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Big, Bigger, Biggest
In the competition to build the world's tallest buliding, New York City kept reaching for the sky.

By Phil Scott


	Manhattan's skyline (Corbis)

Two words explain why New York City is a living museum of the Golden Age of the Skyscraper: Manhattan schist. Though it may sound like a new Woody Allen film, it's even more integral to the city's character than that. Without this prosaic-looking gray bedrock, New York City would never have become the great city, the world powerhouse, that it is today. Manhattan schist formed this island in the Hudson river and gave it plenty of waterfront, which made it an important port city. But it goes deeper than that, literally, for Manhattan schist makes a solid anchor for buildings that touch the sky. Instead of having to spread out, the city could reach up.

Like jazz and rock and roll, skyscrapers are an American invention, the nation's contribution to the art of architecture. "It is the first truly American style of architecture—the kind of architecture that survives," says Judith Dupré, a cultural historian and the author of Skyscrapers. "[During the 19th century] it became very important to Americans to surpass the Europeans, because all architecture and all buildings were coming from Europe."

But when does a building become a skyscraper? "It's got to be tall—it's as simple as that," says John Tauranac, an architectural historian and author of several books, including The Empire State Building. "However, there are a couple of technological breakthroughs required."

At first people were convinced that a good gust of wind would blow it over.

For starters, a skyscraper must break with the design of a traditional stone or brick building, which supports its own weight with its exterior walls. The taller the building, the thicker and heavier the lower walls must be, leaving less space available for amenities like windows and rooms. Think of the Great Pyramid of Cheops (which, though originally 482 feet tall, needed a base 768 feet wide and had room for only one person). So most important to the skyscraper's inevitable rise was a structural innovation that actually had its genesis with other architectural breakthroughs, some surprising (such as John Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge) and some not (like Gustav Eiffel's Eiffel Tower).

That innovation was an interior steel skeleton, strong and lightweight. It took the load off the exterior walls, which could now be made of any thin, preferably fire-resistant, material.

The other necessary technological breakthrough also had to do with height: people will walk up only a few floors before they start getting cranky. Happily, in 1853 Elisha Graves Otis invented the safety elevator not only to lift people to great heights, but also to brake the car to a halt if the supporting cable broke. Though initially powered by steam, in 1889 (the same year Eiffel built his Tower) the elevator met electricity. It was a match made for the heavens.

The race to scrape the skies was on.

Though New York is synonymous with skyscrapers, the first true example was actually built in Chicago. The year was 1885 and the architect was William Le Baron Jenney; his now-demolished Home Insurance Building had only nine stories plus a basement and stood a mere 180 feet. Though hardly a skyscraper compared to today's thousand-footers, even with two stories added in 1891, it had the requisite steel skeleton. In no time New York gained its first skyscraper, the 160-foot, 13-story Tower Building at 50 Broadway, built in 1888. The Tower Building gave every outward appearance of having load-bearing walls, but soon architects realized they didn't have to be constrained by the old, European appearances. The process, however, was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Take, for example, the Flatiron Building, still standing on a pie-slice of land at 23rd and Fifth Avenue. Though just 285 feet (21 stories) high, it has been an attraction since it was built in 1902. It may not be your idea of a skyscraper, what with its relative squatness, excessive ornamentation, and odd wedge shape. (Its real name is the more prosaic Fuller Building, but people thought it resembled an old-fashioned flatiron, and the nickname stuck.) While its frame was a simple steel skeleton, architect Daniel Burnham gave the building a highly ornamental (and very French) Beaux Arts-style facade to endow it with the permanence and solidness of classic marble. Naturally, it's all an illusion. "At first people were convinced that a good gust of wind would blow it over," says Tauranac. "But they were reassured by the walls—'look how thick they are'—though they're made of terra cotta. They're just stamped out of a mold."

Across Madison Square, two blocks to the north and east of the Flatiron, you can find a step up the skyscraper's evolutionary ladder: the 700-foot-tall Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower. Completed in 1909, for four years it was the tallest building in the world. This 50-story tower is a copy on a grand scale of a European work, the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, which collapsed in 1902. Pundits and wags thought they saw a parallel between the Campanile's fall and the much larger Tower's rise; between the two events, Met Life president John Hegeman had been indicted for unethical business practices, but was cleared of all charges. Today, though, you're not seeing the same building Hegeman built. In 1960, before the advent of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (which prohibits alteration or destruction of important works of architecture), refurbishers stripped the tower of its ornate marble facade and replaced it with a Modern-style smooth limestone facing.

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While admitting to a New York prejudice, author Phil Scott comes by it honestly; he lives just down the street from the old and new G.E. buildings and right up the avenue from the Chrysler Building.