Grading Height On A Curve

The Wurts Brothers give us the Williamsburgh Bank Tower on Hanson Place in Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s, with the Fifth Avenue elevated crossing in front of it:

The bank was based in Williamsburgh but decided in the 1920s to venture forth to downtown Brooklyn. But enough land to build a big tower was hard to find and expensive downtown, so the building was built about a mile to the east, across the street from the Long Island Railroad’s Brooklyn terminal. There are, scattered across the US, a number of towers in locations like this, based on the idea that the downtown area would keep expanding and eventually the location would be downtown by virtue of that expansion. Downtown Brooklyn never grew across the width of Boerum Hill, leaving the bank somewhat isolated until residential highrises began being built near it in the 1990s.

The tower is 512 feet high, which is, even today, a noticeably tall building. It was completed in 1929, during the huge boom in skyscraper construction just before the Great Depression and at that time it was the 40th tallest building in the world, using the CTBUH criteria: here. I personally would have it two notches higher, using the criteria from The Structure of Skyscrapers, but that’s not very important. What is important is that it is now, per the CTBUH, the 6266th tallest in the world. In other words, some 6226 buildings taller than this have been built in the last 95 years.

In 1930, tall enough to take notice. Among other things, it was the third tallest on the east coast of the US that was not in Manhattan. In 2025, an interesting building if you know it – and a designated landmark – but not one that impresses with height.