Rise Of The New York Skyscraper 1865 1913

The invention of the New York skyscraper is one of the most fascinating developments in the history of architecture. This authoritative book chronicles the history of New York's first skyscrapers, challenging conventional wisdom that it was in Chicago and not New York that the skyscraper was born. 206 illustrations.

Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York. Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them. As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

Publisher Description

The city of New York is the city of skyscrapers. Every first-time visitor to Manhattan experiences the awe of gazing up at the soaring stone, steel, and glass towers of Wall Street or Midtown, and wonders how those structures came to be built. Manhattan Skyscrapers answers the question by presenting the 75 most significant tall buildings that make up the city's famous skyline. From Louis Sullivan's Bayard-Condict Building of 1898 on Bleeker Street to the Conde Nast tower currently rising above Times Square, Manhattan Skyscrapers lavishly presents over a hundred years of New York's most interesting and important tall buildings. Author Eric P. Nash profiles familiar skyscrapers such as the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Towers, the AT&T (now Sony) Building, and the Seagram Building, while also championing several often-overlooked yet significant structures, such as the McGraw- Hill, the Metropolitan Life Insurance, and the Fred F. French Buildings. Nash's writing strikes an elegant balance between history, archi-tectural evaluation, and intelligent guidebook. For each building, Nash identifies the building style, gives the overall profile and image of the building, and discusses its construction; also included are quotes from the buildings' architects and the architectural critics of the time. Each skyscraper is illustrated with full-page color photo-graphs by noted photographer Norman McGrath as well as architectural drawings and plans, archival images of the original interiors, postcards, and other ephemera. Manhattan Skyscrapers is essential reading-or an ideal gift-for anyone interested in the buildings that make New York the ultimate skyscraper city.

In Skyscraper, Benjamin Flowers explores the role of culture and ideology in shaping the construction of skyscrapers and the way wealth and power have operated to reshape the urban landscape.

Of all building types, the skyscraper strikes observers as the most modern, in terms not only of height but also of boldness, scale, ingenuity, and daring. As a phenomenon born in late nineteenth-century America, it quickly became emblematic of New York, Chicago, and other major cities. Previous studies of these structures have tended to foreground examples of more evincing modernist approaches, while those with styles reminiscent of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were initially disparaged as being antimodernist or were simply unacknowledged. Skyscraper Gothic brings together a group of renowned scholars to address the medievalist skyscraper—from flying buttresses to dizzying spires; from the Chicago Tribune Tower to the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Drawing on archival evidence and period texts to uncover the ways in which patrons and architects came to understand the Gothic as a historic style, the authors explore what the appearance of Gothic forms on radically new buildings meant urbanistically, architecturally, and socially, not only for those who were involved in the actual conceptualization and execution of the projects but also for the critics and the general public who saw the buildings take shape. Contributors: Lisa Reilly on the Gothic skyscraper ● Kevin Murphy on the Trinity and U.S. Realty Buildings ● Gail Fenske on the Woolworth Building ● Joanna Merwood-Salisbury on the Chicago School ● Katherine M. Solomonson on the Tribune Tower ● Carrie Albee on Atlanta City Hall ● Anke Koeth on the Cathedral of Learning ● Christine G. O'Malley on the American Radiator Building

An exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection which comprises sixty-three modern paintings, sculptures and works on paper by fifty artists. The Abstract Expressionist paintings that form the heart of this collection were nearly all created in New York City.