by John Browne
His work had a great impact on Rockefeller, who wrote to him after the Carnegie Library opened in Pittsburgh: ‘I would that more men of wealth were doing as you are doing with your money; but, be assured, your example will bear fruits, and that time will come when men of wealth will more generally be willing to use it for the good of others.’50 Yet, in private, he discussed the apparent vanity in Carnegie’s philanthropic donations. The manager of one of Rockefeller’s charitable trusts wrote to him that Carnegie gives money ‘for the sake of having his name written in stone all over the country’.51 In comparison, Rockefeller’s donations were discreet, perhaps so that he could not be accused of trying to curry favour in the face of Standard Oil’s trouble in the courts.52
In 1910 Carnegie founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is still active today. For a long time Carnegie had been an outspoken campaigner for world peace, opposing foreign intervention by the US and the UK. On the eve of the First World War he founded the Church Peace Union. By promoting moral unification and leadership, he hoped the Union would put an end to war for ever. Iron, or more accurately the profits from iron, was again being used as a force for peace. By the time of his death in 1919, Carnegie had given away 90 per cent of his wealth. He arranged for the rest to be distributed through the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Despite the events of the strike at the Homestead Steel Works, we remember Carnegie as a benevolent philanthropist. Even Henry Clay Frick, the antagonist of the tragedy, is now remembered by a glorious collection of art on Fifth Avenue in New York.53 Men are remembered by their ends, by their ultimate generosity, rather than the process by which they achieved those ends. As we look at the Vermeers, Holbeins and Rembrandts in the Frick Gallery we think of beauty and benevolence and not of the innocent lives lost at Homestead.
The sky’s the limit
In mid-1971 I had been living in New York for about six months when a friend of mine, a professional cellist, invited me to a concert at Carnegie Hall, which sits across Central Park from the Frick Collection. We went to listen to Paul Tortelier, the famous French cellist, playing Variations on a Rococo Theme, a piece by Tchaikovsky in the warm and colourful acoustics of the hall. When the hall opened in 1891, with a concert conducted by Tchaikovsky, it quickly became a New York City icon. The striking Italian Renaissance-style façade of terracotta and iron-spotted brick was as fascinating to many visitors as the illustrious artists performing inside. The hall was designed by the architect William Burnett Tuthill, himself an amateur cellist. He decided against the use of steel support beams, but as a consequence had to build concrete and masonry walls several feet thick. Stone simply cannot carry the same load as steel. It is the thickness of the walls, along with the smooth elliptical hall interior, that lends Carnegie Hall its fine acoustic properties (and helps to drown out the rumble of traffic from 57th Street and Seventh Avenue outside). In 1891 it was already being overshadowed by a new breed of building, shooting up across the city: the skyscraper.54 Just six-storeys high, Carnegie Hall was dwarfed by headquarters of the New York Times and New York Tribune. Ironically, it was the availability of cheap and abundant steel produced by Carnegie that supported this growth.
As early as in ancient Greece, iron had been incorporated into buildings so as to improve stability, but never had an entire load-bearing structure been fashioned entirely out of iron. In the 1820s cast-iron columns and beams were introduced into buildings in Chicago and New York. Architects and engineers were impressed by its compressive strength and durability and soon whole buildings’ fronts were being made from cast iron. As an added bonus, unlike wood, iron did not burn but it did, however, melt. In the extreme heat of Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, building fronts buckled and collapsed and iron fell out of favour. Soon stronger and safer steel, pouring out of Carnegie’s steel mills, enabled steel skyscrapers to rise upwards.
Architects and the public alike still worried whether they could trust steel to support such gigantic structures, but there was a need to find new space in the increasingly cramped cities. Great social and economic changes were sweeping New York. Immigrants were arriving daily from Europe, sailing past the steel-framed Statue of Liberty. Trusts and corporations were growing quickly and all wanted office space in the financial and business capital of the US. Land prices were rising rapidly and the only direction in which to expand was upwards. Traditional stone was just not suitable. The taller the building, the greater the downward weight and therefore the thicker the base had to be. Early plans for the nine-storey masonry structure of the now demolished Tribune Building show basement walls that are two metres thick, a huge waste of valuable floor space. For architects to reach above six floors they had to rely on steel. Between 1870 and 1913, New York was raised from a city of six-storey buildings to one of fifty-storey skyscrapers.
When I arrived in New York on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1971, I hated it. I did not know anyone, the hotels were shabby and the people were rude. But, becoming a resident of Greenwich Village, I soon grew to love the city. Fast-paced and full of interesting people, New York was, and still is, one of the most exciting places in the world. Like other great world cities such as Venice, Tokyo and London, New York is a unique and unmistakable urban environment. In particular, I remember being struck by the city’s fantastic architecture. Elegant brownstone town houses are interspersed with imposing gothic and art deco skyscrapers. The city would rise up around you on all sides to a vertiginous height. It was very different from anything I had seen in Europe.
At weekends in New York I would cycle around the city. Leaving my apartment off Washington Square, I headed south through the then almost deserted district of Soho, which is the site of the most significant and largest collection of nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings. I would head back north and just above Houston, in a rather grimy and run-down office area, one building stood out. It was called the Flatiron Building and it symbolised to me the growth of New York, over the last one hundred years, into the thriving metropolis of the 1970s. As its name suggests, the shape of the building resembles an old clothes iron, with a stark triangular cross-section that rises up to a height of 87 metres. The twenty-two-tiered structure may seem squat in comparison to New York’s modern-day mega-structures, but, on completion in 1902, the Flatiron was a significant feat of engineering.
It was built by the George A. Fuller Company. George Fuller was an architect and pioneered the building of skyscrapers in the US. In 1900, long before the first steel struts of the Flatiron were raised, Fuller died and the presidency of the company was assumed by his son-in-law, Harry Black. For some time he had had his eyes on the small triangular plot of land at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The site would be perfect for the company’s new headquarters, acting as an advertisement for his rapidly growing business. Six months after Fuller’s death, with the company now in his control, Black bought the land. The prime motivation for building upwards was profit. An editorial in Life magazine in June 1901 declared, ‘here in New York the price of land determines the height of the building’.55 And land prices were very high. Only above the tenth floor would investors break even on the land purchase. The tiny plot of land, just 9,000 square feet, had cost Harry Black $2 million ($55 million today).
As a result, aesthetics and economics were often at odds as skyscrapers began to dominate the city skyline. Many worried that the city would be overshadowed by unimaginative yet towering monstrosities. The Flatiron was designed to make the most out of the oddly shaped triangular plot of land, but Harry Black would often argue with the architect, Daniel Burnham, over the building’s soft, curved edges. Why, Black would demand, were 93 square feet of valuable floor space being wasted? The Flatiron soon began to rise up from the wedge-shaped site. Thousands of steel columns, joists, struts and rivets arrived truck by truck and were put together much like a child’s constructor set. Finally, the builders, standing on wooden platforms that hung down the length of the building, laid t
he terracotta-tile skin. In June 1902, it was complete.
The Flatiron was different from any other skyscrapers in the city. Many architectural critics regarded the building as a feat of engineering but a failure as a work of art. But the building was embraced by the public and artists alike. The New York Tribune reported in 1902 that the Flatiron would attract crowds of ‘sometimes 100 or more’ and was painted and photographed more than any other building in the city.56 Symbolically modern, the Flatiron appears to change shape depending on where you were standing. On a winter’s day in 1902, photographer Alfred Stieglitz stood looking up at the Flatiron and, pressing the shutter button, created a memorable image.57 ‘With the trees of Madison Square covered with fresh snow, the Flat Iron impressed me as never before’ he wrote. It appeared to be moving towards me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of new America still in the making … The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.’58
The unique shape and location made the Flatiron another, and instant, New York City icon, but it was far from being the tallest building in New York. For one reason, its height was restricted by the strong winds that blew down 23rd Street, which bordered the southern edge of the Flatiron. Build too high, so the architects worried, and the building might be brought tumbling down. Locals placed bets on how far the debris would fall if this were to happen. It was an unlikely event as the Flatiron was designed to withstand four times the maximum wind force that it would ever come up against. In part, this strength lay in the building’s odd shape. A triangle is the strongest of geometric shapes as it is a self-supporting structure: applying pressure at one point creates greater resistance at the other two points. Soon after the first tenant moved in, a 100 kilometres per hour windstorm braced the city, but inside the Flatiron not a vibration was felt. One tenant claimed that not even the filament inside his desk lamp shook. In fact, it was the Flatiron that held control over the wind. The shape of the building would channel the wind into blustery down draughts that could raise the skirts of female passers-by. Men would loiter around the tower in the hope of catching a rare glimpse of ankle, the police calling out ‘23 skidoo’, since the Flatiron is on 23rd Street, to move the chancers along. One local dressmaker even created a ‘wind-defying’ skirt.59 Hats blew off heads and umbrellas were turned inside out, but the wind could also create more serious havoc. On the surrounding streets shop doors were blown open and plate-glass windows smashed. One February afternoon in 1903 a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, who was attempting to make it around the prow of the Flatiron towards Broadway, was blown into the middle of Fifth Avenue and killed by a passing motorcycle.
As more skyscrapers rose around the Flatiron, the sharp wedge shape lost its propensity to channel wind and the gusts died down. Cycling along Broadway in the 1970s, the Flatiron was no longer as imposing, overshadowed by the nearby Metropolitan Life Tower. But the building continues to attract people to the area and is a constant reminder of a period of unparalleled growth in the city.
Skyscrapers are built to accommodate more people in a city centre; building upwards is just a more efficient use of the land. Iron’s strength and abundance underpins this concentration of the human population into small pockets dotted about the world. These hives of activity foster innovation and so support human progress, raising humanity from simple rural communities to prosperous urban societies.
Skyscrapers were also built as symbols of economic and political power. Some of the first inhabitants of New York’s pioneering buildings were the executives of the corporate trusts, such as Standard Oil and US Steel (formed from the Carnegie Steel Corporation and several other major producers), which resulted from the industrial revolution. Prestige was vitally important to Rockefeller, Carnegie and the other American robber barons and so these buildings were beautiful as well as big.
The World Trade Center’s Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world when they were completed in 1971. For thirty years they stood as symbols of America’s economic eminence, and this is why they were chosen as targets in the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. The Twin Towers went down, and with them 200,000 tonnes of steel. On the day of the attacks, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani declared: ‘We will rebuild. We’re going to come out of this stronger than before, politically stronger, and economically stronger. The skyline will be made whole again.’ The Ground Zero site is being restored to its former standing as a centre for global economic activity; on completion, One World Trade Center will be the tallest skyscraper in America.
The Iron Lion of Cangzhou
At the beginning of 2012 there were, for the first time, more people living in cities than in rural areas. Nowhere is this dramatic shift more apparent than in Asia. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are the biggest twin towers ever built, while Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest skyscraper, standing 830 metres high. Iron and steel have made this possible; China is now the world’s biggest consumer of iron ore.
Every time I visited China in the 1980s and 1990s, new ramshackle and purely functional apartment and office blocks would have sprung up with extraordinary speed. In this period of rapid economic growth, the pragmatic prevailed over the aesthetic; there was little time to consider how to create a sustainable and beautiful city environment. Today, many of these early buildings have been knocked down and replaced with piercing skyscrapers. China’s cities are getting taller and sprawling faster than anywhere in the world. The simple, elegantly curved Shanghai World Financial Centre and the oddly pleasing Beijing headquarters of China Central Television, colloquially known as ‘the big-shorts’, are Flatirons of the twenty-first century.
These are not the first iron colossi that China has built. In the small city of Cangzhou, 240 kilometres to the south of Beijing, stands the Iron Lion. It is over five metres tall and weighs around 50 tonnes. Originally, the Lion is thought to have lived inside a Buddhist temple, with a bronze statue of Bodhisattva Manjusri riding in the lotus flower on his back. Today it is battered and broken. The Lion’s tail went missing sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, and in 1803 a storm toppled the statue, chipping the beast’s snout. It may have seen better days, but the hulking cast-iron mass persists as evidence of the phenomenal Imperial Chinese iron industry that existed over a thousand years ago. When it was cast in AD 953, the production of iron in China was far greater than anywhere else in the world. Iron output increased sixfold between AD 800 and 1078 to 115,000 tonnes, almost as much as the whole of Europe would produce in 1700. China’s growing iron industry was just one face of the great social, political and economic changes that were sweeping through the country during the late Tang and Song dynasties. Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese technology, writes that ‘China in 1000 had more in common with China of 1900 than it had with the China of 750’.60
With this prodigious output of iron, China cast the tools and weapons that it used to become a dominant global power at the beginning of the second millennium AD.61 Up until 1700, China had the world’s largest and most efficient iron industry, which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries declined. During this period, a Chinese poet, Ji Ruiqi lamented this change:62
Thinking of ancient flourishing glory
I sigh for the changes of our times
But the Iron Lion still stands,
While halls and palaces have turned to thorns and brambles.
In Europe and the US the industrial revolutions were creating increased productivity and growth; scientific advances had led to an array of innovative low-cost iron- and steel-making techniques. China could now simply not compete. In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong was determined to reverse the decline of its iron and steel industry during the Great Leap Forward. He wanted China to produce more steel than Great Britain but the pots and pans he had collected and melted down produced useless pig iron.63
Under the rule of the British Raj, the economy in India was also stalled. Jamsetji Tata, a successful cotto
n and textile industry entrepreneur, wondered what could be done to reverse this position. With his already-made fortune Jamsetji decided to pursue his own vision: the development of India.
The house of Tata
Jamsetji believed that four ingredients were necessary for industry to flourish in India. First, technical education and research were needed to reduce India’s reliance on foreign technology. Second, he saw that hydroelectricity would utilise India’s huge supply of water to generate cheap electricity. Third, he made plans to build a grand hotel, to attract the wealthy international elite to India. Finally, and most crucially, Jamsetji wanted to produce steel, ‘the mother of heavy industry’, for the building of railways and cities.64
The notion that India could succeed in making steel to British standards was ridiculed. Sir Frederick Upcott, Chief Commissioner for the Indian Railways, offered to ‘eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making’.65 Behind this arrogance, however, was the fear of competition, a fear which for a long time had caused the British Raj to hold back industrial development in India. It was not until the 1890s that the Raj began to support the development of the iron industry in India, when Great Britain saw itself slipping behind the booming iron industries in Germany and the US.