The short life of New York City’s first skyscraper | Hacker News Reader

The short life of New York City’s first skyscraper

ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com

143 pointsbenbreen40 comments

For anyone curious about the history of early skyscrapers in general:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_skyscrapers

Especially this bit regarding the linked building gives more national context:

> In comparison, New York trailed behind Chicago, having only four buildings over 16 stories tall by 1893. Part of the delay was caused by the slowness of the city authorities to authorize metal-frame construction techniques; it was not until 1889 that they relented and allowed Bradford Gilbert to construct the Tower Building, an 11-story iron-framed skyscraper. This encouraged the building of more skyscrapers in New York, although the city remained cautious about the technology for some years. Finally, in 1895 a breakthrough was made with the construction of the American Surety Building, a twenty-story, 303-foot (92 m) high-steel development that broke Chicago's height record. From then on, New York thoroughly embraced skeleton frame construction.

re Chicago:

https://www.architecture.org/

has wonderful, informed architectural tours you can take, some walking and some by bus, and the really popular river cruise. I've done a whole bunch of them.

River cruise is awesome, would definitely +1 it. Gave an awesome context to so much of the skyline

Another river architecture fan here! It was one of the highlights of my recent trip to Chicago, along with the Field Museum (dinosaurs!) and a side trip to the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan, near Kalamazoo.

You should also read Devil in the White City, which is nominally about the construction of the 1893 World’s Fair but really gives you a feel for the free-for-all that Chicago architecture was in that time period.

read it.

Thunderstruck is not really that great, though. Two stories forced to be in parallel although they don't really go together.

> an 11-story iron-framed skyscraper.

Here in Dubai, it is not uncommon for skyscrapers to be built on top of an 11 story parking building / platau / base.

I think 11 stories would be considered low-rise and even 20-story buildings looks tiny against the Marina skyline.

> Here in Dubai, it is not uncommon for skyscrapers to be built on top of an 11 story parking building

And that looks awful when you're up close on the ground. Some buildings hide it better than the others, but still the architecture of Dubai really only looks nice when you're seeing it from a distance (or a height). I even tweeted about that: https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1595045771744780292

New York City is much nicer visually because it wasn't built around cars and is overall much denser. Manhattan somehow manages to look nice both from the streets and from a distance.

Your tweet isn't showing the parking

This is vida hotel in Dubai Marina. The base is “only” 10 stories though:

https://cloudfront--us--east--1-images-arcpublishing-com.cdn...

The second one in the thread does

Replies to individual linked tweets don't seem to render for logged out users on mobile these days. I only see one tweet, not a thread.

Oof. Musk is at it again. Here's the second tweet: https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1595046077438328832

I wasn’t commenting on the aesthetics, but the size. I think it’s crazy that what was once called a skyscraper is today considered parking.

Skyscrapers look awful no matter what except from a distance.

There, my opinion on that. Does that help? Not at all. Your esthetics are different from mine are different from your parent.

I happen to like sprawled suburbs with lots of greenery. Not the typical actual "cul-de-sac" suburbia but like the more or less naturally grown looking very low density towns. With huge lots but not huge houses.

Skyscrapers are of course marvels of engineering and I can appreciate them for that and some even for the esthetics from afar. The Burj Al Arab did look majestic though I'm not sure how close exactly I was. I would never want to live there. Lots of people that close to each other, all next to other buildings that size tend to breed problems. Not that the Burj has that particular problem but a Chicago and New York do. Not that I'm going to solve over population but that doesn't change the fact that overpopulation breeds issues.

If you read the article you would understand that its not the height but the construction that makes it a skyscraper.

Reading this lead me to Google "lower Broadway commerce canyon" which found this remarkable image. One does not normally associate horse-drawn wagons with skyscrapers. In NYC, they did briefly coexist.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/stereo.1s06711/

Perhaps surprisingly, a lot more than briefly. That's 1915 -- I recently saw the 1948 detective movie "The Naked City" set in NYC, and it still shows the milkman delivering milk via horse-drawn carriage, amid all the cars.

It's a fascinating movie BTW -- as much of a documentary of 1948 NYC as it is a plot-driven story.

I'd have to find the image if I get a chance, but if you look through some online collections of Manhattan photos from the 1970s, there were still horse-drawn carts driven between the immense modern towers of the City by men who recycled scrap and trash..

This is really cool, thanks for sharing.

> In NYC, they did briefly coexist

Along with the electric transport.

I live in London - which saw vast expansion of its suburbs in the 1870-1910 period. It's fascinating learning about the logistics involved - railway was king back then and so they built rail yards everywhere. Building materials were brought in from across the country by train and then pulled by horse and cart to the building site. Everything was dug by hand. They built a 5 mile wide ring of houses around the city.

> “In 1905, [Gilbert] told The New York Times that after he wrestled with the problem for months, the solution came to him ‘like a flash’: He could support both the floors and the exterior walls on a concealed iron skeleton, like an iron bridge standing on end,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 1996.

This is a bit bogus since the first buildings constructed this way were in Chicago and the revolutionary approach of hanging a building off an iron skeleton was very widely discussed, even in the popular press. The article even mentions this later on: "Though metal cage construction had been used to create Chicago’s Home Insurance Building in 1885, Bradford brought the technology to New York..."

The article calls Bradford Gilbert "Gilbert" in one place and "Bradford" elsewhere so I suppose expectations should be low.

Sounds like Gilbert would make a great Founder in our era.

Why should we assume he was familiar with the building techniques used in Chicago? Perhaps he just reinvented what already existed.

Your general point makes sense: it’s true that 150 years ago news was more local.

But thanks to the telegraph and train even local news contained wider affairs. And as I put in my comment, the Chicago building was famous — world famous in fact. It was a technological phenomenon like the telephone. And an architect of large buildings couldn’t have not heard about it any more than a programmer not have heard of an LLM today.

When it was built, it probably looked a little like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

I wonder what happened when the views were obstructed by the building next door.

Definitely in terms of "how is it possible that this building is not falling over". I remember first seeing 432 Park and immediately checking online to understand how it was physically possible to build. I'm still a bit skeptical. With increasingly frequent extreme climate events, I wonder how resilient the building will be.

It's had some problems, not sure how much the height is a factor

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-ri...

The aspect ratio is the problem. If it was steel it wouldn't be an issue but it's all reinforced concrete, flexing away in the wind on its spindly superstructure. In 50 years I'd expect it to be condemned.

If at some point it was deemed unsafe and impossible to fix, I am wondering how you could do a controlled destruction of it without damaging nearby buildings.

I guess you'd need to dismantle it floor by floor? Are there any example of very high skyscraper having been destroyed/dismantled on purpose, not by 9.11 attacks?

EDIT: found a table on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_de...

Most high buildings in that table were "deconstructed".

This one, at 46 floors, was the tallest imploded:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IFItCikJUk0

I remember trying to figure it out. It is 93' x 93' x 1396' tall, which is 15:1, while a cigarette standing on end would be 10:1

I wonder if the answer might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorf_on_Golf

"He is ... about as tall as a 5-year-old; his height and some humorous movements are achieved by Conway standing in a hole, with fake shoes attached above his knees."

Wayback link (as the original seems down now):

https://web.archive.org/web/20231002140515/https://ephemeral...

>Though metal cage construction had been used to create Chicago’s Home Insurance Building in 1885, Bradford brought the technology to New York, paving the way for the first generation of skyscrapers:

>stated The Sun. “It came as an experiment, gained success in spite of general ridicule, and finally formed a beginning for all high buildings of recent times.”

But then the linked article about the Chicago building says, "this 10-story structure employed innovative engineering techniques and architectural features that laid the foundation for skyscrapers of the future".

So why are these writers trying to give New York City credit for anything other than copying what Chicago already did?

It says it used a technique used in Chicago that people doubted. Using it in New York proved the technology viable and thus laid the foundation…

> “When high winds blew during construction, crowds of onlookers gathered (at a safe distance) waiting for the radical new structure to fall over,” according to a PBS/American Experience article.

> “It was only when the architect himself climbed to the peak of the building and declared it perfectly safe that they were convinced otherwise.”

As a left coaster, I’ve been hearing variations on “it doesn’t count until it happened in New York” for my entire life. That may not be what you intended, but that’s what it reminds me of.

> “it doesn’t count until it happened in New York”

More importantly, a new standard isn't standard until it works in different locations implemented by different companies.

True, but in architecture I think that battle was lost a long time ago. Chicago might be The Second City in a lot of things, but not in architecture.

Credit is given to NYC... for NYC's first skycraper. I think that's rather straightforward.

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