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The Post had previously reported that private equity firm, Windsong Global and Burch Creative Capital — led by Chris Burch, who co-founded Tory Burch LLC — were interested buyers along with the rug merchants. After dozens of prospective buyers kicked the tires at bankrupt ABC Carpet & Home, the iconic New York City retailer is being sold to a consortium of investors that deal in Persian rugs, The Post has learned. Registry A cavernous space full of linens, furniture, and accessories, in which couples can pick and choose products from preset categories. Swanky furniture retailer ABC Carpet & Home is scrambling to stave off bankruptcy in the wake of the pandemic, The Post has learned.
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In the rug department, a stack of carpets including designs from ABC’s Alchemy collection, made from recycled wool and silk yarns in India. Interior design as narrative has always been the spine of ABC Carpet & Home. “Our home is us, and our spirit is inside.” By 1994, the store had 350,000 square feet of retail space and had cultivated relationships with craftspeople and designers around the world. It sold midcentury furniture by Herman Miller and then-radical-seeming pieces by the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. The Coles added electronics, kitchenware, books and organic bedding. The all-encompassing approach reminded me of what the British designer Terence Conran had done decades earlier in London with his signature store Habitat, whose very name told you it was a way of life.
But if the displays call to mind flea markets in faraway places, the store itself has always been a New York event. Tourists arrive in throngs, and rumors have long circulated about rich and famous — and infamous — shoppers. A friend told me that she saw Donald Trump and Marla Maples browsing for baby furniture here once upon a time. When she was still in her 20s, Paulette captured the mid-80s zeitgeist just as we, the baby boomers, were settling down. We wanted a certain bourgeois comfort, so long as it didn’t resemble our parents’ or appear too bougie.
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AMMA421 has not been able to pay what it owes to the landlord, according to a Wednesday court filing. The landlord of the flagship building is ramping up pressure on the retailer as well, according to court filings. When Cole closed the carpet store on Broadway, she also inked a deal to sell four of ABC’s six floors at 888 to a real estate firm for $133 million. At the same time, she established an LLC called AMMA421, which became “a sub-landlord for a portion of the store,” according to the ABC spokesperson. Known for its brightly colored furnishings and exotic collection of rugs from India, Morocco and China, ABC was hit hard by the pandemic, which forced it to shutter its flagship store and an outlet store in Brooklyn in March 2020. On any combined furniture purchase of $697 or more made with your ABC Warehouse credit card.
888 Capital Partners became a lender to the flailing retailer in early August, agreeing to advance ABC $5.7 million in cash to keep the lights on. The terms of its bid stipulate that it would forgive the bankruptcy loan and some $8.7 million of pre-bankruptcy debt in exchange for ownership of the business should it have the winning bid, according to court papers. In July, AMMA421 filed for bankruptcy protection, listing Cole as its principal, court filings show. Now AMMA421 and the building’s owner, Columbia Property Trust, are locked in a dispute that could result in ABC losing its flagship lease. Cole, the great-granddaughter of Lower East Side carpet peddler Sam Weinrib, has been shrinking the retailer for several years.
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In 2018, she closed its three-decade old carpet store across the street from its flagship. And in 2016, Cole shuttered ABC’s vast Bronx Warehouse outlet. 19th St. last year — but to a city devoid of many of the well-heeled customers and tourists who used to frequent its halls, which have been likened to a luxury bazaar thanks to its clutter of items stacked high and even dangling from the ceiling. Despite the cash infusions, the store’s inventory has been slashed, the source said.
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There were always party poopers who thought ABC was wildly overpriced and full of things you didn’t need, but it was never about need; like so much in New York, it was about desire. When I finally made up my mind that I should buy a rug — after having lived in my apartment for nearly two decades — I found it at ABC. “Get the hot pink,” said Steven Wagner, a friend who was then one of the shop’s design consultants.
We rejected wall-to-wall carpet in favor of bare wood floors accented with maybe a Moroccan prayer mat, Turkish rug or simple square of sisal. We had traveled and yearned for open kitchens, natural fibers and handmade fabrics from Indonesia, South America, New Mexico and the South of France. ABC Carpet had lagged other retailers for years in setting up a robust online business. But when the pandemic hit, it was especially vulnerable because its merchandise lends itself to in-store shopping. It has relied heavily on wealthy clientele and tourists who had abandoned the city last year.
She’d begun to tap further into her spiritual side, and so the store started hosting classes by visiting teachers such as Deepak Chopra. Meanwhile, the retail world was transitioning to focus on digital marketing, and ABC fell out of step, as Cole and her new C.E.O., Aaron Rose, who came to the store from J. Their aim now is to gear up in this area, making the shop more accessible while retaining its essence. Paulette has always adapted to the moment and believes that, like a home, the store will never really be finished. The first-floor marketplace, filled with handmade pots and table linens, Indian sculptures, tinted cocktail glasses and antique chandeliers. A $2,280 “Diamond Orchid” ring is now selling for $1,499 while a vintage 10 X 15 foot Turkish rug that previously cost $15,000 is now listed at $10,850 and vintage French chandelier has been reduced to $1,760 from $2,200.
For Christmas Day, the snack game is strong -- Janet's got assorted cheeses, taco dip, smokies wrapped in bacon, and a butter board with fresh bread on deck. And while the schedule is so fun, Janet says it's really all about creating traditions and spending quality time with her kids, which is why she puts so much effort into it. When Khalid and his younger sisters arrive, the schedule says there will be puffed popcorn, Chex mix, and various candies available for grazing throughout the day, including jelly beans and peanut M&M's. ABC opened more shops — on Long Island, in Delray Beach and even at Harrods in London — but Paulette’s interests were changing.
A pair of Turkish cicim rugs hang on the wall behind a Highline W 14th sofa in pink velvet. Some insiders have speculated that ABC Carpet, which has a flagship at 888 Broadway and an outlet store in Brooklyn, might return to its roots selling mostly rugs. Riley and Greenberg Traurig “to handle strategic legal and financial matters concerning the past year’s many challenges.” The spokesperson didn’t address whether it’s exploring bankruptcy. The home furnishings destination — dubbed New York’s “most magical home store” by House Beautiful magazine in 2019 — retained investment firm B. Riley Financial earlier this year to help it explore strategic options and secure financing, sources said. YP - The Real Yellow PagesSM - helps you find the right local businesses to meet your specific needs.
Then, last year, either because of this growth or because it could not compete with online shopping, Barneys closed and New York lost a beloved institution. In a city whose retail landscape is increasingly made up of chain stores, and which has recently suffered badly from the effects of the pandemic, ABC remains a little piece of New York’s old glamour — and its soul. In the 1950s and ’60s, my mother would go to the original shop, ABC Carpet, which was across the street at 881 Broadway, to buy broadloom. Later, in 1985, when the store became ABC Carpet & Home and moved to number 888, like many New Yorkers I went for the excitement. This was shopping as experience, a place where furnishings were art objects, in much the same way that Dean & DeLuca, founded in SoHo in 1977, was a museum of food.
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When the business exploded, Max leased a couple of floors at 888 and eventually bought the entire building. Later, still yearning for that gold-luster plate, I recall that Paulette told me she had been influenced in the 1980s by the Chelsea Passage department at Barneys, where the store sold exquisite tablewares and home goods such as cashmere blankets. In many ways, I’ve always thought of Barneys as the fashion counterpart to ABC. It, too, was founded — in 1923 as a discount men’s wear shop — by a Jewish immigrant. The same family expanded it over more than nine decades, and it became very big and opened in other cities.
“In a black-and-white world, ABC is in color,” says Paulette Cole, the store’s owner, when I chat with her over Zoom a few days after my visit last month. (Her favorite hue, as it happens, is pink.) It was Cole who made ABC one of the most fabulous department stores in town, continuing a story that is a paradigm of the character that the city has always housed and inspired. At the end of the 19th century, Cole’s great-grandfather, Sam Weinrib, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, peddled used carpets from a pushcart on the Lower East Side. Later, his son, Max, opened a small store under the old Third Avenue El at 29th Street. And in 1947, Max and his son Jerry opened ABC Carpet at 881 Broadway, another stupendous loft building, this one dating to 1896, when the area was part of Ladies’ Mile, then the most prestigious shopping area in the city. In the late ’40s, wall-to-wall broadloom was a necessity for every aspirant middle-class family, and at ABC Carpet you could get it at a discount.
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