Tiffany’s restored Atlas clock becomes a luxury gift for America’s 250th anniversary

Tiffany’s restored Atlas clock now anchors the Fifth Avenue flagship as a nine-foot Atlas statue holding a face that measures about four feet across, a piece Charles Lewis Tiffany commissioned in 1853 above the store at 550 Broadway. Tiffany still calls it the oldest public clock in New York City, and in its own heritage framing, the oldest extant building clock in the city, which is exactly the sort of provenance that makes a patriotic milestone gift feel like a connoisseur’s object rather than a souvenir.

The clock’s pull is scarcity as much as symbolism. The Cross & Cross building that became the Fifth Avenue flagship opened in 1940, and Tiffany says the Atlas figure has symbolized that institution ever since. The house has also turned the motif into a family of luxury objects: the Atlas jewelry collection arrived in 1995, Atlas X followed in 2020 with Roman numerals lifted from the clock, and Tiffany’s watchmaking heritage reaches back to 1847, before Manhattan got its first public clock from the brand in 1853.

If you want the giftable version of that history, the Atlas collection has real range. The Atlas 38 mm automatic watch in stainless steel is $5,400, the 34 mm stainless steel version is $5,600, the Atlas 34 mm moon-phase mechanical watch in stainless steel with diamonds is $18,200, and the rose-gold moon-phase version rises to $29,800. For a lower-lift but still unmistakably Tiffany choice, the Atlas collection fountain pen costs $1,450 and the ballpoint is $610, which is the sweet spot for the person who cares more about a desk object with lineage than another decorative trinket.

The restored clock matters because Tiffany did not treat the Landmark renovation as a nostalgia exercise. The 2023 redesign at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue preserved the original façade’s Atlas statue and clock, then added a new ground-level clock inspired by the original, so the house now has both the archival object above and a contemporary civic marker below. For a 250th anniversary gift, that makes the Atlas clock feel less like a brand relic and more like the rare luxury piece that can hold a city’s memory and still sell the story of time.