The offices of EC Comics (and therefore MAD magazine for its early years) were located at 225 Lafayette Street in New York. Here's a little peek at that famous address and a quick history of what occurred in that building. That's publisher William M. Gaines behind the desk in the photo above, presumably sitting in his office there. The gent at right is Harvey Kurtzman, who was MAD's founding editor.
One minor quibble. It is often assumed that MAD made the change from a 10-cent color comic book to a black-and-white magazine priced at 25 cents (cheap) in order to avoid the Comics Code and the then-looming efforts to censor comic books. From the time frame, this would seem extremely logical but MAD has rarely been logical and that's not exactly what happened. Kurtzman was generally embarrassed that he worked in comic books. He loved the form but he hated the cheapness of the product and the bad image that dime comic books were getting.
One day, Harvey received an offer to go work at Pageant, a slick magazine of the day. Harvey longed to get out of comics and into the slicks and had, for some time, urged Gaines to turn MAD into a slick. For a long time, Gaines resisted the suggestion but when Kurtzman said he was leaving to go work at Pageant, Gaines relented. He was certain that MAD could not survive the loss of Kurtzman so he made the change not to avoid censorship — though that was a happy bonus — but to keep his indispensable editor on board.
Of course, after a few issues of the upgraded MAD, Kurtzman made a demand to own 51% of EC Publications and Gaines decided that his indispensable editor could be dispensed with. He got rid of Kurtzman and brought in Al Feldstein to edit MAD…to happy and prosperous results. Kurtzman went off to accept an offer to work with Hugh Hefner on an even slicker, more upscale publication. (The demand for controlling interest in Gaines' business was probably Harvey's way of getting fired so he could take Hef's offer.)
Anyway, this all took place at 225 Lafayette Street. When Kurtzman made his outrageous demand, Gaines phoned a business associate, Lyle Stuart, and asked for advice. Stuart replied, "Throw them out the window." Gaines did not literally do this but if you click over to the article, you can see a photo of the window that Stuart recommended Gaines throw Kurtzman out of.