Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [833]
Despite the skeptics, Gilbert’s Tower Building won a city construction permit and overcame the worries of the owner, who feared his narrow building (only twenty-one feet wide) might well blow over. One blustery Sunday morning, the usual gawkers were watching laborers work on the building’s tenth story, when the weather turned really fierce. Throngs poured down to Broadway expecting to see the thin tower topple. As the wind howled, Gilbert clambered to the top, lowered a plumb line, and discovered to his great satisfaction that the building vibrated not at all.
Gilbert’s design ambitions were less daring than his technological ones. Eschewing the approach favored by Chicagoans of having exteriors “honestly” match construction principles, Gilbert swathed the slender base in rusticated stone and enslabbed the remainder with a conventional facade. Just looking at the completed Tower Building in 1889, one would never have known that New York had entered a new era. But after Joseph Pulitzer’s building was finished the following year, there would be no mistaking the fact.
In 1888 the New York World’s publisher had the great satisfaction of buying up French’s Hotel at Park Row and Frankfort Street and having it torn it to pieces. During the Civil War, the elegant establishment had ejected Pulitzer, then a newly arrived Hungarian immigrant and volunteer Union Army cavalryman, because his frayed uniform annoyed the fashionable guests. Pulitzer had grand plans for the site. In the previous few years, his newspaper had dwarfed the circulation of James Gordon Bennett’s Herald and Charles Henry Dana’s Sun. Now he would have George Post erect an edifice that would dwarf his competitors’ nearby buildings, though it would not be as technologically sophisticated as Gilbert’s Tower Building, as Post opted here for cage construction.
On December 10, 1890, the governor and mayor teamed up to celebrate the opening of Pulitzer’s dazzling 309-foot structure—the tallest building in the world. The World tower was topped by a glittering gilded dome, which now would be the first thing to strike the eye of passengers on vessels arriving in the harbor. It was also the first building to overshadow Trinity Church (284 feet), physical ratification of the passage of metropolitan power from sacred to secular. At the top was Pulitzer’s huge semicircular office with three great windows, frescoed ceilings, and walls of embossed leather. One wag reportedly got off the elevator at the top floor and in a loud voice asked, “Is God in?” The editors on the eleventh floor were delighted to find they could lean out the windows and “spit on the Sun.”
Appropriately enough, in the years following Pulitzer’s coup, the term “skyscraper” first gained common currency. It was not a novel word, having had a long history of other associations. Since the eighteenth century it had been used to describe the triangular sails, set above the royals in calm latitudes, called skyscrapers or moonrakers due to their great height. Now, in the early 1890s, it fastened itself irrevocably to the tall buildings sprouting up in lower Manhattan. The new principle of skeletal construction won official sanction, building