A Surprise At A Different Angle

In contrast to yesterday’s view, this 1895 photo was taken by someone in one of the buildings on the west side of Broadway opposite City Hall Park (most likely the Postal Telegraph Building) looking past City Hall to Park Row. We get to see the front of City Hall, albeit at an oblique angle, with its entrance steps. Beyond that is the 1874 Tribune Building on the right (in its intermediate stage, after the first expansion but before the second expansion made it weird), and the 1890 World Building at the center, with Jospeh Pulitzer’s office in the drum below the dome. The low shed-like structure to the left of World is the Brooklyn Bridge elevated station that I mentioned yesterday, obscuring the actual end of the bridge.

The unexpected is the tall building in the distance to the left of World and seemingly behind the elevated station. That’s the 1893 Metropolitan Realty Building at 220 William Street. That location no longer really exists: like the World Building on the south side of the bridge, Metropolitan Realty and its neighbors on the north side of the bridge were demolished in the 1950s for an expansion of the ramp system connecting the bridge deck to the streets and the FDR (East River) Drive.

1890 was a big year for structures: the first two steel skeleton-frame buildings (the Manhattan Building in Chicago and the London & Lancashire Building in New York) were constructed then. The World Building, which was the tallest regular building in the world for two years was one of the last very tall buildings with a design that completely ignored steel columns and supported curtain walls. Metropolitan Realty had an old-fashioned exterior bearing wall – no surprise, as new technology takes a while to really catch on – but was 14 stories and 194 feet high with a base only 51 feet wide. A slenderness ratio of 3.8 is reasonably daring for bearing-wall structure. The fairly large windows in the recessed bays at the 7th through 11th floors are also not standard for this kind of structure. I may be projecting, but I think the architect was trying to make an old-fashioned structure look more modern by mimicking the architecture of the skeleton frame buildings starting to pop up. That’s the opposite idea to the World Building, which makes its heavy masonry walls very clear.