The street is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French hero of the American Revolutionary War.

[1] The street originated as a real estate speculation by John Jacob Astor, who had bought a large market garden in 1804, for $45,000, and leased part of the site to a Frenchman named Joseph Delacroix, who erected a popular resort and called it "Vauxhall Gardens" after the famous resort on the edge of London.

Lots along both sides of the new street sold briskly, earning Astor many times what he had paid for the land two decades before.

[4] The grandest was the terrace of matching marble-fronted Greek Revival houses on the west side of the street, called La Grange Terrace when it was built in 1833, but known to New Yorkers as "Colonnade Row" for the two-story order of Corinthian columns that unified its fronts; the nine residences each sold for as much as $30,000; four that remain are the only survivors of the first fashionable residential phase of Lafayette Street, which gained its new name when the city extended the street south in the early 1900s.

[9] Before long, half of Colonnade Row was demolished to make way for a warehouse for Wanamaker's Department Store.