Changing Expectations

“Looking down upon a forest of skyscrapers: New York City”:

The New York Public Library scrapbook has the date as 1850 to 1945. The Park Row Building in the foreground is 1899, but the most obvious latest possible early date is provided by the Sinclair Oil Building at 55 Liberty Street – the tall and slender building at the top with the dark hip roof and a chimney. That was built in 1910. If I started going through every building on the east side of the Financial District I could probably pin down the earliest possible late date, but there’s an easy clue that eliminates that work.

Where was the photographer standing? Based on the angle, near the top of the Woolworth Building. That also explains what that skeleton in the bottom center is: the southeast pinnacle (of the four surrounding the hip roof), which has not yet received its skin. So we’re in 1912: Woolworth’s steel is topped out or nearly so, and the facade construction is still ongoing. Here’s a view of the tower on July 1, 1912, looking almost exactly opposite the direction of the view above. You can see the unfinished hip roof and the corner pinnacles.

Meanwhile…forest? Skyscrapers? To our jaded eyes, this is a medium-sized group of mid-rises with a lot of open space between them from the old low-rise buildings. But if you were thirty in 1912 – if you were born in 1882 – this was a large group of skyscrapers that included some of the tallest buildings in the world.