At Manhattan's 5th Avenue and 57th Street one morning last week two heavy glass doors revolved, admitted the first of 14,000 opening-day gawkers to Tiffany & Co.'s new store. Before them in fluorescent-lighted showcases lay the toniest U. S. jeweler's dazzling stock: diamond solitaires up to 20½ carats (price: $100,000), pearls (up to $243,000 a string), emeralds, sapphires. The radiance of thousands of stones seemed to spread out and warm the visitors, an effect increased by spotlights hidden in the high soundproofed ceiling. Said Mrs. John F. Bigelow, a Tiffany customer for 40 years: "An inspiring structure with a very social atmosphere. In the old Tiffany's we never looked at each other. Here it is different."
Mrs. Bigelow was right. Gone were the grey, morgue-like walls, the drab showcases, the cloistered darkness of the old store at 37th Street. Instead, large windows, scarcely marred by crossbars, admitted beams of sunlight. Even the clerks looked a little younger. But one thing had not changed, probably never would: the Tiffany tradition of muffled, almost clandestine conservatism.
Tiffany has spent more than a century making its stamp the most upstage of all U. S. trade names. In the panic of 1837, 25-year-old Charles Lewis Tiffany opened his store in downtown Manhattan, sold $4.98 worth of goods in the first three days. A dozen years later, the firm (then Tiffany, Young & Ellis) startled rival jewelers by purchasing $100,000 worth of royal Hungarian diamonds, began gathering éclat. Still later it bought the 128½-carat canary Tiffany diamond. Big as a man's fist, priceless, the stone is exhibited on state occasions, like the New York World's Fair.
Tiffany also has a factory (in Newark, N. J.), shapes its own articles of gold, silver and bronze, engraves invitations, calling cards, etc. During the Civil War the plant turned out ''miscellaneous military supplies" for the Union (Tiffany policy permits no details). In World War I it made surgical instruments. Tiffany also makes jewelers' trade rules, helped introduce to the U. S. the English standard of sterling silver 925/1000 fine.