Per the children’s joke about a blank sheet of paper being a picture of a cow eating grass, that’s a picture of the Woolworth Building above, from a Scientific American article titled “The Tallest Office Building in the World.” (If you’re curious, it’s in the March 8, 1913 issue.) The big building on the left is the post office at the foot of City Hall Park; the two buildings to the right are 1890s skyscrapers, the The Postal Telegraph and Home Life Buildings. From the angle of the shot, looking south-southwest, Woolworth should be just to the right of the post office. And so it is if you look hard enough: we can see the masts of three cranes sticking up.
Things got a bit clearer two months later:
The. building in the near distance past the post office on the left is the Hudson Terminal Building, home to the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad and future site of the World Trade Center. After another two months:
And another two months:
And two more months:
So, besides for the fact that the superstructure of the Woolworth building was built rapidly by current standards, what else can we tell from this sequence of photos? For one, that the logistics of frame and curtain wall were planned pretty well. On February 28, the facade had started on the north face (the right side), with about three floors complete. There were about twelve floors of bare steel and steel with the tile-arch floors installed above that to the working top of the frame. In April, there were about nineteen floors of facade and about thirteen floors without above. And in June, with the tower just about topped out, there are about eleven stories of frame without facade below the hip roof. In other words, the fabrication of the terra cotta had been planned out well enough in advance, and the construction of the terra cotta was being performed with sufficient speed, so that the walls kept pace with the rapid erection of the steel frame. That’s difficult enough today but rather impressive for 110 years ago.
A minor point, but not unimportant: there’s a sidewalk bridge up around the building to protect pedestrians. You can see it at the base of the north facade in all five pictures. The use of a bridge rather than a fence is the result of (a) the facades being right at the property line, with no yards or areaways to give distance and (b) the height of the building.
Finally, the crown of the facade, at the bottom of the copper roof, was obviously built last. I suspect it was rather difficult to build: the big cranes were gone, the sloping hip roof gave no obvious platform to work from, and the terra cotta in that area is more complex than the already-complex typical facade.
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