The use of structural cast iron came to a screeching halt in New York in 1904, after years of decline, with the collapse of the Darlington Apartments during construction. Any buildings in construction with iron columns were finished, and afterwards buildings with metal frames had steel columns. I can’t swear there are no outliers from this pattern, but I’ve never encountered any.
There are, of course, other possible uses for cast iron, so the material didn’t completely disappear. You can find iron elements of non-bearing facades through the 1910s and into the 1920s. For example, the 1913 Scribner’s Building on Fifth Avenue:
Ernest Flagg snuck this design in while he was finishing the Woolworth Building. It’s a fairly ordinary office building of the era, with a large retail space at the bottom: Scribner’s was both a publisher and a bookseller, and this was their flagship store until 1989. And the storefront, a small precursor to glass curtain walls, is framed in cast iron. This designation photo from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission gives a sense of the spidery design:
Finally If that first view looks a little familiar, maybe it’s because it was in the background in the 1917 march in last Saturday’s post?
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