Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Among the city pleasures the transit strike denied us is the yearly ritual of making the rounds of Manhattan’s Christmas decorations. Though politically correct opinion enjoins us never to utter the word “Christmas,” in fact the holiday is one that New Yorkers, over the last two centuries, have helped to define. Santa Claus is largely a New York invention. For two centuries few other cities have annually ornamented themselves as New York has. Throngs go to Rockefeller Center to admire America’s most beautiful Christmas tree. The sights, sounds, and smells of the city streets – the glimpse of the ornamented tree in the parlor window of a brownstone, the tinkle of Salvation Army bells, the sweet fir aroma as one passes streetside vendors of Christmas trees, that delightful nip in New York’s December air – are a year’s end payoff for our trials and tribulations.
Department stores play a major role in all this. Our department stores are sensorially splendid in their colorfully arrayed merchandise, perfumed air, and sounds like no others. A thousand voices blend into a mellow hum, 2,000 feet beat a steady rhythm, the display cases open and close, hangers jangle, objects, like keys, tinkle against glass, while music wafts. Such interiors, brimming with the goods of an affluent society, represent the essential grandeur of 20th-century American civilization. The Internet can’t replace our grand downtown shopping experience.
We now so take for granted our world of plenty that we no longer seek to celebrate it. The downtown department stores are vastly fewer in number than in times past, and the stores that remain are shadows of their former selves. When I moved to New York, you could still buy fine antique furniture at Lord & Taylor, superior art deco jewelry at Gimbels, rare books at Altman’s. Macy’s, it seems to me, sells perhaps a third the range of merchandise it did 25 years ago.
The daddy of New York stores is Lord and Taylor. Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor opened on Catherine Street, on the Lower East Side, in 1826. In 1853 Lord & Taylor opened at Grand and Chrystie Streets, in 1860 at Broadway and Grand Street, in 1872 at Broadway and 20th Street (in a building, still standing, with one of the most beautiful cast-iron facades in the city). In 1914 the store moved to its present location, on Fifth Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets. While Lord & Taylor is no longer the pacesetter of American retailing that it was as recently as the 1960s, the store still persists, and comes alive at Christmas, with a splendidly decorated main floor, and with the city’s most beguiling window displays.
Where in years past Lord & Taylor has offered vignettes of old New York, this year designer Manoel Renhal has given us six fairy tale scenes, which, like Lord & Taylor windows of the past, are meticulously rendered in outstanding miniature details. Strike or no strike, it should be a priority for all of us to get to Midtown before the new year to imbibe the luscious holiday atmosphere.
