Lafayette Radio Electronics

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Lafayette Radio Electronics grew from Abraham Pletman’s early-1920s Wholesale Radio Service in New York City. The Lafayette name appeared on radios in July 1931; by the postwar years, the company had evolved into a major catalog source for the nation’s tinkerers, listeners, hams, and would-be home engineers.

From Syosset, New York, Lafayette mailed thick catalogs loaded with radios, electronic components, amateur-radio gear, speakers, tape recorders, tools, PA equipment, and hi-fi hardware. Its 111 Jericho Turnpike headquarters was part command center, part wish-book launchpad for anyone who believed a weekend and a soldering iron could improve civilization.

Lafayette also built a chain of company and associate stores, where sound rooms and demonstration gear invited shoppers to audition the future. The company’s shelves mixed practical parts with big-ticket stereo systems and plenty of gloriously specific gadgets—an electronics counterculture with fluorescent lighting.

The late 1970s got brutal. Lafayette entered Chapter 11 on January 4, 1980, amid store closures and financial strain; Circuit City acquired several remaining New York-area locations in 1981 and operated them as Lafayette-Circuit City stores for a time.

Our Lafayette Radio Electronics collection celebrates the catalog-page confidence, receiver dials, CB chatter, and component-bin chaos of a retailer that made every basement bench feel like mission control.