Arnold Constable

Arnold Constable & Company

The upper floors of the Broadway facade of the "Palace of Trade", showing the mansard roof
Industry	Department store
Headquarters	New York City

Arnold Constable & Company is a former department store chain in the New York City metropolitan area. At one point it was the oldest department store in America, operating for over 150 years from its founding in 1825 to its closing in 1975. At the company's peak, its flagship "Palace of Trade" in Manhattan – located at 881-887 Broadway at East 19th Street, through to 115 Fifth Avenue – was acknowledged to be the store which took the largest portion of the "carriage trade", in New York, serving the rich and elite of the city, such as the wives of Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Arnold Constable & Company began as a small dry goods store at 91 Front Street in lower Manhattan opened in 1825 by Aaron Arnold, who had immigrated to the United States from the Isle of Wight. Arnold moved the business to a larger space on Pine Street, and took on partners, his nephews George and James Hearn, with the business being known as Arnold and Hearn until 1842, when the Hearns began their own store. James Mansell Constable was an employee of A. Arnold & Co. who would later marry Arnold's daughter, and he was taken on as a partner in 1842, with the store name changing to Arnold Constable & Company in 1853.

In 1857 the store moved into a four-story white marble dry goods palace located at 309-311 Canal with frontages on Howard, and Mercer Streets. A few years later as the country suffered from inflation, the store became one of the first to issue charge bills of credit to its customers each month instead of on a bi-annual basis. The firm continued to expand, and in 1862 added a five-story building at 307 Canal, as well as a fifth-story to the original building. The new additions were aesthetically integrated with the existing structure.