Overgrowth

It’s worth taking a look at two pictures of Newspaper Row/Printing House Square. First, around 1900:

Second, 1936, from Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” project.

We have the same line-up in both pictures, from left to right: The World Building, the Tribune Building, the New York Times Building, the American Tract Society (behind the Times), and the Potter Building. (It’s worth noting that all five are in The Structure of Skyscrapers. These were giants of the era; the World was briefly the tallest building in the world.) The biggest change, in a way, is that the Times had moved northwards to 42^nd Street in 1904, abandoning its old headquarters.

You don’t have to look very closely to notice the biggest physical change: the Tribune Building has, uh, sprouted. It was nine stories plus a high basement and decorative tower until 1903, when ten stories were added and the tower relocated upwards. It was a somewhat awkward building as first built in 1874, in part because of an awkward site. An early horizontal expansion made it a better building when viewed from the sides, without changing the appearance form the front. The vertical expansion was ungood, architecturally speaking. The front elevation became a mess of not-really-related elements, with an undersized tower. Most of the building in its earlier configuration was rental space, so this wasn’t done because the newspaper was expanding. Having more than twice as much rental space obviously was good for the bottom line, but it’s hard to believe that the triggering impulse didn’t come from the building next door to the northeast: the World. Tribune’s tower, at 260 feet high, had been the second tallest structure in Manhattan, behind the spore of Trinity Church; the main roof at 155 feet was probably the highest in the city. The top of the dome of the World Building was around 309 feet high; the top of the Tribune tower after the expansion was 335 feet high. This sure seems like a game of literal one-upmanship. If this seems bizarre, I highly recommend the discussion in The Skyward Trend of Thought by Thomas Van Leeuwen.