A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  In 1901, the partners’ Triangle Waist Company signed a thirty-month lease for the eighth floor of the Asch Building, later extending their stay and expanding to the ninth and tenth floors, too. Triangle, like many other manufacturers, provided space; contractors recruited pattern makers, cutters, sewing-machine operators, pressers, and other workers to produce the clothing—leaving the company’s owners with little accountability, except to their consciences, for the employees’ welfare. At Triangle, that wouldn’t be a sufficient safeguard. Employees often worked without overtime pay. Managers locked the workers in, searched them to keep them from stealing, forbade them to speak, and even required them to supply their own needles and thread. In 1909, Local 25 of the United Hebrew Trades Association called a strike after Triangle fired 150 workers, whom the owners suspected of complaining to the union, and locked out the rest. The walkout escalated into a general strike in the industry that lasted thirteen weeks, until 279 manufacturers employing fifteen thousand garment workers agreed to a fifty-two-hour workweek and a raise. Triangle approved the pay increase, but refused to recognize the union.

  Just after four thirty on Saturday, March 25, 1911, anticipating the end of their final shift on the last day of the six-day workweek, Triangle workers on the eighth floor began glancing at clocks, time and again. Ten minutes before the four forty-five closing bell, a small fire started smoldering in the scraps of cloth beneath a cutting table, among the ton of remnants that were stored on the eighth floor. The smoldering scraps burst into flames, spreading hungrily to the fabric atop the table and even more swiftly to the tissue paper patterns that were hanging above it. A manager rushed to the stairwell standpipe only to find that the rusted water valve was hopelessly jammed and that the fire hose had rotted long ago anyway. Still, while a few desperate women jumped to their deaths, most of the workers on the eighth floor escaped. Some workers fled down the eight flights to the ground floor; others crammed into the elevator. Before she exited, the bookkeeper alerted executives on the tenth floor, where all but one of the workers (she panicked and jumped) managed to survive by taking the elevator down or fleeing across the roof to adjacent buildings.

  The 260 employees on the ninth floor, though, were unaware of the fire raging beneath them. The closing bell had rung as scheduled, but nobody suggested that anything was amiss. The workers, most of them women in their teens and twenties, were collecting their paychecks or retrieving their coats when flames burst through the windows. The Washington Place staircase was locked. The heat ignited a barrel of machine oil in the vestibule, obstructing the Greene Street exit, too. Iron shutters concealed a courtyard fire escape but it, too, was a dead end. Some fleeing workers who finally found it plunged to their deaths after the length of stairs became overloaded because a drop ladder from the second story to the ground had never been installed, leaving them stranded. Until they stopped operating altogether, two barely five-by-six-foot elevators were the only way out, except to jump.

  Firefighters brought the blaze under control within half an hour. But for scores of immigrant women, thirty minutes was a lifetime. The death toll totaled at least 146. Many victims were burned beyond recognition and unclaimed. Within a few weeks, Local 25 and the Women’s Trade Union League galvanized eighty thousand marchers to mourn the victims and protest the conditions that contributed to their deaths. Blanck and Harris were indicted for manslaughter and for violating the state’s labor law, but were acquitted the following December (the jurors said they were unable to agree on whether the owners knew the ninth-floor door was locked that day). They reopened their business in a nearby building on University Place in March 1912 and eventually settled civil suits filed by twenty-three survivors or their families for seventy-five dollars per victim (or about five week’s wages). By collecting a two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance claim for their losses in the fire, in effect, they pocketed $445 per victim.

  Whatever lessons the owners may have learned from the fire, if any, they quickly forgot. In 1914, a judge apologetically fined the owners the minimum of twenty dollars for fastening a chain lock on a fire door where 150 employees were working at their new factory on Fifth Avenue. That same year, Blanck was accused of counterfeiting labels that stated “Made under clean and healthful conditions,” suggesting that the National Consumers’ League had endorsed the company’s manufacturing standards, although the league had not. In 1923, Blanck received a minimum sentence of six months imprisonment by Magistrate George W. Simpson in Commercial Frauds Court, although it appears that the conviction was later overturned.

  Other than the top three floors, the Asch Building suffered little damage from the fire. Renovators installed a sprinkler system and made other safety improvements, and Joseph Asch prudently renamed his property the Greenwich Building. NYU later leased the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. In 1929, Frederick Brown, a developer and philanthropist, bought the building from its new owners and donated it to the university.

  Several industry-wide strikes the year after the fire produced vastly improved working conditions and triggered the ascendancy of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (now called UNITE, after merging with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers). The city’s Board of Alderman established a Bureau of Fire Prevention and required sprinklers in factories, inspections, and other safety measures. The legislature guaranteed an even more enduring legacy by establishing a Factory Investigation Commission, the result of a strange-bedfellows political convergence that included Alva Belmont (the former wife of Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson), and Anne Morgan, J. P.’s daughter; Charles F. Murphy, the visionary boss of Tammany Hall, and the local Democratic leader Timothy D. (Big Tim) Sullivan, both of whom presciently divined in victories by progressive candidates in 1909 the vulnerability of the party organization; Rose Schneiderman, a tailor’s daughter who was instrumental in organizing the 1909 strike; and Frances Perkins, a thirty-year-old Boston-born social worker and the executive secretary of the New York Consumers League, who was having tea across the street from the Asch Building when the fire broke out.

  Murphy and Sullivan handpicked two of their acolytes, Senator Robert F. Wagner and Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith, as chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Factory Commission. Its recommendations produced three dozen laws to fortify worker safety, further empower the state Labor Department, and revise the city’s building code to base the occupancy of a space on the ability to escape it—laws that became the foundation of the National Labor Relations Act when Wagner became a United States senator. Perkins was recruited by Smith, when he became governor to the state’s Industrial Commission, and by Smith’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. After she joined President Roosevelt’s administration as secretary of labor, the first woman cabinet member, Perkins said that March 25, 1911, on Washington Place was “the day the New Deal began.”

  Now owned by New York University, the building bears a plaque that only begins to suggest the political impact of the Triangle fire. (George Samoladas)

  15

  THE FLATIRON BUILDING

  Surprisingly, the name of the crossroads of Broadway and Fifth Avenue predated the triangular building that defined the site. (New York Illustrated [New York: Success Postal Card Co., ca. 1911–16], 1907)

  A decade after returning from Germany, where he had been raised as a teenager and schooled as an engineer, photographer Alfred Stieglitz became captivated watching steelworkers erect the skeleton of the Flatiron Building, at the foot of Madison Square. He remembered “the lightness of the structure, combined with solidity,” although for all the wonder and glory the innovative building evoked (“it is to America what the Parthenon was to Greece,” he would say), Stieglitz never photographed it until one winter day in 1903 when New York was snowed under.

  “I stood spellbound as I saw that building in that storm,” Stieglitz said, recalling his vantage point on Fifth Avenue facing downtown. “It looked, from where I stood, as if it were moving toward me like the
bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America that was in the making.”

  Initially reviewed with disfavor (Stieglitz’s father, an impressionist painter, pronounced it “hideous”), the Flatiron evolved into one of the most beloved structures of twentieth-century New York and the inspiration for indelible images, including Stieglitz’s iconic ghostly photograph, in which the building, forming a backdrop to Madison Square Park, is framed by a snow-capped, Y-shaped limb in the foreground that conjures up the Flatiron’s own triangular footprint.

  While the 307-foot-tall tower strongly resembles a cast-iron clothes presser, it was actually named for the wedge-shaped plot of land—a vestigial remnant of Broadway’s diagonal slice through Manhattan’s geometric matrix—on which it was built, not the other way around. Years before the building opened in 1902, had you asked directions to “the Flatiron,” any knowledgeable New Yorker would have pointed you to the junction of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, just south of the streetcar tracks that traversed Twenty-Third Street. There, flanked by the three thoroughfares, was a nondescript V-shaped plot that occupied about nine thousand square feet—no bigger than an average putting green and only two-thirds the size of an Olympic swimming pool. The property was deemed so unpromising for future development because of its elfin footprint and triangular shape that it seesawed among landlords for decades, entangled in what one critic lamented was its own perpetual islet of purgatory.

  The underexploited plot was sandwiched between the Ladies’ Mile shopping district, which stretched uptown from around Fifteenth Street to Twenty-Third Street toward Madison Square Park, and a neighborhood that in the 1890s was still defined as a theater and hotel hub. Since the Civil War, the park, itself an aberration in the Manhattan street grid, had become the latest way station of the rich and famous as fashionable society moved uptown, inexorably leapfrogging from their eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century residences on lower Broadway. (Their odyssey paralleled Delmonico’s slow climb up Fifth Avenue, starting at Fourteenth Street from 1862 to 1876, moving to Twenty-Sixth Street from 1876 to 1899, and to Forty-Fourth Street from 1897 to 1923.)

  In the mid-nineteenth century, when the plot went up for sale, the New-York Historical Society spurned the opportunity to buy the site for its headquarters. Instead, it was purchased in 1857 for $32,100 by Amos Eno, a former retailer. Eno’s construction of the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel diagonally across Twenty-Third Street, while initially ridiculed as being too far uptown, defined him as a flourishing real estate speculator. (The hostelry boasted the first passenger elevator in an American hotel and private bathrooms and fireplaces.)

  In the 1890s, Eno erected two-and-three-story commercial buildings (including the offices of a Dr. Hall, whose oversize sign uninvitingly advertised “teeth extracted”) and the seven-story Cumberland (which was also sometimes called the Flatiron even though it didn’t look like one) on the plot. The Cumberland’s northern facade, which faced Madison Square, was variously festooned with Broadway’s original illuminated signage, which promoted Sousa’s Band and Hagenbeck’s Circus performances at Brighton Beach hotels, and also featured news bulletins projected on a screen rented variously by the New York Times and the New York Tribune. (The Cumberland’s signs included a 1,457-incandescent-bulb billboard erected for the Long Island Rail Road touting HOMES ON LONG ISLAND SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES and a thirty-foot-long green pickle promoting Heinz’s 57 Varieties of condiments.)

  After Eno died in 1898, the New York State Legislature authorized the municipal government to purchase the plot for three million dollars and bulldoze the encumbrances to create a mini-plaza. The deal was scuttled, though, after the city’s parks department rejected the proposal as impractical, critics complained about the price, and a newspaper reported that a fat commission was destined for a brokerage owned by the sons of a former Tammany boss. Instead, the lot was auctioned to Eno’s son William for $690,000. A mere two weeks later, he unloaded it for $801,000 to Samuel Newhouse, the New York–born copper mining magnate (not the newspaper publisher), and his brother Mott. Within two years, the brothers abandoned plans to construct a twelve-story apartment building and resold the property for $2 million to an investment partnership formed by Harry S. Black, chief executive of the Fuller Company, a construction firm he had inherited from his father-in-law, George W. Fuller.

  “Owing to the peculiar shape of the ‘Flatiron,’ the erection of a very tall building there has always been regarded as something of an architectural problem,” the New York Times observed in 1900. Given the property’s size and irregular shape, the Times dismissively predicted that, indeed, twelve floors would be the limit. But the Fuller Company, already an industry innovator as a general contractor, was also pioneering steel-skeleton construction (which had been authorized by an 1892 New York City building code amendment that also eliminated the requirement that masonry be used for fireproofing). While the Flatiron was not New York’s first steel-frame tower, it was the first wedge-shaped one—a contour that previously had been impractical because load-bearing masonry construction would have required ground floor walls to be fifteen or more feet thick to support more than twelve stories of brickwork.

  Harry Black recruited the architect Daniel H. Burnham, who had designed the 1893 “White City” for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg conceived a twenty-one-story, 285-foot tower largely clad in glazed terra-cotta, garnished with flora, women’s faces, medallions, and gargoyles. “Not one square inch remaining flush and plain,” as the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission would later say. The terra-cotta midsection, manufactured by a firm on Staten Island, was sandwiched between a three-story limestone base and an ornate cornice that hugged a horizontal roof, rather than the familiar confection of spires, turrets, towers, or domes that typically capped New York’s turn-of-the-century skyscrapers. Fuller’s Flatiron was revolutionary: it rose perpendicular without setbacks from the sidewalk, and it formed a perfect right angle triangle (with gracefully rounded corners) at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street that would have made Pythagoras proud.

  The Fuller Company was becoming a behemoth in its own right around the same time, constructing Macy’s “world’s largest” department store in Herald Square, the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South, and the Flatiron’s fraternal twin, the similarly wedge-shaped Times Tower in Times Square (which briefly claimed the title of tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1904, surpassing the Park Row Building across from City Hall, but only if measured from its deepest basement to its apex). Fuller also stocked its corporate board with power brokers, ranging from Henry Morgenthau, the developer whose son would become secretary of the treasury, to Hugh Grant, a former mayor. (In the mid-1930s, though, after the stock of its parent company, United States Realty, plunged at the dawn of the Depression, Harry Black fatally shot himself.)

  Once the site was cleared and construction began, the Flatiron’s steel superstructure rose by about one floor a week—despite delays that the Fuller Company’s political fixers were unable to parry, including episodic strikes triggered by union leaders who gratified their own greed as well as their members’. There was also a holdout tenant, Col. Winfield Scott Proskeys, who rejected an offer of $5,000 (about $150,000 in today’s dollars) and refused to relinquish his sixth-floor room in the Cumberland for four months until his lease expired. (“The Colonel’s pluck is more to be admired than his judgment,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized.) That the colonel’s principled defense of tenant rights galvanized readers as far away as the Midwest and beyond suggested the level of interest in this singular skyscraper (and not just because the Fuller Company had been based in Chicago).

  New York’s sidewalk superintendents gawked at the spindly steel frame, never before seen to such heights in the city. Once the Flatiron was finished, the steel’s rapid ascent would only further shame the poky hydraulic elevators, which not only might take as long as several minutes to reach the top floors, but
, driven by water pressure, periodically flooded.

  By late 1902, the tower was ready to accept tenants. They would eventually include Frank Munsey, the ruthless newspaper magnate and pulp fiction publisher; World Tourists Inc., a travel agency that was later classified by federal prosecutors as a Communist front that procured fake passports for party members; and a basement restaurant, which became the four-hundred-seat Taverne Louis, a showcase for the jazz drummer Louis Mitchell, who introduced New Yorkers to ragtime. A twenty-second-floor penthouse was added to accommodate studios for artists, among them Louis Fancher, whose illustrations were commissioned by many of the book and magazine publishers who would occupy the offices below as the neighborhood shifted from a theater district to a wholesale toy and photography fulcrum. (Earlier, to monetize every bit of the site, Harry Black had also ordered the architects to affix an infelicitous one-floor retail space at the Flatiron’s bow, which was occupied for decades by a United Cigar Store. Architectural Digest grumped that the addition was “a wanton aggravation of the inherent awkwardness of the situation.” New Yorkers colloquially called it “the cowcatcher,” an homage to the grate affixed to front of locomotives to nudge cattle off the railroad tracks.