I worked for Tiffany & Co. on a temp job from the summer of 2013 to the winter of 2014 and it was a pleasant assignment, mostly copy editing and proofreading in the multiple languages the catalogs were produced in, located in its business offices at #200 5th Avenue at West 23rd opposite Madison Square. It was a handsome office, all white with splashes of “Tiffany blue” (actually a shade of aquamarine). I got it from word of mouth, as an old friend and colleague “Movie Mike” Olshan knew the head of the proofreading department, Paul C. After a shaky start, by the end of my tenure, I was being told “we don’t know what we’ll do without you.” As with all my temp assignments after I left, they managed. Some of the columns, painted white, were embossed with the word “Carnegie.” Two industry titans in the same place, steelman Andrew Carnegie and Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Tiffany Place, one of my favorite Carroll Gardens streets because of its surviving Belgian Block pavement, is likely thought by area denizens to be named for Louis Comfort Tiffany, but maps show it as early as the 1840s — long before the famed glassmaker ever built a factory in Brooklyn or elsewhere. There was a state senator from the area named George Tiffany in the early 19th Century, and that’s likely the source. You will find the famed Tiffanys in Brooklyn, though, since the family, including Charles Lewis Tiffany of dry goods and later, jewelry fame, is interred in Green-Wood Cemetery.
#1 Tiffany Place, at the corner of Kane Street, is the largest of these brick houses on the street, and it is the building that caused the misconception about Tiffany Place being named for Louis Comfort Tiffany. Somehow, an idea got around (likely from real estate agents) that this was a Tiffany glass factory at one time. According to Lost City, the records don’t show it. The building had been home to Walther and Company, which produced “fancy papers” or paper used for wrapping or in wedding invitations. I was hoping the Belcher Hyde 1929 atlas would settle the issue, but it merely shows it as a large brick building.
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