Lord & Taylor has been celebrating the holiday season by
decorating their windows for passersby since 1938. In 1938 the owners avoid the traditional
method of presenting store merchandise. They created a purely decorative display of gilded bells that
swung in sync with the sounds of recorded bells. Electricity allowed shop
owners to light their windows at night and it attracted a lot of crowds far
past closing time. 
“It’s no different than a small Broadway production,” Manoel
Renha, a window designer at Lord & Taylor, told The New York Times. “It’s
very elaborate.” And like a Broadway performance, the windows have become a
destination attraction all their own. 
By Lord & Taylor’s count, more than 250,000 people pass
by their windows daily during the holidays. This year Lord & Taylor did a
more imaginative holiday window than in the past. The windows were created by a
team of over 50 people over 9 months.
The window sets weigh up to 2,000 pounds and are the only department
store windows on hydraulics; the windows were created in a workshop underneath
the Fifth Avenue sidewalk and were then moved onto street level.
This year every window is converted into one of the
rooms in the an enchanted mansion on the eve of the
holidays. Rooms including “The Heritage Gallery” and the
“Hall of Wisdom” are filled with surprises to delight and entertain, honoring
the building’s 100-year history in decidedly modern fashion. While the windows
certainly shone on their own, Lord & Taylor enhanced the viewer experience
with a first-ever video wall technology.
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