Griffon Corporation
multinational conglomerate headquartered in New York City
Griffon Corporation is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in New York City. It operates as a diversified management and holding company. The company has four subsidiaries: Ames True Temper, ClosetMaid, Clopay Building Products, and CornellCookson. Griffon has been publicly traded since 1961 and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as a component stock of the S&P SmallCap 600, S&P Composite 1500, and Russell 2000 indices.
History
Founding and early years (1959–1964)
In 1959, Long Island businessman Helmuth W. Waldorf – a tool and die maker's apprentice who had immigrated to the United States from Germany to study at Columbia University – founded a small defense electronics company in College Point, Queens named Waldorf Controls Corporation. The company changed its name later that year to Instrument Systems Corporation (ISC). In 1961, ISC issued shares to the public and bolstered its avionics business by acquiring Telephonics Corporation. Established in December 1933, Telephonics was among a handful of aviation electronics pioneers that formed the nucleus of the aviation and defense industry on Long Island during the mid-20th century. ISC struggled financially in its early years. To reposition the company for future growth, ISC's major stakeholders, including Waldorf and director Lester Avnet, the president of Avnet Electronics Corporation and son of its founder Charles Avnet, turned to a highly regarded former executive at Loral Corporation, Edward Garrett.
The public source identifies “Griffon Corporation” as multinational conglomerate headquartered in New York City. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Griffon, Corporation and multinational.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16840288. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1500, 2000 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Griffon Corporation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.