ABC Carpet & Home history

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.

Weinrib took over ABC Carpet from his father and, in 1961, moved the store from East 28th Street to the Flatiron district.

Weinrib already had broadened his company's range in 1979 by buying Schumacher's area rugs ("every mistake they ever bought," he later said). That purchase added more than 500,000 square feet of rugs to the company's stock, and there was not enough room in ABC's quarters to house them.

In 1980 Weinrib rented the basement and first floor of what had been the quarters of the century-old former W&J Sloane department store, directly across the street at 888 Broadway.

In order to fill the seven-story structure, ABC branched out in 1983 from floor coverings into the broader field of home furnishings.

ABC Carpet & Home began selling furniture in 1988, starting with antiques and reproductions.

A year or so later, the company added high-end lines of domestic manufacturers, and in 1992 furniture sales came to about $25 million, or about one-quarter of total store sales.

ABC Carpet & Home's stylish home accessories and antiques were, in 1993, arranged in vignette rooms that varied from cozy, crowded Victorian settings to a contemporary one filled with natural, undyed cloths.

The second floor decorative home collection established in the main store in 1994 contained what management believed to be one of the world's largest collections of home fabrics in one location.

Expansion to Other Sites: 1996-98

With the expansion completed in 1994, ABC Carpet & Home had more than 350,000 square feet of selling space, including three floors at 881 Broadway holding 35,000 rugs and thousands of broadlooms. It opened another 50,000-square-foot store, entitled ABC Home on the Road, in 1997 in The Source, an enclosed mall in Westbury, Long Island.

Weinrib’s proudest moments, his family said, was when the London department store Harrods teamed up with ABC Carpet to sell its rugs in 1998.