ANOTHER STORM that struck New York in 1889 is of historical interest because it dashed itself against the city’s first real skyscraper.
Until the 1870’s none of New York’s buildings was taller than five stories. Even so, it was difficult to rent the topmost floors because few people cared to trudge up many flights of stairs. Higher structures were erected as elevators improved. Elevators changed in size, shape, and operating principle. There were screw, hydraulic, steam, and finally electric elevators. As they became faster and safer, they won wider acceptance.
With the advent of the 1870’s the city’s five-story buildings were topped by others eight and ten stories high. Old-timers complained that they threatened “to shut out the sky,” but enterprising men went on building them. In 1882 Cyrus W. Field put up the twelve-story Washington Building at 1 Broadway. This has been wrongly called the world’s first skyscraper, but it was made of masonry, and true skyscrapers consist of steel skeletons.
These earliest tall buildings of solid masonry needed very thick walls to support the weight of each floor. As a consequence, the lower stories had such thick walls that they wasted a great deal of rentable floor space. A solid masonry structure was limited in height by the total weight it could support. With the development of elevators came the need for a new kind of construction that would allow the use of thinner walls all the way up the building.
The prototype of all skyscrapers was erected in Chicago, a city that was young and bold and short on precedent. After the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871 a flurry of new construction began on the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1884 an architect, named William Le Baron Jenney, built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago. It was only ten stories tall, and the Washington Building in New York soared to twelve stories. However, the Home Insurance Building was the world’s first real skyscraper because it was the first to use steel skeleton construction instead of solid masonry. Its steel frame supported the weight of the thinner walls, as well as the weight of each floor.
The success of the Chicago landmark proved that there was no reasonable limit to the height of buildings. Besides steel construction and elevators, however, a third element was required to erect skyscrapers. This was a tough thick bed of rock on which to build. Parts of Manhattan’s stony subsoil were perfect for shouldering the enormous weight of high buildings.
In the spring of 1887 a young New York silk merchant, named John L. Stearns, bought a lot at 50 Broadway on the east side of the street just south of Exchange Place. Its Broadway frontage was so narrow that a building only twenty-one and one-half feet wide could be erected there. Stearns wanted to put up a building that would earn him money from office rentals. If he built the conventional stone masonry structure, its walls would be so thick that he would not have enough rentable space to turn a profit. The more he pondered the problem, the more he felt that he had a white elephant on his hands. Stearns turned for help to a young New York architect, named Bradford Lee Gilbert.
For more than six months Gilbert meditated. Then one day he realized that the solution was to erect a building like a steel bridge stood up on one end. First, he would raise a steel skeleton framework six stories high. On top of this he would place a seven-story superstructure. The walls would be only twelve inches thick and bear no weight at all. The weight of the walls and floors would be transmitted to the steel columns and then down to the cement footings of the foundation. The thin walls would provide more floor space and thus command more rentals than the usual masonry structure.
New York’s ancient and rigid building laws, geared to solid masonry structures, dictated the exact thickness of walls in office buildings. Gilbert and Stearns agonized through long negotiations with various city officials before they were granted a construction permit by the buildings department. When newspapers heard about the plan for the radical new building, they dubbed it the Idiotic Building. New Yorkers were positive that Stearns’ building would be blown over in the first strong windstorm. An engineer even wrote an alarming letter to Stearns, who handed it to his architect. By now Stearns himself feared that his new building would topple and that he would be sued for unprecedented damages. Gilbert, whose faith in himself never wavered, said to Stearns, “I will make my offices in the upper two floors of the Broadway end. If the building falls, I will fall with it.”
The statement satisfied Stearns, and work began on New York’s first true skyscraper. The building was so slim that it began to look like a gigantic exclamation mark. Stearns named it the Tower Building because it towered into the sky. Except for the roof, the thirteen-story structure was finished when a hurricane hit the city one Sunday morning in 1889. With gusts of wind reaching a velocity of eighty miles an hour, Gilbert and Stearns rushed from their homes to the Tower Building to share in the crucial test it was undergoing.
By the time they arrived at 50 Broadway, a crowd had gathered—at a safe distance—to watch the fate of the building. The spectators babbled to one another that it was damned well going to blow down. Janitors and watchmen scurried out of buildings across the street, jabbering that they didn’t want to be crushed to death when it fell.
Gilbert grabbed a plumb line and began climbing a ladder left in place by workmen when they had quit work the evening before. Stearns followed at his heels. From the crowd arose screams: “You fools! You’ll be killed!” The architect and businessman could barely hear them above the shriek of the hurricane. Stearns’ courage gave out when they reached the tenth floor. There he sprawled full length on a scaffold and held on for dear life. Gilbert, who felt that the risk of his reputation was worth the risk of his life, continued to climb the ladder, rung by painful rung, his knuckles whitening with strain and gusts of wind battering him unmercifully. When he reached the thirteenth and top floor, he crawled on hands and knees along a scaffold. At a corner of the building he tugged the plumb line from a pocket, got a firm grip on one end of the cord, and dropped its leaden weight down toward the Broadway sidewalk. He later reported, “There was not the slightest vibration. The building stood as steady as a rock in the sea.”
In that moment of triumph Gilbert rashly jumped to his feet on the scaffold. His hat had been tightly crushed on his head. Now he snatched it off and waved it exultantly. The wind knocked him down. It scudded him toward one end of the scaffold. He gulped. He prayed. Wildly he grabbed about him. Just as he was about to be swept off the end of the board and down to certain death, he caught a rope lashing about in the wind from an upright beam of the tower. His grip held. The rope held. He steadied himself, eased down onto his knees, and carefully picked his way back to the ladder. Climbing down the ladder, he was joined by Stearns at the tenth floor, and the two men then made their way slowly back to street level.
Spectators cheered the heroes of the hour and gave way to let them pass. Locking arms, their chins upthrust, the architect and the businessman marched up Broadway, dumbfounding Trinity Church members just leaving the morning service, by singing in unison: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . . .”
New York’s first skyscraper had passed its first test. The thin walls Gilbert designed gave Stearns $10,000 a year in extra rental. New York was to become the city of skyscrapers, a man-made Rocky Mountain range wondrous to behold. The end result was the world’s greatest concentration of the tallest possible buildings on the smallest possible site. One year after this memorable Sunday, with the opening of the sixteen-story Pulitzer Building near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, a guest stepped off the elevator at the top floor and asked in a loud voice, “Is God in?”
New York needed a large hall for orchestral and choral music. The Metropolitan Opera House was inadequate for concert music because an orchestra’s best effects were lost in the vast recesses of its stage. Chickering Hall and Steinway Hall were suitable only for recitals. Theaters lacked the proper atmosphere for serious music. The Oratorio Society, founded by Leopold Damrosch in 1873, gave concerts in the showrooms of a piano store.
Damrosch also established the New York Symphony, and before he died in 1885, he passed along to his son Walter his vision of a huge music hall in New York. After his father’s death Walter Damrosch became director of both the New York Symphony and the Oratorio Society. Serving on the society’s board was Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. Young Damrosch told Carnegie that a chorus as large as that of the Oratorio Society had to have a much larger place in which to perform. Carnegie preferred pipe organs and bagpipes to symphony orchestras and choral groups, but his wife, twenty-four years his junior, urged him to give the city a great concert hall.
Carnegie acquiesced, partly because he foresaw the use of such a hall as a lecture platform and partly because he hoped that such a building could pay its own way. He told Damrosch that he was willing to spend $2,000,000 to construct the building, but that other New Yorkers would have to maintain and expand the institution. In the spring of 1889 Carnegie organized the Music Hall Company, and that summer excavation began for the main building.
The chosen site was the southeastern corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, then considered far uptown. Saloons abounded in the neighborhood, and Carnegie, who never drank liquor, was annoyed when he heard that at the end of a working day his laborers headed for a bar run by a brewery on Fifty-sixth Street. He cut off this source of supply by buying the property and closing the tavern.
The Music Hall, as Carnegie Hall was first called, was designed by William B. Tuthill. Besides being an accomplished architect, Tuthill had an excellent tenor voice, played the cello, was secretary of the Oratorio Society, and knew all of New York’s serious musicians. In those days acoustical engineering was in its infancy, but Tuthill methodically studied the acoustics of all the important European concert halls. When the cornerstone was laid on May 13, 1890, Carnegie said of the structure, “It is built to stand for ages, and during these ages it is probable that this hall will intertwine itself with the history of our country.”
It was erected piecemeal over the next seven years—not just one building, but three buildings cunningly connected to look like one. Down to the present, strangers are confused by the fact that the eighth floor of one unit runs into the tenth floor of another. Tuthill designed the exterior of the main building in modified Italian Renaissance Eclectic, which one writer described as a “fat, brown-and-buff Romanesque pile.” Its foyer was well marbled, and the auditorium was rich in red plush and gilt trimmings. Two tiers of boxes were constructed around 3 sides of the auditorium, which seats 2,760 persons.
To open the Oratorio Society’s new home, Walter Damrosch planned a five-day six-concert music festival, and he persuaded Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky to conduct some of his own works. When the Russian landed here late in the afternoon of April 26, 1891, he was the first truly great composer to visit America. Tchaikovsky was not a conductor by profession. A morbid neurotic, he sometimes felt as if his head were falling off as he stood on the podium, and at a previous concert he had clutched his head with one hand during the entire performance.
Tchaikovsky had a ruddy complexion, a bitter and full-lipped mouth, piercing blue eyes, gray hair, and a gray beard, and he dressed meticulously. As members of the welcoming committee helped him pass through customs, he glanced about apprehensively. He suffered from what he called heart cramps, and he had endured nervous breakdowns, tried unsuccessfully to cure his homosexuality by marrying, and made a stab at suicide. He felt homesick now and grieved over the recent death of his sister. Upon reaching the Hotel Normandie at Broadway and Thirty-eighth Street, he sat down in his suite and wept.
The formal opening of Carnegie Hall was held on the evening of May 5, 1891. Seated in Box 33 was Andrew Carnegie, a tiny man with white beard and hair, his hard mouth hidden by his mustache and his bright eyes widely separated by a thick nose. He was applauded by the chorus, about 400 strong, massed on the stage behind the orchestra. Exactky at 8 P.M. Walter Damrosch lifted his baton, and the chorus began singing a popular hymn, “Old Hundred.” Later that evening Tchaikovsky conducted the Marche Solennelle, one of his minor works, but this time he did not feel it necessary to keep his head from toppling off. His beat was firm, forcible, and a little harsh.
Tchaikovsky considered Carnegie Hall “magnificent.” He was paid $2,500 for this and other appearances during the music festival, and before leaving here, he was entertained by Carnegie. The Russian composer liked the Scottish-born steel magnate, partly because Carnegie expressed admiration for Moscow, which he had visited two years before. Tchaikovsky was also impressed by Carnegie’s simplicity and his talent as a mimic. The musician wrote in his diary: “He grasped my hands, declaring that I am the uncrowned but true king of music; embraced me (without kissing—here men never kiss), expressed my greatness by standing on tiptoe and raising his hands up high, and finally threw the entire company into raptures by showing how I conduct. He did it so seriously, so well, so similarly, that I myself was delighted.”
Carnegie Hall did not pay its way, as Carnegie had hoped. Although it was well attended, its operating costs exceeded its income, so with many complaints Carnegie underwrote its annual deficits for many years. However, it was an artistic success. Few auditoriums have such excellent acoustics as Carnegie Hall, which became America’s most important concert hall.
The world’s largest cathedral began to take shape in Manhattan about this time. Called the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it was the Mother Church of the Episcopal diocese of New York.
Back in 1828 the need for such a cathedral had been mentioned by John Henry Hobart, the third Episcopal bishop of New York. In 1872 the idea was revived by Horatio Potter, the sixth Episcopal bishop, who urged Episcopalians to erect the largest church in America. G. T. Strong discussed the plan with John Jacob Astor, grandson and namesake of the original John Jacob Astor. The grandson told Strong he would donate $100,000 toward the project, causing the diarist to write: “Often as I have thought of it, I never regarded the realization of such a conception as within the bounds of possibility till my casual talk with John J. Astor at the door of 68 Wall Street this morning. Why not try to make the dream a reality?” That was on May 27, 1872. The next year Bishop Potter obtained a state charter incorporating the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
He was succeeded as bishop by his nephew, Henry Codman Potter, who had pronounced the benediction at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The new bishop appealed for funds, not merely from Episcopalians but from Christians of every creed. John D. Rockefeller, a Baptist, later contributed $500,000.
On October 31, 1891, the Episcopalians paid $850,000 for 11½ acres of land then occupied by an orphan asylum on the Morningside Heights plateau, 3 blocks east of the Hudson River. The site was bounded on the west by Amsterdam Avenue, on the north by West 113th Street, on the east by Morningside Drive, and on the south by West 110th Street. Part of the Battle of Harlem Heights had been fought here. Architects throughout the world were invited to submit plans for the cathedral. The winners were two Americans, George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge. They chose the Romanesque Eclectic style, deriving part of their inspiration from the Cathedral of Gerona in Spain, which La Farge had visited in his youth. The cornerstone was laid on St. John’s Day, December 27, 1892.
Built in the shape of a cross, the cathedral was so oriented that a priest standing at the high altar faced the east. Its nave, 601 feet long, became the longest in the world. Its foundation, 72 feet below the surface at certain spots, rested on solid rock. Except for steel in the roof over the nave, the building was made entirely of stone. Its core was Maine granite. Its outer walls were Mohegan granite from Peeks-kill, New York. Its inner surfaces were Bedford (Indiana) limestone and Wisconsin dolomite. Its flying buttresses were placed inside, rather than outside, the structure.
Flanking the nave were columns so lofty that they added grandeur to the magnificent cathedral. The work of hoisting them into place was directed by Carrie A. Howland, wife of one of the contractors. A shipload of tall pine trees had to be brought here all the way from Oregon around Cape Horn in order to make a derrick tall and strong enough to lift the granite pillars. The trees were landed at a Hudson River dock, as were the columns. To move the columns from the waterfront to the cathedral site required the construction of a truck reputed to be then the largest in the world.
Set in the western and front façade of the cathedral was a great rose window, forty feet in diameter. Under this stained-glass marvel stood ponderous bronze doors, eighteen feet high, weighing twelve tons, and richly ornamented on the outside with bas-relief panels illustrating biblical scenes.
The first service in the unfinished cathedral was held on January 8, 1899. After the death of Heins, architect La Farge carried on alone until 1911. At that time only the choir, the apse, and a rough masonry shell at the crossing had been completed. Certain cathedral officials, who preferred the more traditional Gothic architecture, declared the original contract at an end and turned the commission over to Ralph Adams Cram and Frank E. Ferguson. This was a disheartening blow to La Farge and largely cut short his creative career. Cram and Ferguson designed the rest of the building in French Gothic Eclectic.
Although more than $20,000,000 has been spent on the cathedral, it is only about two-thirds finished today. Still lacking are two western towers, not yet carried to their full height of 207 feet, and a central spire, designed to rise more than 400 feet.
St. Peter’s in Rome is a church, not a cathedral; its 41,900,000 cubic feet make it the largest church in the world. St. John’s in New York is a cathedral because it contains the bishop’s throne; its 16,822,000 cubic feet make it the largest cathedral in the world. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine can seat 10,000 people and hold thousands of standees. A scientist has predicted that this massive pile of stone upon stone will endure for at least 5,000 years.
The first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel resulted from a feud and then a truce between two branches of the Astor family. In the 1880’s the empress of American society was Carolina Webster Schermerhorn Astor, known to the elite as the Mrs. Astor. She had married William Astor, the second son of William Backhouse Astor, and at their wedding reception Ulysses S. Grant had become a little drunk. The Mrs. Astor lacked beauty and brains, wore a black wig because her hair was falling out, but rose to undisputed leadership in society because she had $50,000,000 and the personality of a Prussian drill sergeant.
On the southwestern corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street she built a 4-story mansion costing $1,500,000 and spent $750,000 to furnish it. Her husband disliked social life, so she chose Ward McAllister as her chamberlain, secretary, and social arbiter. The third Monday of every January she gave a ball regarded as the crowning event of the social season. At first she limited her guests to 400. McAllister told a reporter, “There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society. If you go outside the number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease. See the point?” The phrase “The Four Hundred” came to mean society’s elite.
Mrs. Astor received her guests while standing in front of a full-length life-size oil portrait of herself. She wore as many jewels as possible, among them a triple necklace of diamonds and a famous diamond stomacher said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. Every pair of canvasback ducks consumed by her guests cost the equivalent of a worker’s weekly wages, and her annual ball was paid for by rentals from miles of tenements.
Her nephew was William Waldorf Astor, a great-grandson of the original John Jacob Astor. He was tall and stooped, parted his hair in the middle, and was as eccentric as he was irascible. It galled him when voters twice refused to elect him to Congress. Equally irritating was his aunt’s social glory, which he wanted for his wife, Mary Dahl-gren Paul Astor. Despite the fact that his fortune was twice as large as his aunt’s, he was unable to wrest the social leadership from her. Declaring that “America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live,” he planned to move to England. First, however, he would try to humble his aunt.
He lived on the northwestern corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street in a house inherited from his father, John Jacob Astor III. Only a garden separated his place from his aunt’s. He planned to raze his house and on its site erect a hotel so tall that its shadow would fall on his aunt’s residence and dwarf its grandeur. Furthermore, he would call it the Waldorf so that everyone who voted against him would have to pronounce this part of his name. He chose Henry J. Hardenbergh to design his hotel and George C. Boldt to run it.
No expense was spared to make the Waldorf the most sumptuous hotel in America. The building alone cost nearly $4,000,000, while furnishings came to $600,000. Construction never was hurried, every detail being planned and built with meticulous care. When completed, it stood 13 stories high and had 530 rooms and 350 private baths. On the rainy night of March 14, 1893, the new Waldorf was officially opened. This was a depression year, and one Sunday the hotel had only 40 guests and 970 employees available to wait on them. Quickly recovering, however, the Waldorf won widespread fame.
Less than a year later the Mrs. Astor capitulated. Unwilling to live within a shadow created by her nephew and seeking to remove herself from what she considered sordid commercialism, she engaged Richard Morris Hunt to design a new palace for her farther north on Fifth Avenue.
Her son, John Jacob Astor IV, was angered by his cousin’s victory and envious of his new hostelry. He decided to tear down his mother’s abandoned mansion and there erect a hotel even taller than the Waldorf. But money was thicker than bad blood. Boldt, who had leased the Waldorf, suggested that the two hotels be operated as one so that both cousins would make greater profits. Cautiously agreeing, they stipulated that every opening between the two structures be constructed in such a way that they could be bricked up and sealed off, should the occasion arise.
John Jacob Astor IV, sixteen years younger than his cousin, had a lean face, a sharp nose, long sideburns, and a pointed upturned mustache. He decided to name his hotel the Astoria for the trading post his great-grandfather had planted in Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River. In the spring of 1895 he began to demolish his mother’s mansion, and by the following summer the Astoria was well along in its construction. The Waldorf had no bar; patrons would drink vintage wine at their tables. The Astoria featured a huge four-sided bar that became famous. It also boasted an enormous carriage entrance and the first roof garden of any New York hotel.
The 17-story Astoria opened on November 1, 1897, and by a coincidence this, too, turned out to be a stormy evening. President William McKinley was unable to attend, but sent Vice-President Garret A. Hobart. The combined hotel, called the Waldorf-Astoria, cost $13,000,000. With its 1,000 rooms and 765 private baths, it was the world’s costliest, largest, and most magnificent hotel. Hardenbergh, who designed both parts, immediately became the foremost hotel architect of his time. The German Renaissance edifice abounded in roofed galleries, balconies, gables, and clusters of chimneys. The Empire dining room was modeled after the grand salon in King Ludwig’s palace at Munich.
“Meet me at the Waldorf” became a byword among New York’s elite during the Gay Nineties and long afterward. The hyphenated hotel continued to function at that location until 1929, when it was torn down to make way for the Empire State Building.