Clear At Any Resolution

A construction photo of the Met Life tower that I had not seen before:

No, the world doesn’t end a bit east of the building: it’s a low resolution scan of a photo with terrible contrast problems and if you want to see the foreground properly, the backgrounds turn to mushy gray.

Except for the Madison Square Presbyterian Church (dome and pediment) and a few brownstones to its left, everything we’re seeing here is part of the Metropolitan Life empire. The building to the right of the tower is their first building on Madison Square, moving up from lower Broadway to the corner of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, completed in 1892. A couple of years later they built another building on the same block, facing 24th Street. By 1908 they had covered most of that block and had built an outpost across 24th Street, behind the church. A number of hospitals in the city have assembled campuses in this piecemeal fashion but Met Life is the only private company that springs to mind to have done the same before World War II. The construction of the tower at 24th and Madison arguably marked the end of the first phase of the campus construction.

Even at this low resolution and a photo taken from about 350 feet away, the knee braces that make this a moment frame are clearly visible. The footprint of the tower is small enough that there’s one main derrick for steel erection. The exterior is being built the old-fashioned way, from the bottom up, with two sets of swing stages: the upper for masons and the lower for glaziers.

The heavy ornament on the tower was at the top – much of it was removed in an old renovation – and so not yet built in this photo, but note that the facade at the bottom of the tower is a pretty good match for its neighbors. The campus was assembled bit by bit, but was quite uniform in appearance. Having one architect for all of the buildings probably helped.

Finally, note that the amount of office space added by the tower – tallest building in the world for four years – wasn’t really that big compared to the rest of the block. If Met Life’s only interest was adding square footage, they’d have done better by expanding all the other buildings by two stories.