Ridley's Department Store

Lower East Side

New York City

Art & Culture | History

Pink Paint and a Wild Cold-Case Surround this LES Landmark

Ridley's Department Store Lower East Side Old Exterior

About Ridley's Department Store

& why it made the Carpe City list

At the corner of Orchard and Grand Streets, you will see something truly grand: a gracious rounded corner of cast iron, sporting curved windows and painted pastel pink.
That grandeur harkens back to the mid-19th century when Grand Street lived up to its name as a luxurious thoroughfare and shopping destination.
In 1848 Edward Ridley arrived from England and set up a dry-goods shop on Grand St.
By the early 1880s, the store had expanded to several more buildings and occupied nearly the whole block of Grand between Orchard and Allen Streets.
Ridley’s was touted as the largest department store in Manhattan.
By 1889 it employed a whopping 2,500 people, maintained a fleet of more than 50 delivery wagons, published an in-house fashion magazine, and sold everything from canaries to waffle irons.
- Business was booming so big that Ridley’s commissioned a whole new storefront in 1886 that spread from 309-321 Grand Street (the pink corner you see dates from 1886).
- Ridley’s advertised that the new store contained “115 departments.”
Sadly, the boom times came to an end as the century turned, and fashion moved uptown.
Ridley’s closed in 1901, but its story does not end there!
Edward Ridley Jr. was eccentric, to say the least…
- When the store closed, Ridley Jr. went into real estate, operating out of the store’s old sub-basement. He also took to wearing rain boots constantly, carrying an umbrella at all times, and letting his beard grow to his waist.
- One morning in 1931, he came to work in the sub-basement to find his secretary, Herman Moench, dead in the cellar.
  - At first, the death seemed to be from natural causes, but the coroner found two bullet holes in Moench’s chest! However, no one saw nor heard anything, and the case went cold.
And it gets weirder!! Two years later, the now-88-year-old Ridley Jr. and his new secretary, Lee Weinstein, were found dead in the same cellar in which Moench was found.
- Weinstein was shot, and Ridley was beaten to death with a stool. But get this: the ballistics report revealed that Moench and Weinstein had been shot with the same gun!
Here’s what was discovered:
- Weinstein had been bootlegging out of the subbasement/adjacent garage.
- He was also named to receive $200,000 from a fake version of Ridley’s will.
- Weinstein’s two co-conspirators for the will caper were none other than Ridley’s two accountants.
- It turns out they had also skimmed $200,000 from the Ridley business coffers.
- Although indicted for those crimes, no murderer was ever found, and the case remains cold to this day!