So Skinny

Continuing yesterday‘s thought for a bit, here’s a Wurts Brothers photo from the early 1920s, showing the intersection of Madison Avenue and 24th Street, taken from Madison Square Park.

The building on the right that runs past the right and top edges of the photo is the Met Life Tower, the record-breaking skyscraper. The building centered in the view is an annex building that was torn down around 1928 for the construction of the Met Life North Building that covers the entire block from Madison to Park Avenue South, 24th to 25th Streets. So the three buildings visible to the left of the annex were also demolished at that same time.

The annex was built around 1919 or 1920 on the site of the second Madison Square Presbyterian Church. I’m pretty sure that the two buildings immediately to its north (the left) were built on the sites of two rowhouses. There was a period in New York from around 1890 until around 1910 when it was surprisingly common to build little skyscrapers on single lots 25 feet wide or smaller. I know of around 30 such buildings from before 1900, and there were more after. Eventually people realized how terrible the economics of these buildings were: the loss factor from exterior walls, elevator shafts, stairs, and tenant toilets was far higher with such narrow buildings than they were with more ordinary floor-plans (like the annex) and that was the end of their construction. But here are two fine short-lived examples.

Very skinny towers have made a return to the city since 2000, particularly on Billionaires’ Row, but that location is a tip-off as to why they have been built again: the economics of ultra-luxury housing are quite different than those of ordinary office buildings.