Lord & Taylor Building Restoration, New York

Starrett & van Vleck finished the Lord & Taylor Building in 1914 and it sold ladies’ gloves for 105 years. WeWork bought it in 2019, started a $438 million renovation, and ran out of money. Amazon paid $978 million for it in February 2020 and finished the job, moving staff in during mid-2023.

The building occupies 424 to 434 Fifth Avenue, was designated a New York City landmark in October 2007, and runs to roughly 690,000 square feet across eleven above-ground levels plus two basements, including the adjoining Dreicer building.

Project Scope

ZGF Architects served as design advisor and led the facade design. The restoration covered rebuilding balusters, extensive masonry repair, work to the copper crown, and replacement of the upper cornice eagles in specialty terracotta. Walter B. Melvin Architects advised on historic preservation. Hill West Architects handled the renovation and overbuild design; WRNS Studio designed the interior fit-out; Structure Tone, part of STO Building Group, managed construction.

Inside, the notable moves are two new skylights, an eight-storey open stair that ties the office floors together, a 200-person event space and basement waterproofing done by grout injection rather than excavation. Seventeen floors were fitted out across the Lord & Taylor and Dreicer buildings, and Amazon’s team completed its portion within fifteen months. The Shaver Hall food hall on the ground floor opened in June 2026.

Why It Matters

Office-to-anything conversions get the attention, but this is the rarer case: a department store that became a workplace without being gutted. The landmark designation covers the exterior, so the facade work was the non-negotiable part of the budget, and the terracotta eagle replacement in particular is the kind of scope that rarely survives a value-engineering exercise. It survived here, and the project took the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award.

The other lesson is about sequencing. The building was already a construction site under one owner’s plan when a second owner bought it and changed the brief. Finishing in fifteen months from that starting point says something about how much of the hard work was already in the ground.

Project Team & Details