Lord & Taylor, WeWork and the Death of Leisure
- 7 years ago
Lord & Taylor, WeWork and the Death of Leisure
The 676,000-square-foot Italianate building in Midtown it eventually occupied in 1914 (a building for which WeWork is now paying $850 million) stood not merely as a monument to turn-of-the-century commerce
but also as the grand testament to what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen called the rising culture of “conspicuous leisure.”
Leisure, Veblen wrote, “does not connote indolence or quiescence.’’ What it conveys is the “nonproductive consumption of time,” by which he
was not anticipating the 10,000 hours people would fritter away playing Minecraft, but any time spent away from the activity of labor.
The founders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey got together in a building on the Brooklyn waterfront where they both worked — Mr. Neumann as the proprietor of a company called Krawlers
that produced padded clothes for babies — and quickly realized that they could make money from all the vacant space they saw around them by simulating the atmosphere of the Silicon Valley workplace, fueling the dreams of young entrepreneurs who always wanted to appear as if they were having fun.
This past week, Hudson’s Bay, whose story begins 347 years ago in the fur trade, making it the oldest company in North America, announced
that it was selling Lord & Taylor’s flagship store, on Fifth Avenue, several years after it had acquired the department store chain through a deal with a private-equity firm.
With the rise of the internet, shopping came to look like work,
and work, in many instances, came to look like leisure, which is why WeWork’s purchase of the Lord & Taylor building has a resonance beyond the obvious.
WeWork leases office space to small but growing companies, giving them shared access to communal rooms
that look like lounges with bars, air-hockey tables, lemon-infused water and so on
When Lord & Taylor opened on Fifth Avenue and 38th Street it featured three dining rooms, a manicure parlor for men
and a mechanical horse that could walk, trot or canter.
The 676,000-square-foot Italianate building in Midtown it eventually occupied in 1914 (a building for which WeWork is now paying $850 million) stood not merely as a monument to turn-of-the-century commerce
but also as the grand testament to what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen called the rising culture of “conspicuous leisure.”
Leisure, Veblen wrote, “does not connote indolence or quiescence.’’ What it conveys is the “nonproductive consumption of time,” by which he
was not anticipating the 10,000 hours people would fritter away playing Minecraft, but any time spent away from the activity of labor.
The founders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey got together in a building on the Brooklyn waterfront where they both worked — Mr. Neumann as the proprietor of a company called Krawlers
that produced padded clothes for babies — and quickly realized that they could make money from all the vacant space they saw around them by simulating the atmosphere of the Silicon Valley workplace, fueling the dreams of young entrepreneurs who always wanted to appear as if they were having fun.
This past week, Hudson’s Bay, whose story begins 347 years ago in the fur trade, making it the oldest company in North America, announced
that it was selling Lord & Taylor’s flagship store, on Fifth Avenue, several years after it had acquired the department store chain through a deal with a private-equity firm.
With the rise of the internet, shopping came to look like work,
and work, in many instances, came to look like leisure, which is why WeWork’s purchase of the Lord & Taylor building has a resonance beyond the obvious.
WeWork leases office space to small but growing companies, giving them shared access to communal rooms
that look like lounges with bars, air-hockey tables, lemon-infused water and so on
When Lord & Taylor opened on Fifth Avenue and 38th Street it featured three dining rooms, a manicure parlor for men
and a mechanical horse that could walk, trot or canter.