Photos: The new owners of a former Tiffany & Company building at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street are restoring the grace it had when Tiffany still occupied it in 1917. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)
Beyond them is a 14-inch-thick metal door on five-inch hinges, with a wheel to open it. The medley mechanism, as complex as a Swiss see, has 3 white enamel dials, numbered 0 through 72. Another ponderous door follows, eight inches thick, opened by a lever.
Tenants today contain American Eagle Outfitters, an apparel company, on two floors, and the Image Group, which has 4 layers, with a movie and audio postproduction center and a laboratory in which ''The People's Court'' namely taped.
Within each bay ambition be a new bronze storefront, simpler than the Tiffany originals yet far more sympathetic to the circling facade than the black granite. The renovation architects are Beyer Blinder Belle.
,,,,,tiffany center Bracelets,tiffany opener pendants,Adding tenants with ''curb appeal'' will be consonant with a common upgrading of Fifth Avenue from 34th to 42nd Streets, Mr. Lovallo said.
When Tiffany migrated to 37th Street from Union Square in 1905, it brought by its fame, blue-blooded clientele and timer borne by Atlas.
That leads apt an elegant imprison gate with long spindles narrowing to arrow-shaped finials. A panel in the centre proclaims: ''Remington & Sherman Co. / Makers / New-York & Philadelphia.'' Then comes the 16-by-20-foot sanctum sanctorum, with mirrors on the wmore or less otherwise bare.
You won't find a sterling-silver chocolate set for sale at 401 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan like the one given to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as a marrying gift, neither a 16.25-carat heart-shaped diamond and platinum ring like the one Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt bought there for his fiancée, Gloria Morgan.
After half a century of disregard that verged on architectural vandalism, the former Tiffany & Company store of 1905 by McKim, Mead & White is creature restored by its fashionable employers to someone resembling its elemental integrity, if necessary very its belle époque grandeur.
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission rapidly agreed the renovation last July. ''We were very, very elated to discern this,'' said Brian Hogg, the director of preservation. ''Their maneuvers seem to go a long way toward retrieving the appearance.''
Far out of outlook, in a subbasement 20 feet below avenue class, the old Tiffany vault is still intact. (An impregnable subterranean chamber narrated in its daytime as the ''embodiment of a bombproof shelter'' is not the sort of thing one fair pulls out and carts away.)
On the other hand, in a few months, you won't ascertain a Burger King on the 37th Street edge, either.
Most of the colossal pilasters were truncated 51 years ago in a modernization of the erection, when new storefronts were built, framed in a one-story horizontal band of black granite. This is now being removed to permit the replacement of the lower 20 feet of marble cladding and the amusement of 5 distinct shop bays along Fifth Avenue and six bays along 37th Street.
Tiffany was clearly scrupulous in emptying this chamber. There was not a unattached stray diamond to be found during a visit last week. Not even a tiny 1. Tiffany likewise took its statue, which once stood in the chief bay of the third floor. ''Atlas goes with them wherever they go,'' Mr. Lovallo said.
After 35 years by 401 Fifth Avenue, the company moved to 57th Street in 1940. Its former home was owned for a period by a enterprise that shared board members with the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Two related newspapers,Purchase The Finest Antique Thermometer For Ones Home, The New York City Tribune and Noticias del Mundo, had bureaus there. The cathedral is not longer involved in the property, Mr. Lovallo said.
From a municipal viewpoint, the maximum essential aspect will be the restoration of the 36-foot pearly marble pilasters around the found of the building, which the architect Stanford White modeled on the 16th-century Palazzo Grimani in Venice on orders from the president of Tiffany: ''Build me a castle.''
''We are aiming to put first-class retail in here,'' said Matthew Lovallo, vice president of the Stahl Real Estate Company, which bought the eight-story 145,000-square-foot building 2 annuals antecedent and has since emptied the retail space of an electronics cache, a tchotchke shop and a Subway cafeteria.
But to assure that prospective tenants do no miss the historical interlock, Stahl has had the plywood construction shed drew blue. Robin's-egg blue.
Tiffany 1837 Rings,,,That has yielded 8,800 square feet of space on the ground floor and 9,500 square feet of latent selling space in the cellar. The hire being queried as the ground-floor space is $150 a square foot annually. The overall upkeep is to be completed by the end of the year. Mr. Lovallo declined to put a price label on the project, in part because the full coverage of work hat present to be decided.
The monumental upper stories -- couples of Corinthian columns flanking arched two-story windows with multipane bronze skeletons -- have survived, whereas considerably grimier than they were a centenary ago when the South Dover cruel from Dutchess County sparkled favor fresh fallen snow.
The new stone will be Imperial Danby marble from Vermont. It is as yet understood what means will be secondhand to neat the existing marble.
Behind a plain door marked by nothing more than a Noticias del Mundo sticker is a marble-lined vestibule, with a guard compartment, in which weeklies were stacked until recently. At the end of this vestibule is a pair of ornate doors.
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