Roaring Twenties - Building the Skyline

July 10, 2018 by Jason Barr 6 Comments

The Manhattan Skyline during the Roaring Twenties

Jason M. Barr July 10, 2018

Author’s note: The paperback of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers was recently released. This blog post has been adapted from Chapter 9 of the book.

The Roaring Twenties remains a mythical time in American culture—an age of danger, of heroes, of unrestraint. Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Clandestine speakeasies served bathtub gin to flappers, swinging to the new jazz music. Babe Ruth became the Sultan of Swat. And supertall skyscrapers sprouted upwards like Jack’s beanstalk.

Though the skyscraper was born in the last two decades of the 19^th century, it was a generation later when it reached its true potential. From May 1930 to May 1931, three super-giants—each the world’s tallest for a spell—lorded over New York. First was the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building (71 floors). Next came the Chrysler Building (77 floors). Finally, was the granddaddy of them all, the Empire State Building (102 floors).

They were completed at the peak of a skyscraper construction spree that ran from 1925 to 1931. From these three giants, the natural conclusion is that the boom of the Roaring Twenties emerged from the irrational euphoria of the time. With financing flowing like wine, the newly-rich business tycoons got caught up in the craziness and felt compelled to memorialize their egos in steel and stone.

The “Office-ification” of America

The rise of the Manhattan skyline in the Roaring Twenties—a bit heady to be sure—was due, however, to more mundane reasons. The post-World War I era was the culmination of the Industrial Revolution. It was the “office-ification” of the American economy. Between 1870 and 1920, the population of the United States had doubled; during the same period, office space requirements had risen from about one square foot per capita to five square feet. The combined forces of increased population and office space needs meant that by 1920 the country needed ten times as much office space as in 1870.

In the early years of the twentieth century, corporate America began introducing a series of goods and services that radically transformed the nature of household life. The 1920s was the decade when America began to embrace consumer-oriented culture, which was made possible by the dramatic improvements in industrial productivity. New York City, the center of finance, transportation, communication, marketing, and legal services, was the metropolis—the mother city—that helped enable it.

The Manhattan skyline in the early 1930s. The vast majority of skyscrapers built during the Roaring Twenties were constructed by local real estate developers, who built office buildings for the growing economy. The Chrysler Building is the tallest one in the photo. Walter Chrysler was not a typical developer.

Manhattan and the Automobile

A good example of this is the automobile. The “horseless carriage” was invented as early as 1769. Over the 19^th century, tinkerers, “steamhackers,” and small-time entrepreneurs built hand-crafted models for their rich clientele. But it was, of course, Henry Ford’s idea to mass produce cars and trucks that changed everything. By taking advantage of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, Ford was able to exploit economies of scale—go big to go cheap.[1] For the first time in World History, the common folk had access to their very own personal rapid-mobility units.

The growth of the automobile was tied up with the growth of the Manhattan skyline—each feeding the other. Out of Manhattan office buildings, firms were selling financial, marketing, technical, and legal services to the car industry. This, in turn, increased car sales, which increased the demand for New York services, and so on. Many a Detroit company set up offices in Manhattan’s Automobile Row to be close to the action. To be clear, I don’t want to overstate the case that it was the automobile, per se, that lead to the Manhattan skyline. It did not, but rather the auto industry’s growth was exemplary of the type of relationships between New York City and the American economy more broadly.

Walter Chrysler

When we look at the Chrysler Building, we see its chrome spire ascending upwards, as if to announce the power of capitalism and greed to reach the heavens. This view is given currency by focusing on Walter Chrysler’s desire to erect the world’s tallest building, and which simultaneously required head-to-head “combat” against the Bank of Manhattan Trust for that right. We are fed the legend that William Van Alen, Chrysler’s architect, patiently waited until the Bank of Manhattan Building was topped out, and then gloriously lifted the—craftily hidden—steel spire up over the top floor to claim the prize of “World’s Tallest.”

Burying the Lead

The buried part of story about the Chrysler Building is not about this dramatic height competition, but rather about Walter Chrysler himself. What was an automobile magnate doing in New York City?[2] Chrysler began his ascent in Flint, Michigan, were he successfully copied Ford’s production line innovations for General Motors in 1911. After disagreements with his boss, William Durant, Chrysler moved to New York to take control of the Willys-Overland Company, which had its facilities in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After that he took the helm of Maxwell Motor Company, which he then turned into Chrysler Corporation.

He found that to grow his business, he needed to be in New York, close to the financing, expertise, and marketing. In 1935, Fortune Magazine recalled a story about Chrysler’s start as a budding mogul. In 1924, rejected by both New York bankers, who refused to finance him, and the New York City Automobile Show, which refused to display his car,

It was at this juncture that Walter Chrysler showed his courage-or more precisely, perhaps, his nerve. He hired the lobby of the Commodore Hotel [next to Grand Central Station] a few blocks from the show and wheeled his cars in. And he then took personal charge of the situation, standing guard to see that no one guessed out loud at the new car’s wheel base and refusing for a week to name his price. When he did name it-when it had become evident that the miniature dreadnought had stolen the show and the time had come for orders-he wrote his figures on a card, handed them to Joe Fields, his sales manager, and walked away.

The Developers

Though Chrysler felt the need to be in New York, and this eventually lead him to build the Chrysler Building (which was his own building, and not that of the car company), he was not the typical developer who built the skyline.

The vast majority of builders were either born in New York City or emigrated as small children with their families from Eastern Europe. Many of them had begun their early careers in the Garment District as tailors or small-time clothing manufacturers. The experience they earned was then used in real estate—building lofts and showrooms, and eventually office towers.

The top line gives an index of (inflation-adjusted) profits for office buildings based on the rents and operating costs. The bars are the number of 100-meter or taller skyscrapers completed each year. As the figure shows, the profits to owning office buildings were very high during the 1920s, and developers were constructing new offices as a result. Sources: See Barr (2016).

A typical example is that Abraham E. Lefcourt, who was born in 1877 and came to America in 1882. He started out hawking newspapers on the streets of the Lower East Side, and later worked in the garment industry. In 1910, he built his first structure, a 12-story loft building for garment businesses on West 25^th Street. The first two floors housed Lefcourt’s own women’s apparel manufacturing company. The success of the endeavor prompted him to move into the real estate business full time. Between 1910 and 1930, Lefcourt constructed 31 commercial buildings in the city.

The Railroad Stations

The reason that men like Lefcourt built was that during the second half of 1920s, office rents (adjusted for inflation) were at an all-time high. Businesses were willing to pay the cost because being in New York increased their profits. The high rents motivated developers to provide more offices in the sky. This is the real reason for building boom of the Roaring Twenties.

Before World War I, two magnificent railroad depots were completed in the city—Penn Station (1910) on the west side at 33^rd Street and Grand Central Station (1913) on the east side at 42^nd Street. Together they created a kind of flower pot for modern midtown Manhattan to grow. These two transportation hubs, combined with the expansion of the subway system, drew millions of people to midtown each week to work, play, and shop.

Left: Penn Station (1910). Right: Grand Central Station (1913). Each helped contribute to the growth of modern midtown and promoted the rise of skyscrapers during the Roaring Twenties.

Around Penn Station were the Garment District offices and factories. Moving east, near Herald Square, was the retail zone, including the giant Macy’s Department Story, which sold the wares made just a few blocks away. Going north was Times Square, the city’s entertainment center. Then going east were the gleaming new office towers that housed the corporations that produced America’s goods and services.

Who Built the Skyline?

So, when you look at the Deco Giants remember this: they were not built by the raging egos of self-absorbed tycoons. Rather they were built mostly by local real estate men, supplying the demand for office space in America’s largest and most important metropolis. The skyline was created because your grandparents and great grandparents wanted to buy fashionable clothes and modern conveniences. New York was the headquarters headquarters that made this possible.

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[1] As an important side note, his plant was made possible by the mass production of electricity, the success of which was first demonstrated in New York City by Thomas Edison in 1882. The cost of electricity steadily plummeted in the early 1900s allowing for large-scale manufacturing. Also, Henry Ford knew a thing or two about electricity. In 1890, Ford was hired as an engineer for the Detroit Edison Company. In 1893, his abilities earned him a promotion to chief engineer.

[2] For those interested in the internment locations of America’s social, economic, political, and artistic elite, Walter Chrysler, along with Washington Irving and Andrew Carnegie, is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County, near the Hudson River, 30 miles north of the Chrysler Building.

May 10, 2018 by Jason Barr Leave a Comment

Ugly Architecture: 130 Years of Manhattan Skyscraper Complaints

Jason M. Barr May 10, 2018

Critics of Manhattan’s new supertall superslim buildings have a laundry list of complaints. One particular trope is that they are ugly and out of scale with their surroundings. While I believe it’s important to debate the pros and cons of tall buildings, it’s also important to keep in mind that today’s beefs continue a 130-year tradition of grousing about skyscrapers.

In this vein, I thought it might be worthwhile to give a short pop quiz. I will give you 10 quotes from architectural critics from 1890 to the present. Try to give (a) the year the quote was made, (b) the name of the architectural critic, and (c) the building under discussion.

The Quiz

Please note a few things. First, the years of the quotes are random, so you cannot infer dates from the order of the questions. Second, each quote was written just around the time the building was completed (or being constructed). Lastly, one quote was made by an anonymous writer.

Ready, set, go!

“[A] lesson in how to be mediocre without really trying. For its bulk, its importance, its effect, and its ballyhoo, it had an obligation to be much better. Size is not nobility; a monumental deal does not make a monument.”

“How disappointing for the rest of us, though, that [the company] has built itself a stolid lump of a building, one that encourages the public to treat the architecture the way more and more people are treating their local paper: by ignoring it.”

“If this [suggested change in design offered by the critic] had been sensitively, that is to say artistically done, would not his building have shown more logic, more organization, more form and comeliness, more variety in a higher unity, than it shows now?”

“This one unravels as a cascade of clunky curves descending toward ribbons billowing into canopies. The conceit is falling water. The effect: a heap of volumes, not liquid but stolid, chintzily embellished, clad in acres of eye-shadow-blue glass offset by a pox of tinted panes, like age spots. It’s anybody’s guess how the building got past the drawing board.”

“Such buildings show one of the real dangers of a plutocracy: it gives the masters our civilization an unusual opportunity to exhibit their barbarous egos, with no sense of restraint or shame.”

“If you don’t look up, you could like this building.”

“But for thoughtful and refined design, one looks everywhere in vain, and the critic finds himself forced to follow the example of the designer—to ‘cuss the thing and quit it’.”

“The two buildings offer stunning proof that art and style alone are a ludicrous measure of successful urban architecture; what kind of ‘art’ assassinates a city?”

“The new building, designed by [the architect], is an elf prancing among men.”

“As presently designed, this fearful instrument of urbicide will be not only the tallest, but unquestionably one of the, ugliest buildings in the world.”

The Answers

How do you think you did? Here are the answers….

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1963, Ada Louis Huxtable, New York Times architecture critic from 1962 to 1983, on the Pan Am (MetLife) Building, just north of Grand Central Station. Article: “Architecture Stumbles On.” New York Times, April 14, 1963, 119.

2007, Justin Davidson, New York Magazine architecture critic, on the New York Times Headquarters on West 41^st Street.

1902, Montgomery Schuyler, critic and journalist, in the Architectural Record, on the Flatiron Building, at Fifth Avenue and 23^rd.

2013, Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic, on One57, a luxury condo building on West 57^th Street.

1931, Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker architecture critic and urban scholar, in the New Republic, on the Chrysler Building. Article: “Notes on Modern Architecture.” The New Republic, March 18, 1931, 119-122.

2003, Paul Goldberger, currently the architecture critic at Vanity Fair, in the The New Yorker, on the Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle.

1890, Anonymous, in the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, on the World Building (demolished) near City Hall.

1987, Ada Louise Huxtable, in the New York Times, on the AT&T (Sony) Building and IBM Building in Midtown East. Article: “Creeping Gigantism in Manhattan.” New York Times, March 22, 1987, Section 2.

2005, Paul Goldberger, in The New Yorker, on a luxury apartment building on Astor Place.

1966, Wolf Von Eckardt, architecture critic for the Washington Post, in Harper’s Magazine, on the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. Article: “New York’s Trade Center: World’s Tallest Fiasco.” Harper’s Magazine, May 1966, 94-100.

Top (from left): World Building (1890), Flatiron Building (1902), Chrysler Building (1930), Pan Am (MetLife) Building (1963), Twin Towers (1970/1). Bottom (from left): AT&T (Sony) Building (1984), Time Warner Center (2003), Astor Place (2004). New York Times Building (2007), One57 (2014).

The Spire and the Point

My guess is that, unless you are an architectural historian steeped in the writings of America’s most prominent architecture critics, you had a hard time with this quiz. A phrase here or there, or the writing style, might suggest one time period over another; but there was nothing inherent in any of the quotes to suggest a particular building.

The point is that since day one, skyscrapers have been controversial. Architecture critics seek to provide some indications about whether a building has artistic merit, is new or derivative, achieves the goals of the designer, and/or provides useful urbanism. Naturally, there are buildings that they are going to love and others they are going to hate. To be human is to have an opinion.

But opinions evolve. Take the case of the Pan Am (MetLife) Building. Completed in 1963 it was berated as a monstrous behemoth thrust down amid the Beaux Arts effervescence of Grand Central Terminal and the Helmsely (New York Central) Building. Despite being designed, in part, by Walter Gropius, one the world’s foremost modernist architects, Ada Louise Huxtable, along with many others, hated it for being too large and out of scale with the neighborhood.

Opinions Change

By 2001, however, perceptions reversed. Christopher Gray, author of the Streetscapes column in the New York Times, from 1986 to 2014, aptly quotes John Jurayj, a painter from Brooklyn, who has been involved in preservation efforts:

The old Post Office at the south end of City Hall Park was thought of as garish, and it obstructed a view, and so it was demolished in 1939, but now we’d fight to protect it….It seems that New Yorkers are emotionally connected to what were originally brutal interventions of our skyline. The loss of the World Trade Center shows that buildings that we may not think of as great architecture are important to our sense of ourselves and our city. Aesthetics are dependent upon the passage of time.

Huxtable also hated the AT&T (Sony) Building designed by Philip Johnson (with John Burgee), one of the most creative and influential architects of the 20^th century.^[1]She saw it as another example of the horrors of Manhattan gigantism; yet today the structure is prized for its style. Philip Johnson, in many respects the quintessential modernist, realized it was time to reject the International Style and hopped on the postmodern bandwagon. His “Chippendale” topped skyscraper is a playful “rebuttal” to the black glass box that dominated the skyline for a quarter century after World War II.

In 2017, protests ensued when the current owner, the Olayan Group, from Saudi Arabia, announced its plans for a large renovation. They want to build a glass curtain wall over the street front and replace a glass arcade and annex building with an outdoor garden. These proposed changes generated opposition; today the building is awaiting a review from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

New York’s Earlier Skyscrapers

Going back in time a bit (and risking hyperbole), is there anyone alive who does not like the Flatiron Building? Today, it’s one of the most beloved and iconic structures on the planet. When constructed in 1902, however, it was called Burham’s Folly, because it was believed that noted Chicago architect, Daniel Burnham, designed a dud that would topple over in the wind. Disliked by critics, it was seen as rising way out of proportion with the neighborhood. Many found its rounded edges and triangular shape disconcerting.

Then there’s the Chrysler Building. While, at the time, most New Yorkers appreciated its steel spire, sleek gargoyles, and soaring height, Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), one of the most-read architectural critics and urbanists of his day, thought the building was a garish example of egos gone wild. His opinions were not that far off the mainstream thinking about the supertall skyscrapers at the time. In the late 1920s, there were many complaints that the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings were “freak” projects, built, as monuments not money makers, and symbolized the worst of human impulses, all the while imposing rampant congestion on the streets.

Today, we look as these buildings quite fondly, as examples of the glory days of the Roaring Twenties. An era when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat; giddy Flappers were sipping bathtub gin while swinging to the musical stylings of Duke Ellington; and Charles Lindbergh was flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Ugly or Not They Make New York New York

Say what you will about the new skyscrapers going up in New York today. Maybe they are ugly, maybe not. But we can’t use aesthetics as a reason to prevent them from being built. Today’s uglies are tomorrow’s gems. Today’s swans are tomorrow’s crows.

After World War II, New York was derided as a place where skyscraper design was bland and beholden to the developer’s bottom line. We should celebrate the attempts to bring forth original styles and shapes in the 21^st century. In the long run, they may succeed or fail, but its the striving to produce the new that makes the city so vibrant. New Yorker’s should once again embrace the power of architecture to enhance not only the look of the skyline but also its culture of creativity.

Just to be clear, I’m not against preservation (and will return to this topic in a future post). I strongly believe a city should preserve some of it historical architecture; and, I believe there is a role for the government regulation of tall buildings. But to suggest they are too ugly, too tall, or out of scale is, in a way, an attempt to clip the wings of New York. The historical buildings that we are most proud of were also the ones that got the same complaints as we hear today.

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^[1] Huxtable also complained about the former Huntington Hartford museum (2 Columbus Circle, 1964), disparaging it as a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.” Originally designed by Edward Durrell Stone, in 2008 it was renovated and given a new look, but only after calls to landmark it. I personally liked the building before it was changed; it struck me as an example of whimsical modernism with a marble façade, a more pleasing contrast to the cold glass boxes of Midtown.

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