Lost In The Shuffle

That’s the foot of Broadway in 1900, looking north. There’s an enormous amount going on in the picture, so click on it for the big version.

First, a high-quality photo in 1900 took a while, even in direct sunlight. Note the blurred vehicles and even pedestrians.

The construction fence at the bottom of the picture is the site of the Customs House, soon to begin construction.

An interesting issue is where the photographer was standing to take this shot. The long exposure and steady shot rules out a balloon, the Wrights’ first flight was still three years in the future, and there are no tall buildings south of the Customs House site. My guess is that it was taken from a crane set up to build the Customs House.

Bowling Green looks pretty much the same then as it does now and as it has for close to three hundred years.

The building on the right with the square tower is the Standard Oil Building – actually the second iteration of that building – and is flying a flag with “S.O.C,” presumably for Standard Oil Corporation. In a few years Standard Oil will buy the smaller building to the south (closer to us) and build the third iteration of the headquarters at 26 Broadway. That building has a huge urn at the top  that was lit at night, supposedly as a beacon.

The tall white building on the left is the Bowling Green Building at 11 Broadway, which may be the only prominent building in New York in the “‘Hellenic Renaissance’ style” of “a free but pure treatment of ancient Greek architecture” that a lot of passers-by think is meant to be an ancient-egyptian skyscraper.

But none of that is what I want to talk about. There’s a building in this picture that’s a milestone in the development of early skyscrapers: the Columbia Building. It was the third skeleton-frame building in the city, and one that used a strange combination of cast-iron columns with wrought-iron bracing and struts immediately adjacent to the columns. There’s a good argument to be made that the Columbia Building was evidence that cast iron had reached the end of the road as part of the mainstream of structural technology. Where’s this engineering icon?

Hiding.

In less than a decade, it was overtopped on three sides, and would only last another two decades before being replaced by a taller and more modern building.