Tiffany's of Tribeca

By Michael J. Burlingham
POSTED NOVEMBER 2, 2007

I moved to Duane Street in 1977, lured by the diamond-pattern, no-skid loading docks, the basement vaults lit by glass disks embedded in the sidewalk, the spacious cast-iron loft buildings and, most of all, the cheap rent.

One hundred and forty years earlier, even before these industrial elements of old New York had become part of the local landscape, my great-great grandfather moved to the same neighborhood, opening a “fancy goods” shop at 259 Broadway at Warren Street. Lacking the capital to set up among the posh stores farther down Broadway, he, too, was drawn here by the area’s affordable rents.

He was Charles Lewis Tiffany, and the shop he and his partner founded in this neighborhood in 1837 went on to become the premier jewelry and silver house in the world, its flagship at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street one of the city’s iconic attractions to generations of shoppers and curiosity seekers. Last month, Tiffany & Company returned to Lower Manhattan, to 37 Wall Street. This time to cater to a new, upscale breed of Downtown dweller.

A Connecticut Yankee, born and bred, Charles Tiffany at 15 was running his father’s company store in Brooklyn, Conn., and facing a seemingly bright future as co-partner in Comfort Tiffany & Son, a water-powered textile mill that his father had established on the banks of the Quinebaug River.

Instead, he and John Young, the son of a competing mill owner from the opposite bank of the Quinebaug, decided to open a shop in Manhattan, then a boomtown of over 200,000 inhabitants. Though the Broadway and Warren Street location was considered too far uptown, it was directly opposite City Hall. And City Hall Park was a popular promenade for residents.

For their money, Tiffany & Young, as the first shop was called, got 15 feet of Broadway frontage in an “old fashioned double-dwelling” with two stores. A four-story, brick A-frame, it was rated “third class” for insurance purposes. Here on Sept. 18, 1837, Tiffany & Young opened its doors, selling Japanese fans, Chinese umbrellas, lacquered furniture, papier-mâché and terra-cotta wares, porcelain vases, walking canes, and stationery, among other offerings.

For 16 years the Tiffany store remained within what is now Tribeca, charting steady growth while establishing its hallmarks in quality, service, and honesty in trade. In 1841, the partners took over the shop on the corner, which provided more frontage on Broadway and, for the first time, a show window on Warren Street. In 1847 they consolidated operations in a newer, larger building at 271 Broadway, on the southwest corner of Chambers Street, where they remained until 1853.

In those days, high quality meant imported goods, and the partners devoted themselves to renewing their stock via overseas suppliers. The infusion of capital from a third partner, Charles’s cousin Jabez L. Ellis, made it possible for John Young to travel abroad each year on a buying trip, giving Tiffany, Young & Ellis a leg-up on the competition.

The firm’s first offering in jewelry was a line of French paste called “Palais Royal,” which featured glass jewels in gold-plate settings. It was quite tasteful and relatively inexpensive, yet within a few years Tiffany, Young & Ellis abandoned costume jewelry for the real thing.

The importance of the Tribeca years to Tiffany’s, in particular, and to American jewelry and silver, in general, rests on the firm’s turn to manufacturing and subsequent establishment of internationally competitive benchmarks. Jewelry making commenced with the move to Chambers Street, and silverware followed within three or four years.

Tiffany married his partner’s sister Harriet in 1841, and of three children born in these years, two survived—Annie Olivia and Louis Comfort. Louis, who went on to achieve prominence as a painter, interior designer, and glassmaker, was born on February 18, 1848, four days before the event that did much to elevate Tiffany, Young & Ellis’s emporium to the front rank of diamond merchants—the outbreak of revolution in France. By coincidence, John Young had just landed in Paris on his annual buying trip and invested his entire capital on steeply discounted gems, purchased from an aristocracy fleeing the mob.

Altogether, the Tiffany family lived at three Tribeca addresses, all within a single block and all shared by John B. Young and his wife. In 1846 they moved from 124 Chambers Street across the street to No. 125. Following the death of Charles Lewis Jr., the first-born child, the Tiffanys moved to a higher-grade residence at 57 Warren Street, a “first class” masonry structure with a frame porch and a yard in back, on the south side of Warren between Church Street and College Place (the former name of West Broadway south of Chambers Street, as it approached Columbia College).

By mid-century the neighborhood around Tiffany’s was bustling. The Hudson River Railroad established a passenger station at Hudson Street between Chambers and Warren in 1851, cater-corner from the Fredrick Hotel– one of the few extant buildings from that era and still a hotel, the Cosmopolitan. West of West Broadway/College Place, between Reade and Vesey Streets, were various industrial concerns, including a “candy sugar” refinery, a coal yard, and a tobacco factory. To the east were banks, hotels, and churches.

Fifteen years after establishing themselves on Chambers Street, in 1852, the Tiffanys headed uptown to East 10th Street near St. Marks-in-the-Bowerie, where they lived for 10 years. And the next year Tiffany bought out his partners and reorganized at 550 Broadway, between Prince and Spring Streets, under the name Tiffany & Company.

The Tribeca years were over. It is not accurate, however, to say that the Tiffanys never looked back.

During the mid-1870s, young Louis Comfort, then still exclusively a fine artist, returned to paint his boyhood haunts, which had fallen on hard times in the wake of the so called Uptown Movement. One of these views, depicting a group of tumbledown buildings, is said to have anticipated the work of the Ashcan School in its unfiltered view of urban slums. Now in the Brooklyn Museum, it is titled Duane Street. Since those days, of course, the fortunes of Duane Street and its environs have brightened considerably—to the point where it seems almost fitting that the House of Tiffany would decide to establish a beachhead near the founders’ original turf.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article,  updated here, first appeared in the September, 1995 issue of The Tribeca Trib.

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