Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [834]
More was involved here than a prosaic expansion of commercial office stock. In succeeding so admirably in overarching its competitors—making runts of the Times, Herald, Sun, and even the Tribune, whose campanile peaked at a paltry 260 feet—the World Building broke new cultural as well as material ground. Pulitzer’s publishing success owed as much to his paper’s exuberant self-advertising and ferociously competitive spirit as to its innovative content. His architectural initiative extended this warfare onto a new terrain. The World Building was more than a mere office building; it was a corporate self-proclamation, a brand name shouting itself in iron and stone, a shrewd Barnumesque statement by a man well aware that appearances could constitute reality.
Other corporate moguls would follow Pulitzer’s lead and seek their own boardroom-eyries. It would be a few years yet before the process accelerated sharply, but soon a corporate competition for sensational self-presentation—and rentable floor space—would be unleashed. The ensuing frenzied space race would drive New York spectacularly skyward.
The city’s silhouette was also transformed in these years by two devices that became (and have remained) two of New York’s most distinguishing features: water tanks and steam pipes.
As commercial buildings rose to six stories, beyond the reach of fire ladders, and then even higher, beyond the reach of fire hoses dependent on Croton-generated water pressure, the fire department, city government, insurance industry, and tall-tower occupants grew steadily more alarmed, especially when it became clear how quickly flames shot up elevator and air shafts. Western Union, whose building was among the first to confront this problem, had adopted an extremely costly solution. The company dug wells seventy feet deep in its cellar and installed powerful steam pumps to drive the water up through iron mains to the roof, from which heavy streams of water could be played on surrounding buildings. This was not a practical solution to mounting fire losses—which in the dry-goods district alone surpassed six million dollars between 1877 and 1882, less than a third of which had been covered by reluctant insurers. In the latter year the burning of the former World Building on Park Row produced four hundred thousand dollars in damages and twelve deaths, starkly underscoring the peril.
Water sprinklers were part of the answer. The Parmelee Automatic Sprinkler, a heat-triggered device connected to piping installed on each floor, was introduced in 1874 and replaced in 1881 by the improved Grinnell Sprinkler. But sprinklers, as much as hydrants and hoses, required a sure source of pressurized water. The solution, adopted at first on a piecemeal basis, was to have barrelmakers construct a bulky wooden water tank, which looked like a huge washtub on stilts, up on the roof, where it gravityfed water into the sprinkler pipes that wove back and forth through the building beneath. Fire insurance companies lowered rates on buildings that installed these tanks. In the 1890s, companies emerged to build them (of which two remain, the Rosenwach Tank Company and Isseks Brothers). And the city’s Building Code was amended to require them (or a cellar pump equivalent) on all buildings over 150 feet tall.
Another solution to problems raised by tall buildings was the creation of a network of underground steam pipes to heat them. If each of the new behemoths had a separate heating plant, their gargantuan coal requirements, which would have to be delivered through narrow downtown streets, would soon have rendered the area impassable. To obviate the problem, the New York Steam Company, formed by a merger of competitors in 1881, got a Common Council franchise to lay such pipelines (for which it paid a paltry hundred dollars a year) and in 1882 supplied its first customer, the United