On Madison Avenue, behind a large brass door just north of 61st Street, there’s a portal to old New York—martini New York, town car New York, the one with all the shoulder pads and creative-class expense accounts. You can probably picture it: soft pendant lighting; rows of colorful eyeglasses peering out from vintage Shaker cabinets; a local woman, buffed to a high shine, trying on sunglasses with both hands back and forth, like windshield wipers, without ever leaning forward or uncrossing her legs. A small clutch of liquor bottles sits on the display case next to a bowl of hard candy, and Bob Balaban, in a gray wool three-piece suit, offers you a drink.
has several NYC locations, including an airy, modern boutique in SoHo, but the Madison Avenue shop is my favorite for the way it retains the quirky, clubby, cushion-cut feel of the Upper East Side as it existed in the era of and Richard Feigen. It’s the type of brand that still finds shouting about itself distasteful, despite the kinds of price tags and old-money bona fides that make it ripe for a name-drop in any of the myriad TV dramas, from to , in which luxury goods co-stars. Frederics Opticians opened in New York in 1913, the same year Ford started producing Model Ts in , but the brand known today as Morgenthal Frederics dates back to the former’s sale, in 1986, to eyewear designer Richard Morgenthal, who moved the label upmarket and with a particular specialty in buffalo horn.
followed in the 1990s, including th.
