Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [832]
TALL TOWERS
Burgeoning professional and corporate concerns needed lots of office space. Continental-scale companies like American Tobacco had to control the flow of product from factory to retailer, oversee sales agents throughout the country, maintain a large central depot in New York, audit costs, manage labor, track inventory, compile reports, pay taxes, and initiate legal transactions. Companies with international outreach, like I. M. Singer and Company—led by Edward Clark since 1876, the year after Singer’s death—established agencies in Latin America, Canada, and the Far East, which dispatched reports back to the central office in New York City. Sales, purchasing, legal, auditing, and manufacturing departments, in turn, required ever-expanding support staffs: typists and stenographers to handle intra- and extra-company correspondence, clerks to file it all, office boys to handle miscellaneous chores.
Particular entities had special space needs. Insurance companies needed to keep huge record bases for premium and claims payments, manage investments, and develop actuarial statistics. In the case of a company like Metropolitan Life, which sold “industrial insurance” to workers, headquarters had to direct the army of agents who sold policies and collected premiums each week. Law firms needed bigger libraries as national reporting of case law expanded the number of publications to be researched. Specialized segments of the import-export fraternity (iron and metal, petroleum, produce, cotton, coffee, and coal) needed their own gathering places; no longer would a single Merchants’ Exchange do.
To meet this demand, Manhattan’s real estate industry—itself newly organized and housed in a Real Estate Exchange (1883)—generated a tremendous volume of commercial construction, much of it now in red brick neo-Renaissance rather than Second Empire, though mansard roofs remained popular. Some construction was commissioned, but much was erected “on spec” for rental to bankers, brokers, and railroad and insurance companies; the building boom created havens for capital in more ways than one.
The result was a dramatic enlargement—horizontally and vertically—of the city’s business district. The high cost of land encouraged tall towers. “Real estate capitalists,” according to “Sky Building in New York,” an 1883 article in Building News, had “suddenly discovered that there was plenty of room in the air, and that by doubling the height of its buildings the same result would be reached as if the island had been stretched to twice its present width.”
In 1882 the cornerstone was laid for George Post’s mammoth, arcaded Produce Exchange. Over the next two years, it rose at the corner of Broadway and Beaver—site of Peter Stuyvesant’s weekly “Monday Market”—until it loomed ten stories tall over Bowling Green. In 1884 William Rockefeller commissioned a headquarters to house the new Standard Oil Trust at 24-26 Broadway, and two years later its ten stories were filled with managers and employees directing the production, refining, and marketing of oil. By the end of the 1890s over three hundred buildings nine or more stories tall would have gone up in Manhattan.
Though such structures did not overtop the previous era’s Tribune and Western Union buildings, they did surpass them in technology. Most lofty predepression structures had been masonry buildings, whose thick weight-supporting walls ate up floor space and dictated small windows. Post’s Produce Exchange used cage construction: iron columns and girders carried the weight of the floors, allowing exterior walls to get slimmer. Post also experimented with “skeleton” construction for some of the walls, using a metal frame to support them as well.
New York ambled farther into the technological