Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [749]
The “Metropolitan Steam Safely Elevator” in Lord and Taylor’s store at Broadway and 20th Street. (Courtesy of Otis Elevator)
Elevators made upper floors profitable, bringing in the rents required to offset the rising cost of land. Directors of Equitable Life were skeptical of consulting-engineer George Post’s plans to make their proposed seven-and-a-half-story headquarters at Broadway and Cedar into New York’s first office structure with steam passenger elevators. They were reassured somewhat when the young man rented an upper-floor suite of offices at twice the market value to demonstrate his confidence. Two months after it opened in 1870, Equitable easily leased out the fifty upper story rooms to financial and legal firms, and four months later Post sold his lease for a profit of six thousand dollars. Multitudes came to ride the iron-framed building’s elevators to see the panoramic view afforded by this first example of what in time would be called a skyscraper.
Tall buildings raised stylistic problems, and possibilities too. Many owners played it safe, commissioning structures modeled on the commercial palazzos of the 1850s. A more adventurous solution was to make the building “modern” by topping it with a mansard (or “French”) roof. This transformed “Italianate” into “Second Empire,” drawing on the cachet of Napoleon Ill’s France and the elegance of Haussmann’s Paris. Continental Life introduced the mansard roof to the business district at 100-102 Broadway; New York Life Insurance Company followed suit; and Mutual, to stay in vogue, was forced to call John Kellum back to add two mansarded stories.
COMMUNICATION GIANTS
The Second Empire solution was also adopted by the federal government for its new post office, which went up in City Hall Park in 1875. The tremendous increase in business correspondence, the emergence of the railroad mail car, and Congress’s approval of free urban delivery in 1863 had channeled staggering amounts of mail into the metropolitan area. Some six million letters were delivered locally in fiscal year 1867-68 alone, despite complaints that it was easier to get mail to Boston than to Gramercy Park. The post office was still headquartered in the dark, overcrowded, seventeenth-century Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street, where it had moved in 1845. So when Alfred B. Mullet was asked to build a new central post office he thought big and raised a colossal Second Empire structure in City Hall Park; widely hated for overshadowing City Hall itself, it was contemptuously nicknamed “the Whale.”
Construction of the new Post Office, Harper’s Weekly, October 23, 1869. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
A more revolutionary architectural development lay two blocks south, at Broadway and Dey, where, in 1872, the cornerstone was laid for what was about to become the nation’s tallest office building and home to the nation’s first continental-scale enterprise: Western Union. The company had done well in the war, receiving massive government subsidies and fourteen thousand miles of government-built lines, and in 1866 had merged with its leading rivals, using massive quantities of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s money, and relocated to New York City. Its virtual monopoly on national telegraphic communications gave Manhattan the technological wherewithal to monitor capital and commodity movements on a national scale and also helped triple the volume of messages between Manhattan and Europe by 1875. New York’s lock on the new information order was further secured with a