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.)