Before Tiffany & Co. Moved Uptown - New York Times

By this time the Tiffany name was also associated with the enterprises of one of Charles's sons, *** Comfort Tiffany, who had established a separate company for decorative glass and other items.

THE politest thing to say about the blocky white blob of a building at the south corner of 15th Street and Union Square West is that it's homely. Now the building, long known as the Amalgamated Bank, is in play, and investors are circling, presumably thinking to replace it with something more in keeping with the rising values of the Union Square area.

Born in 1812 in Killingly, Conn., Charles Lewis Tiffany opened a stationery and fancy-goods shop in 1837, and by the 1850's it had become one of the leading jewelry stores in the country.

The next month Tiffany's decided to leave Union Square and bought the site for its next building at 37th and Fifth, where it moved in 1906. The earlier building was rented out to underwear importers, shirtwaist makers and other garment companies. A 1911 photograph shows a giant sign for Star Skirts on the second and third floors.

If demolition actually comes, watch the process closely. Buried beneath the 1953 facade is the 1870 building of Tiffany & Company.

Charles Lewis Tiffany founded his store in 1837. In 1953, the building assumed its present appearance, top, after its cast-iron facade was stripped away. By 1911, Tiffany's had moved on, and the building had been rented out as commercial lofts, above.

The prominence of the Tiffany name made the jewelry company an easy target for shoplifters like Alfred (Toothpicks) Britton. In March 1903, he was arrested for stealing $200 worth of what The Times described as si *** er plate from the store, apparently by diverting a salesman's attention.

This Mr. Schoen achieved by stripping off every projecting piece of cast iron and encasing the remains in a simple — some might say brutishly simple — packing case of white brick. Since then, the bank has been just one part of the polyglot assortment of Union Square's architecture, which mixes Romanesque, Queen Anne, Federal, postmodern and other styles.

An unidentified reviewer for The Real Estate Record & Guide scrupulously remarked that the completed building was "a fine specimen of workmanship" but painting the cast iron to resemble stone deceived no one and contributed to the building's "utter poverty of design."

Correction: June 24, 2007

"Tiffany's is easy," he told The Times, but whatever the truth of that statement, there was definitely hyperbole in his claims of having made off with a foot-high ivory statue, half a dozen clocks and two "large bronze elephants," each worth $100.

The new $500,000 Tiffany building, at 15 Union Square West, was designed by John Kellum. His cast-iron facade, chosen for its supposed fire resistance, was more elaborate than the typical loft building, many of which Mr. Kellum had also designed, but not remarkably different from them.

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In 1892, a fire next door prompted the store to put its entire inventory — with an estimated value of $2.5 million — into the vault for safekeeping.

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At the building's opening in 1870, The Times described security so tight that "a 50-cent pin can't enter or leave the establishment without its history being fully known and recorded."

The Streetscapes article of July 2, 2006, about 15 Union Square West, misstated the date that Tiffany & Company began its move from the building. It was 1905, not 1906. The error first appeared in a Streetscapes article on March 25, 1990, about 401 Fifth Avenue, the site to which Tiffany moved from Union Square. A reader pointed out the error in an e-mail message after noticing the date of 1905 in a Metro article on June 12 about construction at 15 Union Square West.

In 1869, The New York Times observed of Union Square that "the great business firms of downtown are encroaching on the once aristocratic thoroughfares of the upper portion of the Metropolis." That was the year Tiffany's began what The Times called "a monster iron building" on the west side of Union Square, at the same time that Brentano's, the bookseller, and Decker, a piano maker, were relocating there.

Correction Appended

The Times called the new building a "palace of jewels," with black-walnut counters and ebony cases holding watches, fans, opera glasses and other articles in wood, leather, si *** er, cloisonné, enamel, bronze and rosewood. The Times observed that one ornamental statue, " 'Zingerilla,' by the Spanish sculptor Klessinger, appears almost ready to speak to her admirers."

But such security was fleeting. The next year The Times reported that a man named Francis Brode got in through an upstairs window one night, collected a large amount of booty and was arrested only because he inadvertently alerted a watchman. Similarly, in 1873, The Times noted that a salesman, Henry E. Murray, had been sentenced to prison for stealing at least $10,000 worth of goods.

Such calls for a more considered treatment of cast iron were almost uniformly ignored by architects throughout the period.

"Monotony and insipidity are stamped upon every square inch of the surface," the reviewer said. He also objected to Mr. Kellum's use of "the same caps, the same brackets, the same rustications, cornices and moldings" that had been current two decades before. He did not question the need to paint the facade, given that iron requires such protection. What he wanted was more creativity — why not "boldly polychromize our iron structures," imitating the ancient Greeks with their stone buildings?

But this spring the bank put its building on the market, and the tall buildings on other corners of Union Square make it unlikely that it will remain much longer. Zoning favors some sort of condominium use, so perhaps trade will now give way to residence, at least on this corner.

Union Square became a center of trade union activity, and by the end of 1925 the Amalgamated Bank, founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America two years earlier, had taken over the building. A billboard was erected on top, but the union made no other significant changes to the 1870 structure until an accident in 1952. On July 15 of that year, Moses Weickselbaum, a salesman who lived in Brooklyn, was hit by a piece of iron that had come loose from the facade. He died from his injuries the next year, and the bank retained an architect, Eugene Schoen, to make sure such an accident never happened again.