WeWork buys Lord & Taylor’s NYC home

NEW YORK — Lord & Taylor’s flagship store in Manhattan, known for its displays along Fifth Avenue, is being sold to the office space sharing company WeWork.

The nearly 100-year-old building will be converted into WeWork headquarters, and Lord & Taylor will rent less than a quarter of the space for its store. Ten of the building’s 11 floors are now devoted to retail.

WeWork attracts millennials who are looking to share office space, a consumer segment that Lord & Taylor owner Hudson’s Bay and other department stores want to attract. So store executives expect the stores to benefit from WeWork members going in and out of the building, and hope they’ll be shopping.

Lord & Taylor will keep the whole building with its usual operations through next year’s Christmas season. And the displays will continue to go on this year and next year, a company spokesman said. The department store was the first to create Christmas windows for entertainment, rather than for selling merchandise. It also pioneered the animated window display back in 1938.

Company officials declined to share details for what the redesigned Lord & Taylor store of about 150,000 square feet will look like.

The $850 million sale of the building, announced Tuesday, is part of a plan by Hudson’s Bay Co., which owns Lord & Taylor stores under its own brand as well as Saks Fifth Avenue, to pare down debt and reinvigorate sales.