Lord & Taylor to close store at Walt Whitman Shops
Lord & Taylor opened at the Huntington Station mall in 1998. Credit: Barry Sloan
Long Island will lose another Lord & Taylor.
The high-end retailer’s parent company plans to close five more of the department stores, including the location at Walt Whitman Shops in Huntington Station, according to Hilco Merchant Resources, a Northbrook, Illinois-based firm that is part of a joint venture leading the closing sale process.
The newly announced closings are in addition to 19 — including one at Westfield South Shore mall in Bay Shore — that were announced shortly after Lord & Taylor and its parent company, Le Tote Inc., both filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Aug. 2 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a major reason for the action.
The closings of the Lord & Taylor stores in Huntington Station and Bay Shore will leave Long Island with two: in Manhasset and Garden City.
Merchandise at all of the closing stores is being discounted 20% to 40% off the lowest ticketed prices, a representative for the joint venture said in a statement Thursday.
The nation’s oldest department store chain, Lord & Taylor entered Suffolk County with its Walt Whitman Shops and Westfield South Shore locations, both of which are anchor stores that opened Nov. 11, 1998, according to Newsday archives.
At that time, each store was 120,000 square feet.
It’s unclear if the size of the stores has changed since then, when the stores will close or how many employees will be affected by the closings.
Le Tote could not be reached for comment.
Walt Whitman Shops, at 160 Walt Whitman Rd. in Huntington Station, is owned by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group Inc., the largest mall operator in the nation.
Westfield South Shore, at 1701 Sunrise Hwy. in Bay Shore, is owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based company with U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles.
Simon and URW directed media inquiries about the closing Lord & Taylor stores to the retailer.
Lord & Taylor has 38 brick-and-mortar stores.
Le Tote Inc. is seeking a buyer for its fashion rental subscription service, also called Le Tote, and for Lord & Taylor, which opened its first store in 1826 in New York.
Founded in 2012 in San Francisco, Le Tote bought Lord & Taylor from Brampton, Canada-based Hudson’s Bay Corp. for $75 million in 2019.
Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
Updated now Newsday travel writer Scott Vogel took the ferry over to Block Island for a weekend of fun.
Updated now Newsday travel writer Scott Vogel took the ferry over to Block Island for a weekend of fun.
