Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [750]
When Western Union commissioned construction of a nerve center to coordinate its over 12,600 offices—and to reflect its wealth and glory—it turned to Equitable’s George Post. The architect-engineer had several novel problems to solve, stemming from the building’s projected height, a hitherto unimaginable ten stories—notably the question of how to design surfaces lifted far beyond any street watcher’s ability to grasp them. Post opted for a tripartite organization that would become standard for tall towers. A massive base—required by masonry construction, which needed thicker walls to support additional higher stories—supported a shaft section, boldly striped with red pressed brick and granite. Atop this was perched a showpiece capital—a Renaissance palace—and a clock tower, which featured a ball, synchronized with the Naval Observatory in Washington, that fell precisely at noon, allowing mariners in the harbor to set their chronometers and ground-level businessmen to adjust their watches.
When completed in 1875, the Western Union building stood at 230 feet, featured one of the first hydraulic-gravity elevators, and had its own wells beneath the cellar, from which water could be pumped to the roof by steam pumps in case of fire. The office, which housed one hundred telegraph operators in the vast open reaches of the eighth floor, was open 24 hours a day and brilliantly illuminated through the night. New York had become a city at least part of which never slept.
The great newspapers too began to climb skyward. Most still congregated just east of City Hall Park amid a thicket of magazines, news agencies, job printers, type foundries, lithographers, engravers, bookbinders, stationers, and publishing houses. The day’s copy (much of it taken from the telegraph wires) was assembled at night, and the giant basement steam presses rumbled until the predawn hours. Newsboys, some of whom slept on nearby streets, picked up the still-warm sheets and began their sunrise deliveries. The newspapers, already voracious consumers of space, with their extensive staff and bulky presses, were also expanding rapidly. This dictated larger headquarters, for purposes of practicality and for competitive display.
James Gordon Bennett’s Herald hunched the process. When Barnum’s American Museum burned down in July of 1865—a spectacular blaze, which left a dead whale in the street for two days—Bennett decided to erect a showpiece building on its Broadway and Ann Street site. He selected architect John Kellum, who by 1867 had turned out another of the mansarded Second Empire structures that were now the rage.
Perhaps Bennett’s project, together with Oswald Ottendorfer’s construction of new quarters for his Staats Zeitung at the corner of Chatham and Tryon, inspired Greeley to outdo them all and trump even Western Union. He commissioned Richard Morris Hunt—the first American architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris—to raise an eleven-story mansarded building, the Tribune Tower, on the corner of Nassau and Spruce. Like Post, Hunt divided his granite and brick structure into an imposing base, a repetitious shaft, and a dramatic summit: a clock-campanile that, when completed in 1875, soared to 260 feet, now within nine yards of Trinity’s crown.
RAIL COMPLEX
Some of Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann’s most dramatic interventions in the Parisian cityscape had been designed to integrate the French capital into the national rail network. Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose consolidated lines now connected the western heartland to the heart of Manhattan, similarly realized that to maximize his system’s efficiency, he (and his son William) would have to complement their rail building with city building.
Vanderbilt’s primary effort lay far uptown, where he decided to build a passenger terminal that would service both the Central and Hudson road (which ran down Tenth Avenue) and the Harlem and