A few weeks ago, I was walking in Central Park on the Upper West Side. As I strolled past some benches near the Diana Ross Playground, I saw a young man, likely in his late twenties, with his face buried in a huge, white-covered book. When I got closer, I noticed he was reading a brand-new copy of Robert Caro’s 1974, 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
It struck me that I was witnessing a quintessentially New York act—to buy the Power Broker and read it in the park. In such an act, we glory in our ability to enjoy ourselves in the vast urban wonderland that is Central Park while reading a book about a man who built more parks in New York than anyone and yet who today is vilified as a power-hungry titan who initiated the fall of Gotham.
The Caro Narrative
It also occurred to me that Robert Caro’s legacy is not just that he provided a chronicle of 20th-century New York’s most important public figure but has also affected the course of public policy.
Caro’s story is about the abuse of power—how Moses transmogrified into a Kurtz-like figure in The Heart of Darkness. Moses began his career as an ambitious idealist Progressive. His genius and endless drive to create parks and parkways pushed him forward and showed New Yorkers how government can improve people’s lives. Yet, with each success, he became increasingly power-hungry and gamed the system to feed his bottomless appetite.
Because of the arrogance that was so basic to his nature…Moses’ susceptibility to the addiction of power was unusually strong….Once Robert Moses had sought power only for the sake of his dreams, only as a means to an end; even then, however, there were signs that he was beginning to seek it for its own sake, as an end in itself. And the avidity with which he sought power—and the lengths to which he went to get it—revealed the depth of his need for it.
After World War II, as Caro’s portrait goes, Moses became deeply entrenched in his “Fortress of Solitude” on Randall’s Island as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. With a wave of his hand, he clear-cut the “slums” that resulted in massive residential displacements; he ramrodded expressways through vibrant working-class neighborhoods; and his highway construction program drove New Yorkers to become automobile junkies while generating rampant white flight and the collapse of the subways.
Caro provides a gripping tale. We all love a Greek tragedy—the king who becomes so blinded by his power and is convinced of his own perfection that he is unable to see the damage he causes.
Robert Moses in 1939 viewing a model for a Battery Bridge (a tunnel was built instead). Source: Wikipedia.
The Caro Effect
Yet, whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been “in power” since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.
This is not to say that Moses’s career was not problematic. His policies were not race- or class-neutral and often harmed people of color and the poor to benefit the white middle class. As a master bill writer, he crafted legislation that left him untouched by the democratic process to implement his programs as he saw fit. He swatted away community pushback with the epithet, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
Bogeyman Moses
However, the overly simplistic residual of Caro’s book—the belief that people cling to—is that because Moses was a power-hungry bully after World War II and presumably harmed New York, we shouldn’t build important megaprojects that the city needs today (megaprojects that other cities worldwide are building easily).
Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.
The Harm
New York faces 21st-century crises that need to be addressed directly and strongly. Most notably, the city must become resilient against climate change, dramatically expand its housing stock, and upgrade and produce other services, including mass transit, to improve quality of life and prevent the high cost of living from pushing people out.
Today, Gotham is tiptoeing its way to climate change resilience. It builds out the shoreline here, adds some bluebelts there, and buys out some households over there. But the truth is that a patchwork of programs only offers partial protection against increasingly damaging storms, flooding, and sea level rise.
New York is on the path toward building $52 billion worth of seawalls that will be used sporadically to stop storm surges. Politically, erecting seawalls away from any residential neighborhood is the easy path, but practically, its cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Billions more will be spent against sea level rise and coastal disappearance.
The Housing Affordability Crisis
Just as important is housing affordability. Over half the city’s renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and one in three low-income households is severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income for an apartment. There is hardly any rental housing to be found with the current vacancy rate at a mere 1.4%, the lowest in half a century.
To his credit, Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Housing Opportunity will attempt to add more housing in each neighborhood, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on affordability. He has to tread gingerly to avoid total rejection of his plan.
Additionally, climate change resilience and housing affordability are not independent. Housing will become scarcer and more expensive as more land is removed from use because of rising sea levels or to mitigate flooding.
The Interchanges to and from the Cross Bronx Expressway ca. 1973. Source: Wikipedia.
Moses: A 20th-Century Centurion
In the decades following the Power Broker’s publication, there have been more nuanced reevaluations of Moses’s career and impacts. The most forceful and comprehensive is the 2007 book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (which contains a comprehensive list of Moses’s New York City projects). But the revisionists have been drowned out by the howling of the Caro’s spirit.
Lost in the collective memory is that Moses was a product of his time. He rose out of the Progressive Movement, frustrated with machine politics’ failure to eradicate urban ills like overcrowding and lack of fresh air and sunlight. His genius was in figuring out (for good and for bad) how to overcome nimbyism and status quo politics. He had the support of leaders and the people because he delivered the results that they wanted.
Moses existed within the political spectrum of reformers. On the far left were the socialists who sought to abolish private property. Just to their right were those who wanted to master plan the metropolis, deconcentrate it, and create a network of garden cities. Moses pushed back against those that he saw as being too extreme. He decided that a project-by-project strategy was to be preferred to grand schemes. The populace agreed with him, being suspicious of grand plans that would disrupt the culture of laissez-faire New York.[1]
Slum Clearance
Moses did not invent slum clearance.[2] It had been the dream of reformers since after the Civil War with the rise of hyperdense slums in Five Points. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis’s expose, How the Other Half Lives, provided more fuel to the slum clearance movement.
One of the earliest examples of slum clearance was that of Mulberry Bend, a dense cluster of tenements in the Lower East Side that was notorious for its poverty, crime, and vice. It was cleared in 1904 and the land was converted into a park (today Columbus Park).
When Moses was in his heyday, slum clearance advocates were in positions of power through the New Deal programs. After World War II, Title I and public housing funds were made available on a level never seen before in human history.[3] Moses was able to grab the lion’s share for New York. He was largely supported in his endeavor because he was carrying out the work that previous reformers had been unable to accomplish. Moses was their Trojan Horse.
The Automobile
Moses did not invent America’s love of the automobile, and we can’t blame New Yorker’s car addiction on him (and which is certainly no worse as compared to the rest of the country). It’s good that he didn’t get his way in various projects, such as building elevated highways across Greenwich Village and SoHo, and it’s bad that he did not consider neighborhood impacts when helping to build America’s highway system within Gotham’s borders.
But America’s automobile dependence is based on a much larger institutional and cultural framework—subsidies for cheap oil, various Federal Highway Acts (the National Highway Act of 1956 had the Federal Government covering 90% of localities’ highway construction expenses), and the fact that people highly value the personal freedom that comes with cars.
Moses’s radial highway system for New York City was not his invention. As historian Leonard Wallock states:
Far from being novel, [Moses’s] ideas for a circumferential system of roadways were nearly identical to the ones proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, which in turn were based on Edward H. Bennett’s Brooklyn City Plan (1914) and Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).
Parts of New York that Will Be Underwater if Sea Levels Rises by Six Feet (a likely projection by 2100). The green areas are those likely to be prone to flooding. Map Source: NOAA.
Moses and “The Fall”
The most influential element of Caro’s book has been its subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” as if Moses destroyed New York. Yes, Moses did some bad things, and blaming him for Gotham’s post-industrial woes makes for good copy, but it’s just plain wrong.
In fact, after the massive wave of deindustrialization that hit manufacturing cities in the 1960s, New York fared better than most. It lost population from 1970 to 1980 but rebounded after that, and today, the city holds its highest population ever. Detroit and St. Louis, on the other hand, are still losing people. Chicago, Boston, and Newark, for example, have rebounded, but their populations remain far lower than their peak in the 1950s.[4]
More broadly, while Moses is seen as godlike in his impact on New York, the truth is that there was nothing wholly unique about his building spree. As Wallock writes:
In The Power Broker…Moses is not merely the lawgiver but the creator, for he transcends the role of his Biblical progenitor and usurps the place of God. By making Moses the prime mover responsible for the city’s genesis, [Caro’s] interpretations disregard a crucial fact: from the 1920s through the 1960s, New York’s physical and spatial development was markedly similar to that of other large American cities….The Power Broker fail[s] to explain why other cities, not blessed with a Moses figure, assumed the same physical and spatial configuration as New York.
But Caro was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when New York was seemingly coming apart at the seams. To many, including Caro, the “fall” was brought about by Moses’s opening the barn doors. In hindsight, this seems to be a confusion of correlation with causation.
Ironically, in his Introduction, Caro hedges on Moses’s net impact, which is quite rich, given how powerful his book has become. He concludes:
Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? ….
Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
Time to Move On
It’s time to move on. Let’s put Moses in the past where he belongs. We need to learn the true lessons of Moses and use them as a guide to improve New York’s future, rather than clinging to outdated myths that keep the city nearly paralyzed. The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.
How to Vanquish Moses’s Ghost
However, once lodged in the public consciousness, myths are hard to kill.[5] We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the “truthiness” of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them. Blaming Moses for the planning mistakes of the 20th century is easy because he stood in the center of these changes and was seemingly waving his magic wand like Lord Voldemort.
So, how do we remove the Moses Myth from blocking policies needed to keep New York safe, affordable, and viable in the 21st century? I believe the answer is twofold. One approach must come from the top down and the other from the bottom up.
Trust Building
First is that our leaders need to engender trust. Nimbyism is, in large part, motivated by a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good. The legacy of Moses and Caro was to remove this trust.
Enabling communities to have strong veto power over large projects forces policymakers to employ half-hearted measures instead. When these measures fail to achieve their purpose, residents blame the government for its inability to solve problems, thereby reinforcing their mistrust.
Leaders need to say, “Yes, people like Moses were heavy-handed and their decisions led to projects that today we feel were poorly implemented, but we must move forward. Some large problems require big solutions, and we can’t tiptoe our way to the future. The cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action and we have learned from the mistakes of the past and will not repeat them. Here are the ways that we have your back….”
Just as importantly, leaders need to create the institutional mechanisms that will bring residents and communities on board. Community input is vital and should be part of the bargaining process. However, all large-scale policies need to lay out the costs, benefits, and the likely negative spillovers, and directly address how these spillovers will be mitigated to reduce the fear of change. (I have spelled out examples here). One mechanism is that a large project also comes with a compensation fund to which people can apply if directly harmed and which is objectively administered by an impartial board.
Rebranding Moses
While leaders work on the issue of trust and compensation, we, the people, need to rebrand Moses and reframe how he is seen in the public eye.[6] Yes, Moses did many things that, in hindsight, were regretful. But he also did many wonderful things. What’s wrong with a story about a complicated man who was a product of his time?
We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.
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Notes
[1] When Jane Jacobs emerged on the scene in the early 1960s, her antidote to planning was to eliminate it altogether. Death and Life directly response to the wide-eyed planners who wanted to remake the city from scratch or to build towers in the park. Her “cure” for neighborhoods was to leave them alone (or allow residents to veto any new construction) and permit mixed uses. In terms of city planning, her recipe for utopia was to build more playgrounds and cut long blocks in half to create more sidewalks and street frontages.
[2] Moses did not invent the tower-in-park style of housing either. It was an invention of reformers and visionaries, such as Le Corbusier, starting in the 1920s. The planning consensus during the Great Depression and beyond was that building towers surrounded by green space would cure urban ills.
[3] Arguably federal mortgage programs that created redlining and with which Moses was not involved had a greater effect on cities like New York than Moses’s housing and slum clearance projects.
[4] Ironically, public housing—something in which Moses had a more behind-scenes role in developing—today is a success story in New York. Given the massive affordability problem, NYCHA housing provides a huge benefit for those with low incomes. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s book, Public Housing that Worked: New York in the 20th Century. More broadly, given recent economics research on the impacts of highways (such a Brinkman and Lin, 2024) and slum clearance on cities (such as Collins and Shester, 2013), measuring the net impact of Robert Moses on New York relative to what happened in other cities, would not be too difficult. To my knowledge, no one has specifically measured whether Moses’s projects were a net plus or negative for the city’s economic growth.
Many cities around the world are facing housing affordability crises. In New York, for example, a majority of renters are rent-burdened, meaning their housing costs eat up more than 30% of their income. Even worse, nearly one in three low-income renters are severely rent-burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing.
To his credit, Mayor Eric Adams is pushing his City of Yes Housing Opportunity agenda, which, if approved, would allow for more housing throughout the city. These rezonings will produce up to 100,000 additional units over the next 15 years, if all goes well. While this may sound like a lot, it’s only about 6,700 units per year, on average—hardly what’s needed to make a meaningful impact in affordability.
Where to Build?
One of the biggest hurdles is finding new sites on which to build housing. With only a slight bit of exaggeration, we can say that current housing is where future housing goes to die. In other words, when housing is built, it creates barriers that make future, denser buildings more difficult to construct.
Tenants in rental buildings, for example, would need to be evicted or relocated, which is frequently impossible as retnal laws give tenants the right to remain in their units (and with New York City vacancy rates at 1.4%, where will they go?). In suburban areas, zoning for single-family housing dominates, and densification is nearly impossible (more than 50% of residential land in New York City is zoned for one- or two-family homes and is likely much higher outside the city boundaries).
Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul introduced a bill to upzone parcels near transit lines around the state. However, it was voted down by the state legislature because suburban residents are opposed to having multifamily buildings in their towns or neighborhoods. Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Plan is now working its way through the legislative process. It remains to be seen if key parts will be gutted because of local opposition.
Lower Manhattan with Map of New Amsterdam Superimposed. Manhattan Island has been dramatically expanded over the centuries by landfill. Source: Created by Jason Barr from the 1660 Costello Plan and Google Maps.
New Mannahatta
However, there is another option that we can add to the list—creating housing on new land.
In the long sweep of urban history, when cities have been land constrained, they have frequently made more of it by draining wetlands or building out the shorelines into the sea. The process of land reclamation is as old as civilization itself.
The proposal was greeted, of course, with a flood of skepticism. Much of the knee-jerk nay-saying was based on the idea that my plan was too radical. However, I don’t think most people realize that land reclamation has been part of New York’s DNA since New Amsterdam was founded in 1624 and has continued well into the 20th century. Lower Manhattan south of City Hall is about 50% bigger than it was before the Dutch arrived. In fact, there’s nothing wholly original about my proposal as it follows a long line of such proposals (discussed below).
Second, a tour around the world (to be discussed in Part II of this series) will show how common reclamation is in cities seeking to grow and accommodate their populations (I will discuss the environmental concerns in Part III of this series).
The Ghost of Moses
Today, American cities are mired in paralysis—residents are afraid of mega-projects that could substantially benefit us. People in New York constantly chime in about how the city was, so to speak, bitten by the snake of Robert Moses, the master builder of New York from the 1930s to 1960s. Because Moses was heavy-handed and power-hungry in the mid-20th century, the logic goes, we can’t do big projects today.
So, I want to demonstrate in this blog series that land reclamation for urban expansion and new housing is not only an age-old tradition but something we should consider for our future. Let’s turn to New York’s history.
Jason Barr’s Proposal for a Manhattan Extension. See here for more details.
New Amsterdam
When the Dutch created New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1626, one of their first acts was draining the wetlands along the shoreline (today this is a bad idea, but I’ll return to the environmental issues in Part III). They dug a canal from a creek that ran down what is Broad Street today and shored up the coastline. Elminating wetlands was also seen as good for public health to prevent insect-borne diseases. By draining these wetlands, they created new land, and the canal allowed boats to enter the city itself.
Another early act was to build a fort on the lower tip of Manhattan (today, where the Museum of the American Indian resides). As the map above shows, by 1660, the Dutch had transformed Lower Manhattan into a hub for commerce and defense (and the seat of government). If the Dutch had remained in control of the colony and had not lost it to the English in 1664, Lower Manhattan would likely be ringed by a series of canals, like its father city in the Netherlands.
When the English arrived on the scene, local officials sold off so-called water lots—those parts of the shoreline that were exposed during low tide—to private landowners, who would create a retaining wall and fill in the land. Over time, water lots were sold further and further out.
Land creation had multiple purposes. First, it provided new real estate to help the city grow. Additionally, since the new land was now in deeper water, ships laden with merchandise could dock at the wharves and piers rather than anchoring further away and transferring their wares on barges, thus reducing transportation costs and creating a bustling port.
On the eve of the American Revolution, British New York had added nearly five hundred acres of land along the Lower Manhattan shorelines. As the historian Ann Buttenwieser writes, “Ballast was dumped and ships sunk, hills leveled, building sites and roadways excavated, wastes, ashes and sweepings collected, and all were deposited at the water’s edge. When space was needed for services, work places, homes, or recreation, it was always possible to create more land.”
Over the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the harborside facilities of New York were transformed. Two full blocks were reclaimed out of the East River. The city once had ended at Pearl Street; by the end of the century, Front Street was the southeastern border of lower Manhattan.…It is a certainty, however, that waterlot grants were used, as they were designed, to provide New York City with the streets, wharves, and port facilities of a growing seaport.
The Dutch fort (though rebuilt) remained a defensive location for the English as well. Colonial Governor Thomas Dongan began building batteries along the shore in 1683, giving the area its name. In 1788, the fort was demolished, and the rubble was used as landfill to create a public promenade. Between 1808 and 1811, a new, circular fort was built 200 feet offshore on an artificial island to prepare for the War of 1812. Originally called the West Battery, it was re-named Castle Clinton in 1815. In 1824, it was repurposed as Castle Garden, and became a popular entertainment venue and beer hall.
During the 1840s, as people began clamoring for more park space on Manhattan, the idea of infilling the area between the Battery and Castle Clinton took hold. Battery Park was thus created with landfill, uniting Castle Garden island with Manhattan. From 1855 to 1896, Castle Clinton operated as the city’s official immigrant processing depot before Ellis Island opened.
Over the course of the 19th century, New York continued to expand it shorelines. In 1865, the engineer Egbert Viele published a topographical map, which shows how much of the city had been expanded through fill up to that point. Many housing projects built in the 20th century, like Stuyvesant Tower and the Lillian Ward Public Houses on Avenue D in Alphabet City are on land reclaimed in the 19th century.
The Viele Map with Some Modern Developments Built on Made Land.
The World Trade Center
After World War II, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) moved the city’s port to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, which could accommodate the large container ships. Between the declining fortunes of Manhattan’s port and the aging Art Deco offices, Lower Manhattan was falling on hard times.
In 1957, David Rockefeller, Chairman of Chase Bank and grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, spearheaded the creation of the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA) to help revitalize Lower Manhattan. The DLMA commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merril (SOM) to create a master plan, which included a World Trade Center and office and exhibition space near the East River south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The DLMA turned to the Port Authority as a natural agency that could spearhead construction.
After protracted negotiations and “slum clearance,” the PA took control of a 15-acre (6-hectare) site on Manhattan’s lower west side and built the World Trade Center, including the Twin Towers, on landfill created in the 19th century.
Left: Battery Park City Landfill ca. 1970. Right: Waterside Plaza Housing Development. Sources: here and here.
Battery Park City
Excavation for the World Trade Center produced a lot of material that had to go somewhere. Thus, the idea of creating a new neighborhood, Battery Park City, emerged by reusing the fill for new land next to the World Trade Center site. However, the plan was expanded to 92 acres (0.37 km2) and only a quarter of the fill came from World Trade Center site.
The Battery Park City Authority developed the complex, which was formed in 1968 by the New York State Legislature. While the neighborhood took a while to be fully built out, today, it is hailed as a success story of how to create a mixed-use neighborhood from scratch. The site contains 9,300 residents in 30 residential towers, 10 million square feet of office space, parks, museums, a marina, and a riverside promenade.
Waterside Plaza
Another example of a successful housing development is Waterside Plaza. In 1973, twelve years after it was first proposed, the “ambitious and dramatic Waterside housing development over the East River was formally opened…by Mayor Lindsay and former Mayor Robert F. Wagner.” The project contains 1470 residential units within three towers and rows of townhouses on a six-acre platform built over the East River. Two thousand steel piles were sunk 80 feet in the riverbed to support the platform. Many units are reserved for middle- and low-income households, made possible by various housing subsidy programs.
Visions of a New New York. Starting in 1911, the engineers T. Kennard Thomson offered several visions of expanding New York City through land reclamation. Source: NYPL.
The Unbuilt Future
Producing visions of expanding Manhattan is something of a cottage industry. In fact, despite the shock created by my Manhattan expansion proposal, there’s not all that much original about it. What is unique is that it has been updated to reflect our current needs: protection from climate change and the need for more housing.
Arguably, the most brash—much more so than mine—was proffered by the engineer T. Kennard Thomson in 1911. He proposed to dam and fill in the East River while also expanding Manhattan and Brooklyn four miles into the harbor. His plan added new peninsulas on Staten Island. And, he proposed digging a canal from the Long Island Sound to Jamaica Bay and moving the city’s port to southern Queens.
Thomson argued that “The method of reclamation to be followed is extremely simple. I would merely erect concrete seawalls from the Battery toward Staten Island for the desired length, and then fill them in.”
In 1921, the New York Times reported on a scaled down version of the plan, which was simply the Manhattan extension part—four miles into the harbor (my plan is a mere 2.5 miles). The consensus among the panel of lawyers, planners, and engineers was that there were no legal or engineering barriers to building it, and that new land would help the city grow and reduce congestion.
In 1924, engineer John A. Harris proposed damming up the East River and creating new land in place of the river (and a canal to the east running through Brooklyn and Queens). The centerpiece of his proposal was a vast new civic center and arts complex on top.
New Land for New Cities
While land reclamation has been part of New York’s long history, many cities around the world are using it to expand their cities. In the next post, I will discuss what’s happening globally.
In 1896—a decade after the completion of the Home Insurance Building (HIB)—William Le Baron Jenney and his Chicago colleagues, including the world-renowned architect and planner Daniel H. Burnham, engaged in a public relations campaign in the trade journal The Engineering Record to convince the world that, as Jenney claimed, “The skeleton construction was a radical departure from anything that heretofore appeared and was exclusively my invention.”
These words represent an attempt to rewrite history as the HIB was neither a radical departure from previous structural designs nor something that one individual, let alone Jenney, could claim sole credit for. The perfection of the tall office building was the product of decades-long trial and error. And there is virtually no metric for which Jenney’s building can be deemed the “first skyscraper.”
However, because Chicago architects and engineers were so crucial in advancing building technology and creating the Skyscraper Revolution, the public was convinced when they claimed that Jenney built the first skyscraper. The engineering argument was rather technical, while Jenney’s statement was simple and believable, despite being untrue.
But Why?
But Jenney’s dogged insistence that his building was both radical and pivotal begs the question: Why was he so eager to claim the prize? Was it pure vanity? Or were other forces at work?
The answer is that in the years between 1885 and 1896, other architects and cities were vying for the title of “first skyscraper” and the Chicago community fought to claim what they believed was rightfully theirs. As a result, they began changing the historical account and offering misleading statements about the structure of the Home Insurance Building.
The “Cloudscraper.” A rending of an office building from Leroy Buffington based on his 1888 patent for iron framing. It was never built. Source: Inland Architect, July 1888.
The Claimants
Jenney’s language in the ER and private letters makes sense when placed in the context of what he saw and heard in the late 1880s and 1890s. By using phrases such as “radical,” “my invention,” and “first steel skeleton,” to refer to his building, Jenney was attempting to securely establish his claim by locking out the other claimants, which included three key “factions”: those from New York, Chicago, and Leroy Buffington, from Minneapolis, respectively.
Leroy Buffington
Leroy Buffington (1848-1931) was arguably the most antagonistic and problematic of the lot. In 1874, he opened a practice in Minneapolis, where he flourished. As a designer of large public buildings in the 1880s, Buffington knew the state of the art of structural methods.
He claimed that in 1882, he discovered the ideas behind the skyscraper and was determined to get his due. In 1888, he won a U.S. patent for his iron-framed skeletal building design, which, he argued, showed solid proof that he was the father of the tall building. However, no structure was ever built using his patented system.
In 1892, Buffington started suing for patent infringement. His first of several unsuccessful cases was against William H. Eustis, a real estate developer and the mayor of Minneapolis. Eustis’s answer to Buffington’s bill of complaint referenced Jenney’s 1885 article about the design of the HIB in The Sanitary Engineer as proof that the patent had been anticipated and was, therefore, void.[1]
In 1892, Buffington also wrote to Jenney (and likely many others), “I beg to direct your attention to my patent, No. 333,179, issued May 22nd, 1888 for ‘Iron Building Construction’, and to warn you and others to refrain from infringement of said patent or any of its claims.” We can imagine that Jenney received quite a shock when he opened the envelope. Jenney responded by asking for a copy of “said patent.” On May 14, 1892, Buffington honored his request.
Buffington After Boodle
In late November 1892, at least four Midwest and Western newspapers published an article with the headline, “Buffington After Boodle,” which stated that Buffington “is about to begin suit against the owners of all the sky-scraping buildings in Chicago. He claims that the structural iron work has been put in a manner conflicting with patent which he holds. He will claim damages to the extent of the 5 per cent of the cost of each building. This means that he will claim $4,500,000 from Chicago….”
Some version of this article was printed around the country during the last week of November and early December, including the in San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago-based newspaper, The Sunday Inter Ocean, and The Chicago Tribune on December 4.
Buffington’s claims seem extreme today, but when put in the context of Jenney’s private experiences with Buffington and his retainers, such copy, if it reached Jenney—which it most likely did—would undoubtedly have contributed to his concern. Jenney’s words in the ER need to be considered in light of Buffington’s actions, and the evidence suggests that Jenney was worried.
Gates Paves the Way
Then, in 1896, when F. T. Gates inquired to The Engineering Record about who invented steel framing, Jenney saw an opportunity to get Buffington off his back. Jenney rounded up friends, colleagues, and former executives related to the Home Insurance Company to help in his quest by having them write letters supporting him.
The letter-writing campaign can be seen as an attempt for both the Chicago group—through Jenney—to claim “prior art,” which is evidence that an invention was already known. If another party can document it, it can invalidate a patent.
Jenney’s phrasing in his letter to the ER and private letters such as “radical departure,” “my claim to the invention,” and “nothing of the kind had ever been…hinted at” were efforts to demonstrate that Buffington’s patent was null and void due to Jenney’s structure, completed at least two or three years before Buffington filed (November 1887) or won (May 1888) his patent.
Thanks for the Honor
In early 1897, when Gates “formally” chose Jenney as the inventor of the skyscraper in another letter in The Engineering Record, Jenney wrote to Gates to thank him for his selection, stating, “I accept [this honor] with many thanks: it is the one official recognition, confirming my claim to the invention of the Steel Skeleton Construction, though as far as I know, no one has ever made the claim….(emphasis added). I have also to thank you for the inquiry through the Engineering Record, which brought the matter to the notice of the Architectural and Engineering profession.”
Jenney saw Gates as paving the way for him to make his claims in the public forum. However, Jenney’s statement, “no one has ever made the claim,” is false, in light of the fact that Jenney received a cease-and-desist letter from Buffington in 1892. Additionally, the newspaper article about Buffington’s lawsuits likely reached Jenney’s desk.
The Birkmire Letter
Furthermore, in an 1899 letter to the architect William H. Birkmire, Jenney confesses his awareness of Buffington’s actions when he wrote:
L. Buffington of Minneapolis, took out a patent May 22, 1888, which I have before me….Buffington formed a company with large capital, supposed to be for the purpose of prosecuting and obtaining money from all those who used the skeleton construction. Parties interviewed me whom I supposed to be Buffington’s attorneys. I showed them that if they could find anyone using that extravagant column [in the patent] they certainly could prosecute them but no architect or engineer of any scientific knowledge would be guilty. That was the last I knew of the patent. He certainly never attempted to interfere in the use of the skeleton construction which he did not patent (emphasis added).
Again, how Jenney can say to Gates that “no one has ever made the claim” is odd considering that he was interviewed by Buffington’s lawyers four years before Gates’s inquiry to the ER!
This “fight” between Buffington and others would continue for many years and was no doubt an ongoing source of concern for Jenney. In 1904, a Chicago-based attorney, James Raymond, responded to an offer from Jenney to help in Raymond’s legal work for his client, the First National Bank, which Buffington was suing for patent infringement. Raymond expresses his fear, which Jenney likely shared, when he wrote, “Undoubtedly if Buffington should win either the suit commenced here or the suit commenced in New York, claim would be made against all the skeleton buildings in the country which come within the construction which the Court might thus put upon the Buffington patent.”
George Post’s New York Produce Exchange (1884) in New York. This building is considered the first to include curtain walled framing, but in courtyard walls. Source: Wikipedia.
The New York Faction
While Buffington may have represented Jenney’s “left flank,” several New Yorkers on “the right flank” were vying for the trophy. One respected architect, George Post, felt he deserved the credit. Post’s building, the New York Produce Exchange (1884), at the lower tip of Broadway, was arguably the first tall office building to contain at least one set of curtain walls—in this case, in the internal courtyard.
Post’s Claims
In 1894, at a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects, which included both Jenney and Daniel Burnham, Post made his claim to his esteemed colleagues when he said:
Individually I believe, although I never very carefully investigated the subject, that I was the first person to use anything approaching to the steel cage. Some fourteen years ago, I think it was, I built the tower of the Produce Exchange with a wrought iron and cast iron combined cage, filling in the panels with brickwork, but covering it on the outside with cast iron plates in the form of pilasters and string-pieces and cornices.…
Using the terminology of the day, by “cage,” Post means an iron-framed curtain wall. Again, the fact that Jenney stated in his letter to Gates that he never heard anyone make the claim about steel-framed construction is disingenuous, given that he was sitting on the panel dais when Post made it two years before the ER debate.
Then, during the letter-writing campaign in 1896, Post weighed in again when he said, “In 1881, I designed and erected the New York Produce Exchange, in which the interior courtyard wall is constructed with a cage of cast-iron columns and wrought-iron girders, which are filled with brick panels. I am inclined to think that this is the first example of cage [iron-framed] construction.”
However, Post’s claims suffered for several reasons. First, his voice in the ER was drowned out by the bevy of those writing for Jenney. And the HIB, unlike, the Produce Exchange had iron in the external street-facing walls, while the Produce Exchange did not. So, while Post’s courtyard walls represented a true evolutionary step forward in curtain-walled design, Jenney’s building seemed closer to one.
Bradford Lee Gilbert
Another claimant arrived on the scene in 1889. The architect Bradford Lee Gilbert was awarded a commission by John Noble Stearns, a silk merchant, seeking to erect an office building on an awkwardly shaped lot in Lower Manhattan. The problem was that the Broadway frontage was only 21.5 feet across, though the lot widened toward the rear. To erect a masonry-bearing structure would have meant that the thick walls would have rendered the site unprofitable.
Gilbert claimed he devised the idea of turning a railroad bridge truss on its side. However, there is some debate about whether the idea was his or that of William H. Birkmire, who worked for the Jackson Iron Works, supplying the building’s iron at the time. Gilbert framed the exterior walls with iron columns and included diagonal members for wind bracing. The framing freed up significant space on the lower floors. The Tower Building was only 11 stories.
Like many buildings of the day, it was a hybrid. The rear part had masonry walls. The iron frame in the front stopped at the sixth floor, and above that were load-bearing walls. But his building certainly made an impression. Partly for his achievement with the structure, Gilbert won a medal at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 “for a new type of American architecture.” It’s telling that Jenney did not win an award for the Home Insurance Building.
Them’s Fighin’ Words
Although a few years after the letter-writing campaign, a “fight” erupted between New York and Chicago when, on August 9, 1899, the Society of Architectural Manufacturers of New York affixed a bronze plaque to the Tower Building, which stated that it was “the earliest example of the skeleton construction….” This event illustrates how, in the late 19th century, New York was aiming for the “trophy” as well. It also helps to explain Chicago’s ongoing attempt to claim Jenney invented the skyscraper.
The Tower Building (1889). At 11 stories it was the earliest example in New York of the use of external iron framing with wind bracing. Source: Landau and Condit (1996).
Chicago’s Other Claimants
Finally, while less vocal than Buffington or the New York architectural community, some individuals in Chicago felt they deserved more credit than they received. Jenney, Burnham, et al. constantly interacted with community members; from time to time, they would likely talk with or hear a story about someone who felt denied their recognition.
The Chicago architect Frederick Baumann believed he, too, was entitled to some credit. In 1884, Baumann published a pamphlet outlining the principles of iron-framed construction. Though there is an intense debate about whether Baumann’s article came before or after the conception of the Home Insurance Building, Baumann was disappointed that his ideas were not recognized.
Peter Wight, a well-known architect and fire-proofing expert at the time, agreed with Baumann, to whom he wrote in 1915,
Mr. Jenney’s claim has no foundation in fact…I know more about the Home Insurance Building than any other man living or dead, but did not feel like contraverting Jenney’s claims, as Holabird and Roche never did with any earnestness. George B. Post used cast iron construction in the inner court of the Produce Exchange in that city, just as H and R had done. I am sorry you did not have an opportunity to bring your ideas into effect.
As this letter implies, there was also a movement in Chicago to anoint the Tacoma Building (1889), designed by Holabird & Roche, as the “first skyscraper” since it was the first tall office building in Chicago to have curtain walls in the street-facing façades (though the rear walls were load-bearing brick).
The Tacoma Building in Chicago. Designed by Holabird & Roche is was one of the earliest examples of curtain-wall framing for a tall office building in Chicago. Source: NYPL.
The Jenney Myth Must Die
The Jenney Myth arose because we like stories with clean narrative arcs. In this case, the gist of the (made-up) story goes like this: Chicago was growing by leaps and bounds after the Great Fire of 1871. The Loop, being hemmed in, desperately needed taller buildings to accommodate the demand. One man–brave and ingenious–answered the call. William Le Baron Jenney, heroically and radically, altered the course of history by designing the Home Insurance Building. After even taller builders emerged in the late 19th century, his genius proved correct and was awarded the title “Inventor of the Skyscraper.”
Jenney was an engineering genius, to be sure, but his building was none of what history has ascribed to it. It was neither a steel-framed skyscraper, a radical break with the past, nor a pivotal one. While it’s impossible to have a counterfactual history where Jenney never existed, we can say for sure that the skyscraper would have been “invented” all the same. For that matter, it seems likely that if Jenney had not been presented with such a propitious opportunity as the ER letter-writing campaign, his building would have been just a historical curiosity among architects and engineers with little notice among the public.
[1] We can only speculate if Jenney was aware of this. But if so, it’s possible that Eustis’s claim gave Jenney the idea of using his building to demonstrate “prior art” regarding Buffington’s patent. Perhaps when Buffington’s lawyers interviewed Jenney, they mentioned this fact to him.
Well, if you read Wikipedia or ask ChatGPT, both will tell you that it was the Home Insurance Building (HIB), designed by the architect William Le Baron Jenney.[1]
The Wikipedia entry on the “First Skyscraper” informs us that “The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, opened in 1885, is, however, most often labeled the first skyscraper because of its innovative use of structural steel in a metal frame design.” Similarly, if you go to Jenney’s Wikipedia page, you will read that the Home Insurance Building “was the first fully metal-framed building and is considered the first skyscraper.”[2]
The only problem with these entries is that they are entirely wrong. His building neither used structural steel nor was the first fully metal-framed building. Jenney’s designation as the “inventor of the skyscraper,” rather, was the result of a public relations campaign initiated by Jenney and his fellow Chicagoans to make the world believe that Jenney created the skyscraper.
The HIB included some engineering innovations, to be sure, and Jenney was one of the leading architect-engineers of his day. But there is not a single metric by which we can say his building was so important that it merits the title that society has given it. It’s time the Jenney Myth died.
The Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago. Falsely labeled the “first skyscraper.” Source: Library of Congress.
What is a Skyscraper?
Before discussing the first skyscraper question, we need to define a “skyscraper.” Predating its application to tall buildings, the word “skyscraper” was used to denote nearly any high or tall object. The most notable examples include its use to describe a type of ship’s sail, a tall horse, a fly ball in baseball, and even ladies’ flowery hats that were all the rage in the mid-19th century.
The first appearance in the press that I can find referring to a tall building as a “skyscraper” was in 1882, when the New York Sun announced plans for the Mutual Life Insurance Building (1884, 11 floors) in New York. The following year, the Chicago Tribune reported in its “New York Gossip” column about the “high-building craze,” which included a discussion of Gotham’s “sky-scrapers,” mentioning its early tall offices such the Tribune Building (1875, 10 floors) and the Western Union Building (1875, 10 floors).
So clearly, by the standards of the press and the popular conception, what mattered was a building’s height and not its structural design. Thus, by the pure height definition, the first skyscraper predated the Home Insurance Building by a wide margin.
The Steel Skeleton
However, in the first skyscraper debate, what mattered most was how the building was constructed. Thus, a “skyscraper” can be defined (for historical purposes) as a relatively tall building having three essential elements. First is a steel skeleton, where all the beams and columns—both for external and internal use—are riveted together to form one complete latticework. Second, the skeleton contains extra steel for wind bracing. And third, the façade is a mere “curtain” that serves no structural purpose.
Against this standard, the Home Insurance Building fails in all categories. First, only the two street-facing exterior walls had iron columns, which were embedded in the exterior masonry piers that ran up the façade. The iron was used to reduce the thickness of the exterior walls, and the iron and masonry shared the load. Additionally, the rear two façades were traditional load-bearing masonry brick. Further, the iron beams and columns were not riveted but were bolted together and reinforced with iron rods since iron was too brittle to be riveted. None of the exterior beams or columns were made of steel. Finally, the building contained no additional materials for wind bracing—instead, the thick masonry walls stiffened the building against wind forces. Without this façade, the ironwork would not have been strong enough to protect the building against intense gusts.
The Client
When Jenney was asked by his client, the Home Insurance Company of New York, to design a Chicago headquarters, he created a hybrid building, combining old and new materials and methods. However, it is true that Jenney was likely the first architect to include steel floor beams inside the building on the upper stories. Jenney’s original plans called for wrought iron beams, but the Carnegie mills asked him during construction to substitute steel instead. However, steel and wrought iron had similar structural characteristics, so there was nothing revolutionary about this substitution.
The Reliance Building (1895) and its Steel Skeleton Frame. Sources: here and here. This building in Chicago is one of the earliest examples of a true steel-framed skyscraper with a curtain well.
Jenney’s Own Words
When his building was completed, neither Jenney nor the wider architectural and engineering community took particular note. Just as importantly, no one, including Jenney himself tried to claim that the Home Insurance Building represented a revolution in structural design.
When Jenney wrote about his building in the journal The Sanitary Engineer in December 1885, his opening remarks—the accomplishment of which he was most proud—was that he had successfully employed a foundation design to prevent uneven settlement.
Only in the second half of the article does he turn to the structural framing, where he discusses how he implanted the iron columns into the load-bearing piers and connected them to expanded iron lintels, the beams that span over the window and door openings.
Burying the Lead
There was little in his discussion to suggest that he saw his building as anything more than an evolutionary advance, and nothing in his talk hinted that he felt he invented the skyscraper. Surely, if he thought that his iron framing methods were entirely novel and groundbreaking, he would have led with this fact. Ironically, in his article, there is no mention of the word “steel.” This omission is strange given that years later, he would claim that he invented the steel-framed skeleton.
In the ensuing years, as other hybrid and experimental buildings came online, such as the Rookery (1888) and the Tacoma (1889) in Chicago and the Tower Building (1889) in New York, none copied Jenney’s methods. Rather, these structures were inspired from earlier designs in iron framing.
The PR Campaign
Starting in 1896, however, the discussion about the Home Insurance Building began to take a very different tone. At this point, Jenney and his colleagues asserted that the HIB was a revolutionary building. By the mid-1890s, skyscrapers of 20 stories or more were rising around the country, such as the 21-story Masonic Temple Building (1893) in Chicago and the 20-story Manhattan Life Insurance Building (1894) in New York, and people were curious to know who “invented” them.
No doubt, the new towers piqued the curiosity of a one F. T. Gates, the president of the Bessemer Steamship company, a ship manufacturer. In June of 1896, Gates wrote to the trade journal The Engineering Record (ER) to inquire who discovered the idea of steel construction for tall buildings. An editorial offered that its journal had discussed some early examples of tall office buildings, such as the Home Insurance Building, the Rookery, and the Drexel Building (1889) in Philadelphia, though the editor did not pick one building as the first skyscraper.
High Gear
When Jenney read Gates’ letter, he went into high gear. The first thing he did was to write to Gates, telling him, “My claim is that in 1883 I invented and put into practical use in the Home Ins. Bldg. Chicago, what is now known as Skeleton Construction, a radical departure from anything heretofore existing.…” On July 6th, Gates responded to Jenney, apparently convinced by his pleas, by stating, “Your letters seem to be conclusive as to the invention of the Steel Skeleton Construction.”
In the ER’s July 11th issue, Jenney also wrote a letter to the ER stating that “The skeleton construction was a radical departure from anything that heretofore appeared and was exclusively my invention.”
Rewriting History
This statement—over a decade after the completion of the HIB—represents the first time Jenney publicly claimed that he invented the skyscraper. Furthermore, these words do not accurately depict the nature of the Home Insurance Building, as described above. First, the building was not a radical departure from earlier buildings. It was predominantly a load-bearing structure with iron to reduce the thickness of the masonry walls. The claim that skeleton construction was exclusively his invention disregards the long history of iron framing dating back at least a century before the HIB was conceived, not to mention the countless other necessities to make a skyscraper possible, such as electric elevators with safety breaks and fireproofing, with which Jenney had nothing to do.
The Voting
Gate’s inquiry also motivated others to write in with their opinions. Seven more letters, five in support of Jenney, were also included in the issue. Most of the writers were intimately involved with the construction of the building and had a relationship with Jenney. For example, one letter was from George M. Lyon, the former business partner of the Home Insurance Company’s Chicago Agent, A. C. Ducat, while another was from Hugh Young, the president of the Young & Farrell Diamond Stone Sawing Company, which provided masonry for the HIB.
One of the two letters not expressing support for Jenney was from Dankmar Adler of Adler & Sullivan in Chicago. Adler felt that one could not assign an inventor and gave a more historically accurate perspective by writing, “Take it altogether, the skeleton construction, or its present successor, the steel-cage construction, was a growth rather than an invention….the credit for which should therefore be given my profession as a whole rather than to anyone in its ranks.”
Another letter was from George Post, who felt his Produce Exchange Building (1884) in New York should be considered the first example of curtain-walled construction in a tall office building, and whom today many architecture historians feel was the first to use true external iron framing.
In the July 25th issue, two more letters appeared. One was from the Chicago engineer C. L. Strobel, who agreed with Adler and wrote, “The correct conclusion …of building work actually done would therefore seem to be that the modern steel-frame construction is a development towards which a number of individuals have made valuable contributions.”
Burnham Weighs In
Strobel’s letter was followed by one from Daniel Burnham, arguably the most famous and important Chicago architect from the 1880s to the early 1910s. He wrote:
This principle of carrying the entire structure on a carefully balanced and braced metal frame, protected from fire, is precisely what Mr. William L. B. Jenney worked out. No one anticipated him in it, and he deserved the entire credit belonging to the engineering feat which he was the first to accomplish.
In the same spirit as Jenney, Burnham sought to place the HIB as the pivotal structure in skyscraper history. As discussed above, Jenny’s building was not a “braced metal frame,” as it had no wind bracing and the ironwork was not fully self-supporting.
Similarly, the statement that “No one anticipated him” ignores the many historical precedents in iron framing, while the comment that “he deserved the entire credit” exaggerates Jenney’s role within this history. Burnham had worked in Jenney’s office as a draftsman in 1868, and they were long-time colleagues and friends. His letter can be considered more of a recommendation letter than an unbiased account. In this regard, it’s important to view Burnham’s words with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Buffington
The August 8th issue of the ER included a letter from Leroy Buffington, a Minnesota architect who in 1888 received a patent for iron-framed construction. Buffington claimed, “I have used construction like the Home Insurance Company’s Building of Chicago since 1876.” Like Jenny, Buffington was trying to argue his case and was prone to making statements that overstated his role in skyscraper history. There is no evidence that his buildings in Minnesota used external iron framing or had curtain walls.
The W. L. B. Jenney
Finally, in February 1897, Gates was convinced by the Chicago architects that supported Jenney and concluded that HIB was novel enough that his company would name their next vessel, “the ‘W. L. B. Jenney,’ after the eminent engineer and architect of Chicago, to whom we think the iron and steel trade is most indebted for this great advance in the construction of buildings.”
Jenney was quite pleased that Gates had given him this forum and victory. He wrote back to Gates saying, “I accept [this honor] with many thanks: it is the one official recognition, confirming my claim to the invention of the Steel Skeleton Construction, though as far as I know, no one has ever made the claim….I have also to thank you for the inquiry through the Engineering Record, which brought the matter to the notice of the Architectural and Engineering profession.”
Jenney’s use of the phrase “though as far as I know, no one has ever made the claim” is untrue (as will be discussed in the next blog post), as is his highly exaggerated statement of inventing “Steel Skeleton Construction.”
Jenney, for the Win
Jenney now had his tautological victory—he had told Gates that he was the winner, and Gates declared Jenney the winner; therefore, he was the winner. Just as importantly, Jenney used Gates’s decision as if it were a final, factual judgment. Gates was a business executive with limited knowledge and information regarding tall building construction, as evidenced by his query to the ER. He relied on the opinions of others, but most stated opinions came from people with a personal and professional interest in promoting Jenney—and several of them had directly received letters from him pleading for their support. The more nuanced opinions of industry insiders like Adler and Strobel were ignored, likely because they refused to play the game of picking an “inventor.”
And, more importantly, the letter writing campaign convinced the public because Jenney, Burnham, et al. were the experts and leaders of the Chicago Skyscraper Revolution. Additionally, no one really knew what the guts of the structure looked like, as they were hidden in stone. In the debates, Jenney pointed to his published drawings of the iron beams connected to the expanded lintels, which had the appearance of an iron frame on paper but, physically, operated very differently in practice. Jenney’s words and drawings seemed true, and there was no way—or reason—to try to prove this American genius wrong.
An example of how the press repeated Jenney and Burnham’s words can be seen in an 1898 article entitled, “Chicago’s Skyscrapers” in The International: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Travel and Literature published in Chicago, which stated that “More effective than anything else in settling the dispute was a letter from Mr. D. H. Burnham.”
Left: Masonic Temple in Chicago (1893). Right: Manhattan Life Insurance Building in New York (1894). Sources: here and here.
Post-1896
After 1896, Jenney continued to insist that he invented the skyscraper. In one final writing, before he died in 1907, Jenney published a brief memoir in The Western Architect. Once again, taking liberty with the facts, he states that when the Home Insurance Building Committee asked about other buildings of similar form, “I replied there was none; that they would have the first; that the steel construction was a simple engineering problem….” Again, notice how Jenney simplifies and misrepresents the description of the building as the first steel skeleton constructed building. Whether Jenney believed what he was saying or not can never likely be known, but he was not above bending the truth.
When Jenney died, he continued to receive the honor in his obituaries. The Pittsburgh Press, for example, wrote, “William Le Baron Jenney, inventor of the skyscraper…died in Los Angeles, Cal., yesterday….” A few days later, a Chicago Sunday Tribune reported that Jenney “discovered skeleton construction….”
And the rest, as they say, is history.
But Why?
But what was driving Jenney’s dogged attempt to re-write history? Why was he so eager to claim the epithet “inventor of the skyscraper”?
The answer to these questions will be revealed in the next post, which you can read here.
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[1] There is a near-universal consensus among architectural and engineering historians that the HIB was not the first skyscraper. The problem, however, is that this understanding has not spread to the broader public. Architecture historians have done little to undo this persistent myth, as evidenced by the incorrect information in widely read sources like Wikipedia.
[2] ChatGPT simply repeats Wikipedia’s response if you ask it, “What was the first skyscraper?”
