Postcard Thursday: New York Skyline, ca. 1900

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

(To see a larger view of this entire postcard, CLICK HERE.)

Today's postcard comes from the vast trove of images at the Library of Congress. Published ca. 1900, the fold-out card shows the downtown skyline. The view, looking at the west side of Lower Manhattan from the Hudson River, shows just how much has changed in the past 116 years.

The tallest building in the postcard (toward the right of this close-up) was also the tallest in the world: The Park Row building, Completed in 1899 by R.H. Robertson, the building's twin cupolas hosted the city's first paid observation deck, a feature that would become a hallmark of every future building to hold the record. The Park Row tower still stands (until recently its ground floor housed J+R Music World), but many others in that part of town are now gone, including another tallest building in the world, the headquarters of the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper. Capped by a large dome (at the left of the above close-up), Pulitzer's skyscraper was the first building ever to boast about its height, though it was -- paradoxically -- also designed to appear short and stocky to passersby. Like much of Newspaper Row, the skyscraper was demolished to make way for the widened approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Another familiar landmark on the skyline is the spire of Trinity Church, which was also once the tallest structure in town. (It is the dark spire, above.) Just north of that you can see the American Surety Building at 100 Broadway, Bruce Price's 1896 skyscraper that still stands opposite Trinity's graveyard, though this and any other extant buildings in Lower Manhattan are impossible to see from the river today.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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JULY 29 at 6:30PM || ALEXANDER HAMILTON'S NEW YORK

We will be speaking at the New-York Historical Society on Friday, July 29, at 6:30pm. The illustrated talk, which takes you through the New York City Alexander Hamilton would have known, is free with museum admission (which is pay-what-you-wish on Friday nights) but the museum would like you to make a reservation. Click this link for all the details: http://www.nyhistory.org/programs/exploring-hamilton%E2%80%99s-new-york

* * * * Read more about NYC history in   Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: The Singer Tower

Astute readers will note that today is Friday, but sometimes (as the late, great Douglas Adams once said), it can be hard to get the hang of Thursdays.

And speaking of late, great: the image above depicts the Singer Tower, Ernest Flagg's 1908 skyscraper in the Financial District. This was the second building Flagg completed for the Singer Manufacturing Corporation, America's premiere sewing machine company. The first, a 12-story manufacturing and retail space in SoHo, still stands at 561 Broadway, and is where Flagg tried out his unusual red-and-green color scheme. Before that tower was finished in 1904, he'd already received the commission to build Singer an office tower downtown -- and to make it the tallest in the world. The new skyscraper held that title for just two years (1908-1909) before being dethroned by the Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.

The Singer Tower, an increasingly unique structure among the uniformity of postwar design, stood until 1968, when it earned the dubious honor of being the tallest building in the world ever to be intentionally demolished. As James wrote in a piece for Curbed this past week:

Having been acquired by US Steel [in the mid-1960s], plans were underway to demolish the tower to build the company's new headquarters, today known as One Liberty Plaza. Though preservationists rallied to have the Singer Tower designated a landmark, the LPC hesitated. Having been unable to find an appropriate buyer for the Jerome mansion, the LPC was leery of designating the Singer Tower only to have to find a new buyer willing to move in and preserve it. Instead, the commission declined to save it and it fell to the wrecking ball in 1968.

Read the full story about New York's struggle to hold onto its landmarks at
http://curbed.com/archives/2015/04/29/how-some-of-nycs-first-landmarked-buildings-became-rubble.php

Today's postcard was sent 105 years ago on May 16, 1910. It is one of the first generation of cards where the message could finally be written on the back (Congress changed the law in 1907), but the bulk of the space is still reserved for the address. The message reads:

Hope you are all well as usual. I am just the same. Can see this bldg from where we are working. Will write some time this week. WDH

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Postcard Thursday: When Met Life was the World's Tallest

Today's postcard shows the Met Life tower on Madison Square, which held the title of tallest building in the world from 1909 (beating out the now-demolished Singer Tower) until 1913, when it was bested by the Woolworth Tower, which remained the world's tallest until the opening of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

This postcard was actually mailed in August 1908, meaning that it was printed before the Met Life tower was actually finished, but that's par for the course--how many tchotchkes of the "Freedom Tower" were on sale before they'd even laid the foundation for WTC1?

The Met Life building was designed by Napoleon Le Brun & Sons (noted for the Gilded Age fire stations in New York), and the bulk of the work fell to sons Michel and Pierre Le Brun, who modeled the tower on the campanile in Piazza San Marco in Venice.

The building cost $6.5 million to build, and while it was praised at the time of its completion as the "most meritous work of the year" by the American Institute of Architects, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was annoyed to only hold the title of world's tallest for four years. In the late 1920s, work began on the annex building to the north, which--at least in early blueprints--would have been spectacularly tall, dwarfing the Empire State Building that was being erected at the same time. However, the Depression derailed Met Life's plans and the annex was capped at 30 stories.

The clock tower is owned by Marriott; in April 2015, an Ian Schrager-designed hotel, "New York Edition," is slated to open.

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

News PAPER Spires at the Skyscraper Museum

At the end of the nineteenth century, when newspapers were at their peak, there were 43 daily papers in New York City. Most were published from "Newspaper Row"--the blocks of Park Row near City Hall--from grand skyscrapers that were among some of the first truly notable high-rise buildings in the city.

While most of these newspapers are gone and their headquarters have been torn down, the Skyscraper Museum has brought them back to life in their new exhibition "News PAPER Spires," running through July 15th. The small exhibition makes good use of archival drawings, blueprints, photographs, and newspapers themselves to tell the story of some of the city's most famous skyscrapers, including the World, Tribune, and Times buildings. (Of those three, only the Times building still stands--it's the building from which the ball drops on New Year's Eve.)

Of particular interest in Joseph Pulitzer's World tower, which was the first skyscraper to proclaim itself the tallest in the world. Designed by George B. Post (who also built the New York Stock Exchange and City College), the building reached to 309 feet to the top of the dome. It was a "giant among giants" to use the paper's PR terminology, and soon the Times and Tribune were racing to expand their buildings as they increased their circulation. Alas, the World tower came down when the approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge were expanded.

The show also focuses on the improvements in technology--from the use of rag paper to the invention of the linotype machine--that kept millions of papers circulating every day.

The Skyscraper Museum is located at 39 Battery Place (next to the Ritz Carlton) and is open Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm. If you can't make it in person, there's a virtual exhibition on the museum's website.

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To read more about the race to build skyscrapers in New York

check out

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Will the World Trade Center be America's Tallest?

As you may have read, there is controversy brewing as to whether the new World Trade Center building (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will be America's tallest building upon its completion.

At issue is the building's spire, which was designed to reach a final height of 1,776 feet, thus marking the year of the Declaration of Independence. This piece of symbolism has stayed with the building from Daniel Liebskind's original master plan through architect David Childs's architectural redrafts. However, back in January, the Durst Organization (co-developers of the building) made the decision to strip the spire of its $20 million cladding, leaving it a bare--and functional--antenna. And there's the rub: according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, decorative spires count in a building's final height; solely functional antennae do not.

This controversy between functional vs. decorative height can be traced back to the construction of the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and Empire State Building in the late 1920s.

As we write in Inside the Apple, the contest between 40 Wall and the Chrysler Building to be the world's tallest building was stiff:

In March 1929, the announced height of the Chrysler Building was 809 feet, to be topped with a dome. The Manhattan Company [aka 40 Wall Street] rejoined by announcing it was to be 840 feet. By October, Chrysler’s estimated final height had risen to 905 feet and—after a few last-minute drafting sessions by Severance and partner Yasuo Matsui—the Manhattan Company was revised upward to 925 feet. 

But no one knew of the “vertex,” a secret spire that Van Allen’s crew had been assembling inside the steel dome since September. On October 23, 1929, it was set in place. No newspapers carried the story the next day; no newsreel cameras were on hand to record the momentous occasion. Chrysler and Van Allen were happy to keep their secret—if you can call a 185-foot spire crowning a 1,046-foot building a secret—until the time was right. 

As Van Allen succinctly put it: “We’ll lift the thing up and we won’t tell ‘em anything about it. And when it’s up we’ll just be higher, that’s all.”

This stunt caused many to cry foul--could the Chrysler Building really be the world's tallest with the simple addition of a decorative spire? The Empire State Building wasn't going to wait to find out.

After William Van Allen revealed the Chrysler Building’s vertex, it became imperative to make the Empire State Building taller without adding a “useless” spire. To that end, Smith announced in December 1929 that the top of the Empire State would house a mooring mast, 1,300 feet from the ground, for transatlantic dirigibles. 

This was utter folly. Not only does a dirigible need to be anchored by both the nose and the tail (which is why they landed at air fields in New Jersey in the first place), the updrafts in Midtown were so strong that a zeppelin the length of two city blocks would have whipped around in the wind like a child’s toy. More to the point, a dirigible’s gondola was in the ship’s center; people would never have been able to (as pictured here in an early publicity drawing) exit from the helium-filled balloon straight into the 102nd-story waiting room.

In late September 1931, the New York Evening Journal completed the only successful dirigible mooring. At great danger to life and limb, it delivered a package of newspapers from the Financial District to the Empire State Building’s roof. It looked great on the newsreel cameras, but would be the closest the mooring mast ever saw to real use.

It's ironic that the Empire State Building worked to make its spire functional (even if it never would be), when today having a solely functional spire doesn't count toward a building's final height. Of course, to many people the most important measurable statistic is highest occupied floor, which will continue to be held by the Willis Tower in Chicago, whether or not the Council on Tall Buildings decides to count the World Trade Center's spire or not.

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Read more about the race to the be world's tallest building in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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