Need a button? Check out the most unique button store in America!

Under the giant gold button at 143 East 62nd Street in New York City,  you’ll find Tender Buttons, the only buttons only shop of its kind in America. https://www.yelp.com/biz/tender-buttons-new-york

The shop, part button museum part button emporium, is wonderful place to spend some time, get inspired and maybe buy a button or two. Housed in a charming miniature town house with boxes of buttons lining the walls from floor to ceiling, arranged by color ranging in every kind of button from a classic four hole horn button ($2.75) to hand carved ivory eagle heads ($7.50) to antique collectors items ranging in the thousands of dollars.

Founded in 1964, when Diana Epstein, a New York book editor at the time, went to her favorite button shop on East 77^th street in search of some good buttons, to find the owner had died and the shop had closed. She tracked down the heirs and bought the entire button collection (hundreds of thousands of buttons) for $5000. Shortly after Diana teamed up with Millicent Safro, an antiques dealer who offered to help her organize the buttons and before they knew it the two established Tender Buttons.

Tender Buttons moved from the East 77th Street location to the townhouse in 1968, with the two proprietors living above the shop until Diana’s death in 1998.  Millicent still lives there, rumored to be surrounded by millions of buttons.