of October, the space has just welcomed a new tenant: hey, wouldn’t you know it: a dispensary.

It’s hard for brick-and-mortar retail to compete with online shopping, but a good gimmick always helps. Maybe it’s time to bring back the swirling cornflakes.

What’s Good: Some classic buildings, rolling cheese, and free bananas.

What’s Not: It’s sad to see another swell old department store shuttered, but then again where I buy my clothes is one step above a Spirit Halloween, so I’m not one to talk.

Block Rating: 6.25/10