Breakfast At Tiffany's: Blue Box Cafe

The history of Tiffany dates back to 1837 when   Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young  opened a “stationery and fancy goods” store with a $1,000 advance from Tiffany's father.  Forty years later in 1887 Charles  Tiffany     shocked the world by buying one third of the French Crown Jewels, earning himself the nickname “The King of Diamonds".   Today, Tiffany has more than 300 stores and employs 12,200 people across the world. The little blue box became the ubiquitous symbol for luxury, love and diamonds. This  color,   now  known as Tiffany Blue, was used on the cover of Tiffany's Blue Book, first published in 1845.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958 and  sold to Harper's Bazaar for $2,000.  In 2013 Truman Capote’s  typed manuscript  with the author’s handwritten edits has sold in 2013 for about $306,000 at auction to a Russian billionaire  Igor Sosin. Capote’s handwritten notations include changing the femme fatale’s name from Connie Gustafson to the now-iconic Holly Golightly.

The novella appeared in the November, 1958 issue. The   novel    inspired the classic 1961 film starring Audrey Hepburn .  The title Breakfast at Tiffany's is drawn from an anecdote popular among Capote's social circle about an ignorant out-of-towner who, upon being asked which glamorous New York restaurant he would like to visit, answered, "Well, let's have breakfast at Tiffany's".

The world-renowned Tiffany & Co. store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street  opened its doors for business on October 21, 1940.  In the opening scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie, a New York City yellow cab drives down a quiet Fifth Avenue and drops Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) off near the corner of 57th Street. The formally dressed Golightly stares through her iconic sunglasses into the Tiffany & Co. window as she consumes her morning pastry and coffee.

Now you really can have breakfast at Tiffany's. Tiffany is proud to present The Blue Box Cafe, located on the 4th floor of our New York flagship store.
The redesigned fourth floor also houses Tiffany's new Home & Accessories collection, as well as a baby boutique. 

Richard Moore, the vice president creative director overseeing all things store and window design, told Vanity Fair that the café is “yet another reason to visit our new fourth floor, and we hope it will draw customers up to experience the artfully composed home of Tiffany’s new luxury home and accessories collection of elevated everyday objects.”

Prices are really high.  For breakfast, you can enjoy coffee and croissant for $29.
GrubStreet  wrote: It only took 56 years, but Tiffany & Co. finally realized it could exploit a certain movie scene involving its Fifth Avenue flagship store and food. If you’re claustrophobic, this might be your get-out-of-jail-free card. Tiffany did almost the whole café — walls, plates, banquettes, even salt shakers — in the trademarked robin’s-egg blue. Vogue the point was to give it “the feeling of being inside a Blue Box.” Tiffany seems to have forgotten the one thing Holly Golightly made clear is that nobody could ever put her inside a box.




M&M'S World, Times Square


M&M's World in Times Square is New York City's largest candy store.  This huge 25,000 square feet store is really one of a kind.  It is a three story store and has many types and colors of actual M&Ms and lots of M&M memorabilia. The  store   has clothes, candy by the pound, NY themed souvenirs, and just about any other M&M related thing you could want. The store is open every day from 9AM till 12AM.
Mars, the company that makes  not only M&M's but  Snickers, and Milky Way chocolate bars traces its   origin to the  beginning of the 20th century. The company is entirely owned by the Mars family. Mars family  was called the richest family in America by Fortune magazine in 1988.

The founder of the company Frank  C.  Mars  started the Mars Candy Factory in 1911 with Ethel V. Mars, his second wife, in Newark, New Jersey.   Frank’s   son, Forrest  pushed the company into chocolate bars—the Milky Way debuted in 1924, soon followed by Snickers.


 Since their introduction in 1941, M&M's have become an iconic American candy. M&M's is an abbreviation for the names of their creators, Forrest Mars   and Bruce Murrie.  Forrest was the son of the founder of Mars company and     Bruce   was the son of William Murrie, the president of Hershey’s from 1908 to 1947. The two men called their new company “Mars & Murrie.”  M&M for short.
In March of 1941, Mars was granted a patent for his manufacturing process of  the new product - a candy-coated  chocolates .

After production began in Newark, New Jersey, M&M cut a deal to sell the sweets exclusively to the US Armed Forces so soldiers could have sweets in their rations no matter where they were in the world.   The candy-coated chocolates were resistant to heat - the slogan was  "Melts in your mouth, not in your hand." Originally sold in cardboard tubes, M&M’s were covered with a brown, red, orange, yellow, green or violet coating.


In  1976  the red M&M disappeared.   This decision came as a result of public controversy surrounding a synthetic  red dye called FD&C Red No. 2, also known as amaranth. Amaranth was  the 20th century’s most widely used food coloring; by 1970 it was being used in $10 billion worth of products.

The dye   was linked to cancer in a 1971 Russian study. Mars removed the red candies from production and replaced them with orange M&M's, which were added to the traditional brown, green and yellow lineup of colors. According to M&M’s public relations department, “the red candies were pulled from the color mix...to avoid customer confusion.”


Ten years later,   in 1987, once the panic surrounding anything red had passed Mars reintroduced red M&M's, but kept orange in the bag. Forrest Mars retired in 1973, passing the business on to his children. Rumor has it the Mars heirs are forbidden from ever selling any portion of their ownership in the company. Mars now produces 400 million M&Ms each and every day.











Joseph Pulitzer mansion, 11 East 73

11  East 73
Joseph Pulitzer was   one of the most powerful journalists in the United States. Joseph , the son of a grain dealer,   was born in Makdo, near Budapest, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1847 and emigrated to the United States in 1864 as a recruit for the Union Army in the American Civil War. He started working in the publisher business in Missouri and later shifted to shift his newspaper interests to New York City, where he purchased a morning paper, the World, from the financier Jay Gould.

In an effort to further attract a mass readership, he also introduced such innovations as comics, sports coverage, women’s fashion coverage, and illustrations into his newspapers.  The World later became involved in a   competition with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal.
When the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty ran out of funds for the Statue's pedestal in 1884, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer came to the rescue.  Roughly 125,000 people contributed to the completion of the pedestal thanks to Pulitzer's crusade. In thanks, the World published the names of each person who made a contribution (no matter its size).


The  unconcealed sensationalism used by both publishers   during the  Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the coining of the term “yellow journalism” to describe such practices.

Failing eyesight and worsening nervous disorders forced Pulitzer to abandon the management of his newspapers in 1887. He gave up his editorship of them in 1890, but he continued to exercise a close watch over their editorial policies.

In 1891 Pulitzer bought a house at 10 East 55 street, altered by  Mc Keam, Mead and White.  In January 1900 the fire destroyed the house and killed two servants.  Pulitzer hurriedly purchased a lot at 11 East   73 and again hired the same architect Stamford White. Pulitzer was blind at this time. White made plastic model of the new house and personally presented it to Pulitzer. 
Palazzo Pesaro


Parazzo Rezonnico
The house looked like a palace on Grand Canal in Venice, Italy.   The design was based on the two palaces - the Palazzo Pesaro (1682) and Parazzo Rezonnico (1667).  Mc Keam, Mead and White used the Venettio Palace style again in 1906 when they constructed the new building for Tiffany on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57 street. Pullitzer lived in his house less than 7 years . 
He died  in 1911  aboard his yacht, the Liberty, in Charleston Harbor. 

In 1912, one year after Pulitzer's death aboard his yacht, the Columbia School of Journalism was founded.
In 1917 the Pulitzer Prize, an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States, was established by provisions in the will of   Joseph Pulitzer.  Each winner receives a certificate and a US$15,000 cash award (as of 2017).

The Pulitzer sons held the house vacant  for many years- they were  not able to find a buyer.
At last in 1930 the house was leased to the developer  Henry Mandel,  a leading residential real estate developer who hired James E. Casale to design a conversion of the building into apartments that would retain the façade and many of the lavish interiors.

“New Yorker” in its article, published in September  1934 , said:  “This house, designed by Stanford White for the late Joseph Pulitzer, is being turned into seventeen unites of various sizes with some rather extraordinary features. Owners of the 2nd floor duples will ascend to their nest by a staircase faintly reminiscent of the Paris Opera to a door graced by 20-foot marble pillars. Their living room (half of the former drawing room) will have a 22-foot ceiling. Corinthian columns, & gold cherubs over the 20-foot windows. Their Bedroom, kitchenette, powder-room and bath will occupy what was once an ante-room. Rentals from $1,500 for one room to $3,600 for the maisonette”.

In 1930, his sons leased the house  to some investors who planned to replace it with a new apartment building but the Depression made them abandon those plans and in 1934 the house was leased it for 20 years to Henry Mandel, a leading residential real estate developer who hired James E. Casale to design a conversion of the building into apartments that would retain the façade and many of the lavish interiors.
In the excellent book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan" (Dover Publications, Inc., 1992), Andrew Alpern noted: ”Some duplex units were created as was a street-entrance into the garden at the west end of the building that led to Pulitzer’s bedroom and study.” Alpern wrote that the major loss of this plan was the salon, which measured 24 by 48 feet with a 19-foot ceiling, and that the former squash court and basement swimming pool were converted into apartments.
Mandel did not like the plan  and returned the property to Pulitzer’s sons.
Three years later, Alpern continued, "the completed venture was sold to the Astor family estate as an investment property."
There are 16 apartments in the building now.   There is one bedroom apartment available for purchase with price tag more than $1.7 mln.