by Fran Leadon
Immediately an attendant in a grey uniform appeared, demanding that Cohen fork over a nickel for the use of the chair. When Cohen refused to pay, he was ordered to move to a bench, most of which were in the full sun. Cohen refused to budge. A crowd gathered and attracted the attention of a patrolman, who ordered Cohen to pay up or move. Cohen refused and was arrested and dragged in front of magistrate John B. Mayo at the Jefferson Market Courthouse. Cohen remained defiant, calling the whole affair an “outrage.”
“When the policeman told me to sit on the bench I told him to go bring me a bench and I would do so, but I did not propose to sit in the sun,” he explained to Mayo.
Overwhelmingly, newspapers and even city officials took Cohen’s side. The Tribune proclaimed that the city’s parks were free and “for the people,” while magistrate Lorenz Zeller declared in a personal, unofficial statement that the poor “should be allowed to enjoy [the parks] as fully and unreservedly and hampered as little by outlandish rules as possible.” Police Commissioner Michael Cotter Murphy announced that the police would no longer arrest those who refused to pay their nickels. “The citizens of this community own the parks and they are the ones to be first served,” he said. Still, park attendants continued trying to collect their nickels.
The unfolding drama came complete with two civically tone-deaf, made-to-order villains: George C. Clausen, the hapless Parks Department president, and Oscar F. Spate, a “thin, nervous, wiry little man,” with whom Clausen had signed a five-year contract to place the chairs in all the city’s parks, including Central Park, for an annual fee of $500.
Spate had been inspired, he said, by the use of rental chairs in European parks, and reckoned he could make a profit of $150 a day. He also made it clear that his chairs were for the “leisure class.”
“I believe a certain class of people want [the chairs] . . . that is, the people of means and refinement,” he said. “They do not want to sit herded in with a lot of people whom they do not know, and with whom they do not wish to associate.” As for the protestors, Spate thought they were nothing but “roughs” and “deadbeats.”
None of Spate’s remarks, which were eagerly jotted down by reporters and plastered across the pages of the Times, World, Sun, Post, Tribune, and Journal, went over well with the streams of people who, following Cohen’s example, started turning up in droves in Madison Square just for the entertainment of sitting in Spate’s chairs and then refusing to pay their nickels.
On July 2, temperatures reached 99 degrees and 280 people died of the heat; the next day another 317. Then the heat finally broke as thunderstorms swept in from the west, and the rain momentarily dampened what had become a full-fledged protest movement.
The Fourth of July dawned warm but breezy, with temperatures rising only to 80, and the chair protests went on momentary hiatus as everyone enjoyed the holiday and the clement weather. But on July 6, chair attendant Thomas Tully came to blows with a man who refused to move or pay his nickel, and a crowd of 300 to 400 people formed around him as the argument escalated. Six or seven men from the crowd began punching Tully and pelting him with brickbats, and a police officer standing at a discreet distance off to the side refused to intervene. His face gashed and bleeding, Tully ran from the park, crossed Broadway, and dashed into the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
“Save me! They’re going to lynch me!” he cried in terror to the hotel staff. Tully was taken to safety while the angry mob milled around outside the hotel for an hour before dispersing.
The next morning an estimated 1,500 people showed up in the park, took over all of Spate’s chairs, and refused en masse to pay their nickels, as children heckled Spate’s hapless attendants.
“What do you charge for looking at the fountain?” one boy yelled.
“Mister, will you sell me a couple of sunbeams?” another child called.
“Hey, there’s a sparrow in your chair!” came another cry.
Spate’s attendants—“bouncers,” he called them—marched along behind the chairs, tipping each one forward to dislodge the protestors, who would then immediately reseat themselves. Spate was clearly losing the battle, and his outnumbered attendants, the Sun reported, were treated to a barrage of insults “favoring the immediate extinction of aristocrats, pay chairs, and the Park Commissioner who had conveyed title to the parks to Mr. Spate.”
The following day Commissioner Murphy ordered extra officers to the park, and with fistfights breaking out left and right—the protestors began targeting those few customers who did pay the attendants—they began making arrests. When two protestors were arrested and escorted up Broadway to the precinct house on West 30th Street, a crowd followed, pelting the police with rocks and sticks and chanting “Spate! Spate! Clausen and Spate!”
The next day, July 9, the “Merry Chair War,” as the Evening World called it, escalated into a full-scale riot. As soon as a protestor sat in a chair, an attendant would flip it over, sending the occupant flying head-over-heels. They held on for dear life, even as their heads were pummeled against the ground; the Sun likened the spectacle to a violent game of beanbags. This routine continued for a full hour while a crowd estimated at 5,000 watched and cheered.
Then the dam broke. A youth seized a chair, carried it to Madison Avenue, and pitched it into the street. “Smash it! Break it up!” the crowd roared, as the chair was splintered beneath the wheels of an oncoming wagon. Others in the crowd joined in, and for the next hour chairs rained onto the street. Some drivers even reversed direction in order to run over the chairs twice.
The riot forced Clausen’s hand, and he gave in. The following day he not only revoked Spate’s contract but also announced that he would buy back the remaining chairs and donate them to the Parks Department for the exclusive use of women and children. Spate won a temporary injunction, but then several subsequent court rulings went against him, and that was the end of his short tenure as New York City’s chair king.
The New York Journal organized a celebration for the evening following Clausen’s announcement. The park filled with thousands of spectators for a program of songs, speeches, and fireworks. Spate, still defiant at that point, called a press conference in his office on the top floor of the St. James Building at the corner of Broadway and 26th Street, opposite the park. As Spate read a statement defending his actions, the reflections of fireworks played across his walls and the crowd in the park below cheered as speaker after speaker lambasted him.
CHAPTER 18
THE FREAK BUILDING
HAD SPATE POKED HIS HEAD OUT HIS WINDOW TO SNARL at the crowd below, and had his eyes followed the line of a southbound streetcar—an electric trolley by then, the last section of Broadway’s cable traction system having been removed a few months earlier—for three blocks, he would have seen the mangled remains of an eight-story apartment building called the Cumberland that was being demolished on the south side of the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street. The building sat on a narrow wedge of a block that because of its odd shape everyone called the Flatiron.
New York’s economy was booming, the Panic of 1893 dimming in the municipal memory, and Broadway was once again the leading edge of a boom in construction. Even buildings still considered new were coming down, and offices, hotels, and stores were rising in their place. The city had seen its share of booms over the years, but unlike in the past, when flurries of demolition and construction were universally acclaimed as evidence of civic virtue, the 1901 boom was largely greeted with skepticism and something bordering on dread. Steelworkers, carpenters, plasterers, and other trades regularly walked out on strike. Even some observers in the business world began to question the pace of building and thought that perhaps the situation, especially on Broadway, was getting a bit out of hand.
“At the present rate of improvement of real estate we may soon expect to leave our offices at night to find them the next morning hanging in midair, preparatory for lodgment in the tall steel skeleton of some skyscraper
,” one Broadway merchant scoffed.
The demolition of the Cumberland began in the spring of 1901, when the Flatiron site was sold at auction to a new development consortium known as the Cumberland Realty Company. One by one, the Cumberland’s tenants vacated the building, until only Colonel Winfield Scott Proskey, a Floridian and veteran of the Spanish-American War, remained. Proskey refused to budge, and continued living in his sixth-floor bachelor flat even as the Cumberland was torn down around him. It was one month before the Madison Square chair protests unfolded in the park across the street, and in that summer of discontent Proskey became, for a few weeks, anyway, a local hero, held up by the Tribune as a “chivalric champion of tenants’ rights.”
By June, Proskey no longer had windows, running water, electricity, gas, or even a stair—he had rigged a ladder to get from the sidewalk to his apartment—but was adamant about staying until his lease expired the following October. Proskey went to court and won an injunction that compelled Cumberland Realty to leave his apartment intact and restore his gas and water, a decision that temporarily halted demolition.
Proskey rejected every offer to buy him out and seemed to enjoy the crusade tremendously. He gave tours of his shambles of a home, cheerfully escorting reporters up his ladder and through hallways filled with dust and smoke and occupied by crews hauling out chunks of marble flooring and broken sinks.
“Only five flights more,” Proskey called down to one Tribune reporter who gingerly followed him up to his room. “Splendid exercise! Chance to fill out your chest. Ah, the air! None better. Blows right down Fifth Avenue. Look out for the broken glass on the floor.”
The Proskey siege ended in early June, when a federal court ruling forced him to surrender his keys. Proskey moved to the Fifth Avenue Hotel across the street, and the remains of the Cumberland were in short order cleared from the site. What rose in the Cumberland’s place was so startling the Evening World took to calling it the “Freak Building.”
ARCHITECT DANIEL H. BURNHAM of Chicago was a burly fellow with a large brush of a mustache and hair carefully parted in the middle in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt. He had served as the acclaimed master planner of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the wildly successful “White City” built on the shores of Lake Michigan, and by 1901 was, at age fifty-five, the undisputed father figure of American architecture. He hadn’t yet built anything in New York, but his influence was everywhere: The New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, Hammerstein’s Olympia Theatre, and dozens of other new monumental Neoclassical buildings in the city all reflected Burnham’s aesthetic. Suddenly, the willful asymmetry and dark color palettes of the Romanesque and Queen Anne styles, so popular in the 1870s and ’80s, seemed outmoded.
In 1901 the George A. Fuller Construction Company, owners of the Flatiron site, hired Burnham to design a futuristic skyscraper at the point where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue.
Burnham was perhaps the busiest architect then working in America. As his associate Frederick S. Dinkelberg began work on what would become known as the Flatiron Building, Burnham was busy building Union Station in Washington, D.C., and updating Washington’s master plan. But once the Cumberland was out of the way, construction sped along, and by the spring of 1902 an apparition of steel columns and girders towered over Madison Square.
There was something almost miraculous in the way the Flatiron Building rose into the sky. Architect Charles Follen McKim, of the celebrated firm McKim, Mead & White, watched the Flatiron Building’s progress from his office in the Mohawk Building at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, one block south of the Flatiron site. In April of 1902, in a letter to Burnham, McKim marveled at how the Fuller Company’s steelworkers seemed to add a new floor to the Flatiron nearly every day, and jokingly compared the project to the Tower of Babel.
The Flatiron Building under construction, 1902.
It wasn’t the tallest building in the world, or even the tallest in New York City—the Park Row, American Surety, World, Manhattan Life Insurance, and St. Paul buildings were all taller—but at 20 stories, and 307 feet, the Flatiron Building was still extremely tall for its time: 23 feet taller than the spire of Trinity Church and only 84 feet shy of the Park Row Building, then the world’s tallest.
Before the steel structure was completed, exterior walls were attached to the frame, cloaking in the Revivalist forms of a bygone era what was really a thoroughly modern building. Like an elongated palazzo from the Italian Renaissance, the Flatiron was subdivided into three horizontal sections: base, shaft, and capital. The first three stories were of beige limestone, punctured on the Broadway and Fifth Avenue sides by grand, arched entrances.
The middle section of the building, up to the sixteenth floor, was clad in cream-colored brick with white terra-cotta details. Floors seven through fourteen featured vertical rows of oriel windows that swelled gently from the Broadway and Fifth Avenue façades, like undulating sheets. Just beneath the cornice, so high up that they were hard to make out from the street below, were rows of lion’s heads and Classical busts in terra-cotta. A majestic cantilevering cornice culminated in a sculpture of two full-length terra-cotta figures leaning almost casually against a shield high above the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, looking like two sailors on the bow of a ship.
The Flatiron Building’s nautical allusions were hard to miss. It was the golden age of ocean liners, and ships of the Cunard and White Star lines were regularly breaking trans-Atlantic speed records. To many passersby, the Flatiron Building, especially during a rainstorm or pea soup fog, wasn’t an office building so much as a seagoing vessel making its way steadily north along Broadway. Soon after the building was completed, photographer Alfred Stieglitz shot the Flatiron rising above a snow-covered Madison Square. “It appeared to be moving toward me,” Stieglitz wrote, “like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making.”
BUT WHEN THE FLATIRON BUILDING opened on October 1, 1902, critics unleashed a torrent of disapproval. Some newspaper editors were convinced the first windstorm would knock the building over, while critic Montgomery Schuyler, writing in the Architectural Record, even questioned the building’s abundance of windows, likening a Flatiron tenant to a bird trapped in a cage: “As one looks through the bars of the cage, one pities the poor man,” Schuyler wrote. “He can, perhaps, find wall space within for one roll-top desk without overlapping the windows, with light close in front of him and close behind him and close on one side of him. But suppose he needed a bookcase? Undoubtedly he has a highly eligible place from which to view processions. But for the transaction of business?”
“[It] is a great pity,” Schuyler concluded, “that the architect should have chosen to build on this very odd site an ordinary tall building, ‘built to the limit’ in every direction, and thus have produced a very commonplace and conventional skyscraper.”
Even the building’s name provoked controversy: The Fuller Company intended to use the building as its headquarters, and insisted that everyone call it the Fuller Building. But the public kept calling it the Flatiron Building and, ignoring the critics, adopted it as a beloved landmark. Well before it was finished, the Flatiron Building had become a tourist attraction—even Chief Joseph, the exiled leader of the Nez Perce tribe, made a point of visiting the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue to gaze up at the Flatiron’s improbable profile and seemingly endless rows of windows. The Flatiron was reproduced on countless postcards and stereoscopic views, while the cigar store in the “prow,” the glassed-in storefront added to the building’s narrowest point, quickly became one of the most popular rendezvous points in the city.
Painters and illustrators were drawn to the complexity of the Flatiron’s dramatically thin profile, which, when viewed from farther up Broadway or Fifth Avenue, or from a bench in Madison Square, caught the light in unpredictable ways. At sunrise and sunset especially, the Fla
tiron became an abstract plane of light and shadow.
In 1906, John Sloan painted Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, which depicted the Flatiron Building rising into the vortex of a storm that was bearing down on a group of windblown, terrified pedestrians. It was not an exaggeration: The Flatiron Building’s triangular, vertical mass created unpredictable wind shears, downdrafts that rode down the Broadway and Fifth Avenue façades of the building to the sidewalk, where they gusted about and played havoc with pedestrians. The wind at the building’s base even pushed one unfortunate lad into Fifth Avenue, where he was run over and killed by an oncoming bus. Leslie’s Weekly called the sidewalk in front of the Flatiron Building “Hurricane Corner,” and ran a cover illustration showing men’s hats, women’s scarves, and stacks of newspapers flying everywhere. The Evening World called it the “Home of the Winds.”
“Winds not only blow from every point of the compass at this corner, but they have a way of blowing upward, lifting the clothing of the women in a most embarrassing way,” the World reported. “Their skirts wrap around their waists as if soaked in glue.”
The Flatiron Building’s “Hurricane Corner” wreaked havoc with dresses, hats, and newspapers.
This was an unexpected and exciting development for the groups of men that began coagulating in front of the Flatiron to watch women attempt to round the building’s prow. The wind affected men too, sending their hats and umbrellas flying, but it was the “Flatiron Girl,” a latter-day version of the Broadway Belle, that became the subject of countless news stories, popular songs, and comic strips.
Crowds gathered in such numbers that patrolmen from the Broadway Squad were stationed there to shoo them away. As the number of Flatiron “rubberneckers” increased, and when they began to hoot and holler whenever a woman lost control of her skirt, cops stepped in and began making arrests.