New Yorkers and tourists alike make a point during the holidays to view Lord & Taylor’s windows, this year as good as they’ve ever been. This year would also be a good time to look at the building itself, and to reflect on the role Lord & Taylor has played in the histories of New York and of the department store. A month ago, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Lord & Taylor Building, on Fifth Avenue between 38th and 39th streets, a landmark.

Very few New York retailers of today date as far back as the early 19th century. Brooks Brothers began in 1818, Tiffany & Co. in 1837. Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor opened their dry-goods store on Catherine Street, on the Lower East Side, in 1826. We don’t often hear the term “dry goods” these days. It refers to fabrics, or cloth goods of any kind. Dry-goods stores sold bolts of fabric to retail customers who then made their own clothes or curtains. The stores also sold some ready-made items, such as gloves, shawls, blankets, and eventually suits and dresses. As stores gradually added other categories of merchandise — toys, ceramic dishes, books, food — dry-goods retailers became what we call department stores. Some historians say the first honest-to-goodness department store in the world was A.T. Stewart’s on Broadway at 10th Street, which opened in 1862. (The earlier Stewart store, on Broadway between Reade and Chambers streets, that opened in 1846 was, like the great Parisian emporiums of the day, a very large dry-goods, as opposed to a department, store.)

As Lord & Taylor grew, it moved several times. In the mid-19th century, Grand Street was a major retailing thoroughfare, and Lord & Taylor opened in 1853 at Grand and Chrystie streets. Shortly thereafter, in 1859, Lord & Taylor opened at the northwest corner of Broadway and Grand Street. Employees barricaded the store during the July 1863 draft riots, as mobs ransacked Brooks Brothers — for its ties to the Union Army — right across the street.

In 1870, Lord & Taylor relocated to the southwest corner of Broadway and 20th Street. The cast-iron façade at the corner and on 20th Street remains from the original design. The architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler said it was the most perfect iron façade in the city. The portion extending south on Broadway was remodeled, with its present stone façade, in 1914. A block south, ABC Carpet & Home now occupies, on the west side of Broadway, what was once the Arnold Constable store. Lord & Taylor and Arnold Constable were fierce competitors, and from 1859, when Lord & Taylor moved to Broadway and Grand Street, until 1975, when Arnold Constable went out of business, the two stores were, through three successive uptown moves for each, never more than two blocks apart. Arnold Constable’s last store, on Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, was converted into the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library.

Midtown Fifth Avenue developed as an exclusive residential district beginning in the mid-19th century. Members of the Astor family, for example, built twin brownstone mansions on the west side of the avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, where at century’s end they were replaced by the Astor-built Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (which in its turn later yielded to the Empire State Building). The Vanderbilts established their compound on the avenue between 50th and 59th streets. Around 1900, commerce began to creep into this princely purlieu. Tiffany & Co. opened, in a fine building still standing, on Fifth Avenue at 37th Street in 1906 — the same year Benjamin Altman opened his elegant emporium on the avenue between 34th and 35th streets, in the building that is now the CUNY Graduate Center.

Lord & Taylor followed the trend, opening on the avenue between 38th and 39th streets on February 24, 1914. The building differed significantly from other avenue retailers. Tiffany, Gorham, Altman, Knox Hat, and others had sought to be as architecturally refined as the mansions of the rich people the stores replaced. Stanford White, working for Tiffany and Gorham, in particular developed the “retail palazzo” style, while the École des Beaux-Arts-trained Trowbridge & Livingston created an elegant, demurely beautiful French limestone building for Altman. Lord & Taylor, by contrast, had its architects, Starrett & Van Vleck, create a much more frankly utilitarian building, one that in its dignified simplicity — and large show-windows — announced that the avenue now belonged to commerce. Starrett & Van Vleck, a highly successful commercial firm, grew out of Chicago’s D.H. Burnham & Co., the most successful department store architects in the world; their credits included Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co., Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker, and London’s Selfridge’s.

Lord & Taylor inaugurated its Christmas window displays in the 1920s. In 1945, Dorothy Shaver became the company’s president, and the first woman to head an American department store. Notably, she nurtured the careers of important American dress designers such as Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin, whose productions placed Lord & Taylor on the cutting edge of fashion in the mid- 20th century.

Do step back and look at the building. Note the large-arched entrance on the avenue, and look up: While the midsection bears little artistic elaboration, the top is a fine composition of engaged columns visually supporting a glorious cornice. If Starrett & Van Vleck chose to eschew the palazzo form, they weren’t about to violate the avenue’s claim to architectural glory. As the visiting British novelist Arnold Bennett said of Fifth Avenue in 1912, before the present Lord & Taylor opened, it’s “the cornices, you know.”