The steel-framed office building dramatically altered the urban character of New York at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The dimensional changes it effected in the city’s fabric were found in the new verticality of the skyline, visible from afar, but also along important commercial thoroughfares such as Broadway, Wall Street, and Park Row, as large edifices housing the headquarters of major enterprises replaced earlier rows of narrow buildings housing small-scale commercial activity. The swiftness with which the new urban landscape emerged startled observers; its outward appearances, however, were but the final ramifications of the intensive round of economic restructuring responsible for the change.

On one hand, the agents of New York’s transformation from a mid-nineteenth century city, with an extended villagelike character, to a twentieth century skyscraper city were the large-scale commercial enterprises, whose presence was announced by larger and larger business buildings identified with company names. On the other hand, scores of smaller commercial and professional firms, although less readily identifiable on the urban scene, played an equally important role. They were interrelated with the large-scale enterprises through numerous social and economic connections, and their demand for office space close to key sites and key enterprises influenced the shaping of the emerging skyscraper city.

The concentration of business in lower Manhattan can be attributed to the city’s dominant position in world trade and finance. In the second half of the nineteenth century, New York functioned as a key link in the Atlantic trade economy, and, as a consequence, became the world's busiest port. Merchant exchanges specializing in commodities such as coal, cotton, oil, iron, and produce, as well as several financial exchanges, helped drive this trading system. Specialized insurance ser vices served the exchange market from adjacent office buildings, many gravitating to William, Nassau, and other streets north of Wall Street. By the end of the nineteenth century, the stocks and bonds that financed the nation's major industrial enterprises were traded in the New York Stock Exchange, and merchant bankers, stockbrokers, and lawyers sought space on or near Wall and Broad streets, where the capital investment market had centralized. New York was also an industrial city in its own right, and as one of the key hubs of ocean freight and national rail systems was in an excellent position to serve an increasingly national wholesale and retail market. For these reasons, the city provided a desirable location for the headquarters, or, at the very least, the sales offices of large-scale commercial enterprises. Business concerns of importance found it imperative that they establish an office in lower Manhattan, to effectively compete for a share of the national or international marketplace.

The skyscraper is typically correlated with the appearance of large-scale enterprise on the American economic scene. The revolution that took place in the work force-the massive influx of white collar labor to implement, manage, process, and record the flow of information and decisions to national and global markets-engendered big buildings with vast accumulations of floor area. This, in turn, supported the networks of communications that characterized modern business life. New York's emergence as a skyscraper city cannot be fully explained, however, unless the agents of change are specifically identified and their requirements for space and image are properly characterized. Requirements for space and image engendered building programs that were more complicated than initially met the eye. Major enterprises that built landmark headquarters, for instance, typically functioned as landlords over the smaller commercial or professional concerns, which already depended on them, directly or indirectly, for economic sustenance. They generally assumed this role, however, only after occupying rental space as tenants in a speculative office building at a key location in lower Manhattan's business district. Developers of speculative building projects, in turn, sought major enterprises as anchor tenants and competed with landmark headquarters for the smaller concerns. Case studies of skyscrapers built by large-scale enterprises primarily for the purpose of image-the American Surety, Singer, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Woolworth, and Bankers Trust companies-as well as examinations of other skyscrapers built primarily for speculative purposes-the Trinity, U.S. Realty, City Investing, Hudson Terminal, and Equitable buildings-show that both helped define critical phases of the transformation of lower Manhattan. Both were enmeshed in the changing morphology of lower Manhattan's business district, whose irregularly shaped parcels and complexities of land ownership often inhibited lateral expansion and made vertical expansion inevitable.

The building programs of the large-scale enterprises that constructed landmark headquarters followed a recurrent scenario. After initially staking out a foothold or an operating base, usually a room or suite of rooms in a large office building in lower Manhattan, the businesses relocated a number of times, usually in response to the need to house a larger staff. Then, once they had garnered the financial clout to undertake their own building projects, they planned head offices. The time at which a decision was made to construct a landmark headquarters varied in each company's history, but generally construction was proposed in sequence with major organizational changes. Changes included internal expansion and departmental reorganization, market dominance or competitive advantage, and enhanced reputation as an "honest" economic institution. Once it decided to build its own head office, the enterprise began to take an active role in reshaping the urban environment. Often, it expanded its head office through a piecemeal construction program, fashioning a landmark image and forging a corporate identity in the process.

A large-scale enterprise's evolving building program generally resulted in increased visibility on the urban scene. Visibility was achieved through the sheer scale and lavishness of construction—ornate and stylistically up-to-date office blocks and conspicuous crested towers stood out from the "standard," typically speculative, steel-framed office building construction—but also through siting the new construction such that it had high exposure to urban crowds. Becoming a highly visible architectural presence in the city marked a critical turning point, for now the enterprise began to exercise some control over its urban surroundings. It exerted this control visually—as a dominant structure in its setting, it radiated its influence outward—as well as demographically, because its building program typically entailed adding office space many times in excess of its own requirements, so that as a landlord, it incited shifts in the social and economic composition of an urban district. An enterprise's interests in achieving increased visibility with a landmark headquarters and in assuming the role of a landlord over tenants went hand in hand. Such a two-pronged building objective was already evident in some of New York's earliest headquarters for commercial enterprises, including the New York Tribune Building (designed by Richard Morris Hunt and built between 1873 and 1875), which loomed over its four- and five-story surroundings in contemporary views of the city. The top two stories of the New York Tribune Building were occupied by the newspaper, whereas the lower seven stories were rented to tenants. The prototype for the developments that would follow, however, was the American Surety Building (Figure 6.1). The American Surety Company opened its first office at 160 Broadway in 1884. When it required larger quarters, it purchased 100 Broadway in 1892, at the corner of Broadway and Pine, and in 1894 it retained Bruce Price as architect. Price proposed a twenty-story, 303- foot tower that, at the time of its completion in 1895, rose over three times higher than its surroundings, and dominated skyline views.

Price's design departed from earlier designs for tall buildings in a number of ways. It was the first office building in New York to utilize a complete steel frame, and among the first to employ the caisson method of constructing foundations, both of which were necessary for its unprecedented height. Price also emphasized that he had designed the American Surety Building as a "campanile," calling it a new concept in skyscraper design. Campanile meant that the structure was to be seen in the round, from near and distant points in the city, by contrast with earlier office buildings that had been designed with street facades only, and viewed as discrete units in a street wall. Price utilized Renaissance detailing for all four elevations, alternating vertical groups of windows with vertical rusticated strips, so that they resembled fluted pilasters. Price expended considerable effort in creating visual interest on the otherwise flat elevations. Heavy rustication strengthened the tower's corners and vigorously projecting string-courses, cornices, and cheneaux enlivened its crown. Although Price's tower was at the forefront of structural design in New York office buildings and stylistically distinctive, it immediately created problems for surrounding landowners. Cornices at the fifteenth and nineteenth stories of the tower projected over the Schermerhorn Building-a T-shaped building that fronted 96 and 98 Broad way immediately south and also extended through the block to 5 Pine Street at the tower's eastern side. The Schermerhorn Building was owned by the Astor estate, and when a plan to have the American Surety Company lease the Schermerhorn ran into difficulty in 1895, John Jacob Astor announced plans to build a 300-foot, twenty-one-story office building on the site of the T-shaped building, including buying out the multiyear leases of the 135 tenants of the Schermerhorn, and sending shivers down the spines of the American Surety Company executives and developers, who now realized that "it was foolish for persons to put up a tall building without making permanent provision for light and air." The threat of a "spite skyscraper" forced the American Surety Company to sign a ninety-nine-year lease on the adjacent property, and from the time of the American Surety Tower's completion, the firm occupied space in the adjacent Schermerhorn Building.

In a mere twenty-five years, the American Surety Building was surrounded by a "huge pile of more colossal structures," its mechanical equipment was worn out, and its offices, once regarded as spacious and rentable, were now inadequate. Consequently, in 1919, the company bought the Schermerhorn Building, demolished it, and rebuilt on the entire site (now with a floor area twice that of the tower). The company occupied the top five stories of the new building and leased the remaining space to financial, legal, and industrial concerns. Although the tower was occupied by others, it continued to function as the company's symbol nonetheless, appearing on its letterhead and in its annual reports throughout the ensuing decades. And whatever neighbors to the north, south, and east might do, the westward view over Broadway to the graveyard of Trinity Church guaranteed some amount of air and light.

The offices in Price's tower were marginal to the company from the beginning as work environments. But the company's decision to retain the tower long after it ceased to serve the company's needs only under scored its value as a symbol. Once it was leased to tenants, it functioned as an architectural monument that paid for itself. Speculative uses provided the financial mechanisms for creating an imposing company image on the urban scene. The addition of large amounts of space increased a building's sheer size and, consequently, the concern's seeming impressiveness. Furthermore, speculative uses contributed to the financing of construction with a quality and sumptuousness that surpassed typical steel-framed office building construction.

The American Surety Company therefore was responsible for both restructuring its urban surroundings and for commissioning the architect Bruce Price to design an imposing corporate symbol. Its tower exerted a forceful presence on the skyline, but the complex as a whole had to accommodate itself to the local irregularities of existing construction and to the vagaries of land economics in the heart of New York's business district. The Singer and Metropolitan Life Insurance companies restructured urban space in a similar fashion. Their head office complexes were built in a sequence and form that recalled the American Surety Company's project, but they departed from the pat tern in significant ways. In contrast to the American Surety Company, each ultimately developed coherent architectural relationships among the various parts that comprised their complexes, despite protracted and piecemeal building processes.

Isaac M. Singer got the idea of producing a commercially viable sewing machine in Boston in 1850, and by 1855, the Singer Company established its base of operations in New York. In 1890, the company began acquiring property for a headquarters along lower Broadway, and by 1896, it commissioned the architect Ernest Flagg to design a new ten-story head office building, the Singer Building, at 149, 151, and 153 Broadway, the corner of Liberty Street. The company occupied the top four stories. During 1898 and 1899, the company expanded its quarters to the west and erected a fourteen-story addition at 85-89 Liberty Street, the Bourne Building, also designed by Flagg. The Bourne Building's more assertive commercial character contrasted with the domestic character of the original head office, which recalled a French hôtel. In 1906, Singer decided to expand and unify the complex with additions and to construct a forty-seven-story landmark tower. The lower office block was extended in two directions-north along Broad way, creating a new frontage of 132 feet, and west along 91-93 Liberty, creating a new frontage of 238 feet. To draw together the various blocks that comprised the complex, the original ten-story structure was reconstructed to a height of fourteen stories and crowned with a mansard roof which aligned the cornice lines and, consequently, imposed a new coherence on the complex (Figure 6.2). These decisions marked a crucial turning point in the Singer Company's conception of its head office. Now the hôtel-inspired headquarters, with its sculpturally rich ornamental scheme, dominated the corner at Broadway and Liberty. Its facade, showing a new monumentality, had increased in size and scale as a result of the additions, and at its center stood the building's principal entrance, "one of the most imposing and elaborate in the city," which had been shifted from Liberty Street to Broadway, and, consequently, emphasized the headquarters' prestigious Broadway address.

The Singer Company's grandiose building program was hardly a knee-jerk response to pressing spatial needs. When completed, most of the complex was leased to tenants. The president of the company occupied the thirty-fourth story of the tower, but otherwise all of the offices in the forty-seven-story tower were taken by various professional and commercial interests. These included a disproportionately large number of lawyers and a number of offices housing industrial concerns. The Singer Company's acquisition of property along lower Broadway began after it rose to a clear position of world dominance over its competitors in the sewing machine industry. Singer was the first American business to establish branch offices abroad, and, given its ambitions in the international marketplace, it is perhaps logical that it decided to undertake its energetic building program in 1890, when it controlled 80 percent of the world market. It began international marketing efforts in 1861, with sales offices in Glasgow and London, and opened its first factory outside of the United States in Glasgow in 1867. After the turn of the century, the Singer Company was boasting in its trade advertisements about its stability in markets around the world. It built the tower and increased the size of its complex during its final phase of foreign expansion. Particularly significant to the Singer Company's effort was its development of the Russian market. Between 1902 and 1914, Singer's ventures in Russia increased its international sales by 44.7 percent and accounted for at least three-quarters of its profits.

The Singer Company indulged in a lavishness of construction during the early phases of its project, with Flagg's skillful adaptation of the residential idiom of the French hotel, but it was in the final phases of the project, with the erection of the tower, that the company made its most imposing mark on the urban scene. The tower seemed to grow out of some undefined point at the middle of the base of the building and its design, an audacious hybrid, combined exposed engineering with an ornate crown. Flagg's crown drew its imagery from a number of sources: the tower of the Singer Manufacturing Company's Kilbowie factory in Scotland, probably the clock tower of the Gare de Lyon in Paris, and from the Second Empire mansard roof treatment and ornamental scheme of an important Parisian civic building, Visconti and Lefuel's "new" Louvre (l852-1857). The chief drawback to the Singer complex was that its imposing facade could never be fully appreciated. It could only be perceived from awkward angles in visual fragments, due to the relatively narrow proportions of Broad way's width to the clifflike scale of its Street walls The tower provided some recompense, because it captured the view of the pedestrian from points south along Broadway, and it loomed before the face of the traveler approaching the complex along Liberty Street.

The view of the Singer Tower from the north along Broadway, how ever, would be immediately blocked by the construction of the forty three story City Investing Building in 1908, a speculative office building that rose adjacent to the Singer complex, even before the tower was completed (Figure 6.3). The potential fate of the American Surety Building thus became the actual fate of the Singer Tower; the entire Singer complex occupied only a third of the block, the company had not secured the balance of the block's property, and now it found its speculative rental space competing with some thirteen acres of new office space in what was hailed as the "largest single office building in the world." The quality of the Singer space paled by comparison the few elevators in its slim tower were slow because of so many stops, and the interior spaces of its lower block were small and irregular with lots of corridors and inflexible plans resulting from projecting bays and dormers.Yet the prestige of the building and its location on Broad way kept it rented in good times, and Singer Tower still had advertisement value.

The American Surety and Singer companies restructured urban commercial space along lower Broadway, undertaking a program of spatial intensification in the heart of New York's already heavily built business district. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, by contrast, fled the business district to a site bordering Madison Square, then still predominantly a residential district. As a result, it escaped a number of the business district's problems, such as escalating property values, crowded services, and, as seen in the two examples above, the problem of securing adequate viewing angles and light sources. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, like the Singer Company, established itself in New York before it decided to build its own head office complex. It was incorporated in 1868, and initially rented two rooms at 248 Broadway. The following year, it moved to 319 Broadway, at the corner of Pearl Street, to rent larger quarters. In 1874, Metropolitan Life decided to purchase a building of its own "that would be another mark of an established and successful company." It acquired the seven-story Constant Building at Park Place and Church Street, and commissioned Napoleon Le Brun to renovate it for the company's own use, as well as for use by money-producing tenants.

By the end of the 1880s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had grown to such an extent that it decided to build its own head office. It chose at this time to purchase the Madison Square site, far north of the business district. For an insurance company to remove itself from the other insurance companies clustered in the business district might have seemed outlandish at the time, but the decision proved wise, as the company's subsequent requirements for space, as well as its subsequent record of financial growth, would show. Ground was broken for an eleven-story building in 1890, designed by Napoleon Le Brun & Sons, and the company occupied the building in 1893. Its design, which followed precedents set by the earlier arcaded office buildings in New York, utilized Italian Renaissance-derived features to evoke the character of an urban palazzo. Soon the company found the original building inadequate, and, in 1895, it decided to commission a twelve-story addition to be constructed adjacent to the original building, to the northwest, along Twenty-fourth Street. A company historian later noted that the addition was "filled at once," implying a rapid pace of growth within the corporate offices. In reality, how ever, the company was mixing its own expansion with its role as a landlord for tenants. Vice-president Haley Fiske reported to Metropolitan Life's board of directors in 1894 that the competition for space was stiff between the company's expanding clerical staff and the tenants to which the company had already made commitments. Metropolitan Life's clerical staff continued to expand, from approximately 530 in 1893 to about 1,080 in 1897. To accommodate this growth, the company repeatedly added space to its home office complex. Between 1898 and 1901, properties on the remainder of the block bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues, and by Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets, were acquired (on which stood the National Academy of Design and the Lyceum Theatre), with the exception of the Parkhurst Presbyterian Church, and the company expanded its offices to occupy the new building sites. Napoleon Le Brun & Sons' design, with its regular bays, had the advantage of extensibility in virtually any direction—an architectural strategy well suited to the piecemeal land acquisition process. When completed in 1905, the building occupied virtually all of the block, except the site of the church, and its crowning cornice encircled the entire composition. That year, the company bought a sizable lot on the adjacent block to the north and began construction on a new sixteen-story annex to house its printing department.

Additional space was needed in 1905, and Metropolitan Life found it most cost-effective to enlarge the home office building still again, the alternative being the unsavory prospect of purchasing tenants' leases. The Parkhurst Presbyterian Church, holding out at the corner of Madison and Twenty-fourth Street, was bought and demolished. Pierre Le Brun, of Napoleon Le Brun & Sons, designed a fifty-story, 700-foot Italian Renaissance-inspired and white marble-clad version of the Campanile of St. Mark's, Venice, at the suggestion of the company's president, John Rogers Hegeman, and construction began in 1906. The tower, completed in 1909, was also built for the purpose of image (Figure 6.4). "Mr. Fiske called it an advertisement that didn't stand the company a cent because the tenants footed the bill." The tower functioned equally well as an advertisement for the tenants, to the further advantage of Metropolitan Life, which saw it incorporated into a range of letterheads and logos. Even after it erected the tower, the company continued to expand, demolishing the church's second home, which was now in the company's path—the Madison Square Presbyterian Church (McKim, Mead & White, 1906)—and developing the balance of the block to the north by 1940.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's decision to move its head office to Madison Square, where property values were lower, and where it would have plenty of room for expansion, coincided with an administrative policy of aggressively taking over smaller insurance companies. The company absorbed ten smaller life insurance companies between 1893 and 1904, and another thirteen between 1907 and 1918. This period of intensive corporate expansion coincided with its energetic building program, which culminated with the construction of the tower. Furthermore, just before the tower project was be gun, the company emerged unscathed from the famous 1905 New York State Armstrong Insurance Investigation. The investigation censured the white collar crimes and the unchecked growth of the "Big Three": the Mutual, Equitable, and the New York Life Insurance companies. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company proclaimed itself an honest commercial institution and called its tower a "plea for righteousness and purity in business corporations." The company immediately profited from its new standing. Between 1906 and 1913, the company's ordinary insurance department, which accounted for about half of its total business volume, gained 50 percent more business than the similar departments in the Big Three combined. By the time its tower was completed in 1909, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was known as the world's largest insurance company. Like the Singer Company, it had international offices, which it managed until the 1920s from the Madison Square complex.

The Singer and Metropolitan Life Insurance companies followed a piecemeal process in realizing their headquarters complexes, down to the erection of the towers. As the complexes advanced, the mechanisms used to finance them seemed to take on a life of their own, setting up a financially impelled chain of acquisition, demolition, and construction. The sparks that set the processes in motion and the fuel that kept them propelled were changes in the organizations them selves, particularly the expansion of markets or the acquisition of potential competitors. The changes seemed to prompt the need to assert an increasingly higher profile in America's commercial capital, regardless of the utilitarian requirements for space. To build a tower was the most obvious manifestation of this need. The towers were attention- grabbing cynosures, but they were also wholly dependent on the less visually assertive head office complexes. The low masses of the complexes isolated the towers from surrounding skyscrapers, providing them with maximum exposure in city views. Moreover, the lower offices, in all likelihood, were a source of revenue for the extremely expensive tower undertakings. It was widely known by contemporaries that an "economical" speculative office building was about sixteen stories high and filled as much of the site as possible. Tall, narrow towers required caissons during construction and sophisticated systems of wind bracing, both of which were costly. Besides, the confined tower plans were virtually useless from the companies' point of view. Expensive, exotic icons, the towers actually had very little to do with an enterprise's day-to-day business operations.

If the low-office-block-plus-tower arrangement of the Singer Company's and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's headquarters can be regarded as typical for the head office species, then the Wool worth Building represented a major aberration. The F. W. Woolworth Company's landmark headquarters was not constructed in separate, identifiable stages, but all at once (Figure 6.5). Frank Woolworth also intended that the building be seen all at once, like the completed Metropolitan Life complex, and, consequently, chose a site adjacent to City Hall Park. He wanted to capture an entire urban audience by surprise with his seemingly sudden decision to build a gigantic and extremely visible Gothic skyscraper, the height of which topped all earlier records, and he did.

Woolworth conceived his head office building as an imposing urban monument and his tower as skyline feature. In both aspects of his project, he utilized the familiar formula of mixing head office space with rental space for tenants, although in this case the proportion of space to be occupied by the head office diminished considerably. The F. W. Woolworth Company's headquarters filled only the Woolworth Building's twenty-fourth story and part of its twenty-third story. It occupied less than two stories in a building with fifty usable stories, although the twenty-two stories of the tower were much smaller in dimension than the twenty-eight stories in the lower block. The tower was not well suited to the needs of the F. W. Woolworth Company's head offices, nor to any but the smallest of companies' for that matter, since its offices were among the last occupied when the building opened in 19l3. The lowest four stories of the Woolworth Building were taken by the Irving National Bank, which had been part of the venture from the start. For the most part, the building was comprised of speculative office uses. The small head office requirements of the Woolworth Company can be ascribed to its decentralized administrative hierarchy, which Woolworth set up in 1908. The company had regional headquarters in a number of major cities, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Omaha. Woolworth had plenty of time to plan the spectacle of the building's construction, having had company offices in the immediate vicinity of the building site since 1886. That year, he rented a "desk room," to serve as a buying office, at 104 Chambers Street. The following year, he rented an office at 321 Broadway, and, in 1888, he moved to the Stewart Building, at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. His office faced Chambers Street and looked out over City Hall Park. Be fore the end of the year, he moved to the opposite side of the building, overlooking Reade Street. When he incorporated his company in 1905, however, Woolworth returned to the Chambers Street side of the building with its view of the park, on which bordered the future site of the Woolworth Building, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Park Place. Woolworth studied the activity around City Hall Park. He watched urban crowds spill over the Brooklyn Bridge toward the business district, the construction of the lower Broadway subway line, and the efforts by the Municipal Art Society and others to plan City Hall Park as New York's civic center, a focal point for government offices.

Woolworth commissioned the architect Cass Gilbert in 1910 to de sign Woolworth's head office project after rising to a clear position of dominance over competitors, incorporating the company, and expanding its operations abroad. He opened his first successful five- and-ten-cent Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Before he incorporated his company in 1905, Woolworth had purchased several five-and-ten-cent stores as well as chains from a number of competitors. In 1909, the year before he began acquiring parcels for his project, Woolworth opened his first store overseas in Liverpool, England. Within two years, he opened twelve stores in England. Woolworth began construction on the building's foundations in 1910, but this did not deter him from continuing to enlarge the site, which, by early 1911, included the entire Broadway block front, a feat in the eyes of New York real estate dealers. Gilbert, with a series of proposals, in creased the scale of the design accordingly. The enlargement of the project occurred just before the F. W. Woolworth Company underwent its 1911 merger, which involved the acquisition of four sizable five- and-ten-cent chains, causing it to nearly double in size. Although the project increased in size as the construction progressed, the Wool worth Building was still conceived as a single building operation and financed accordingly. Woolworth refused to rely on the pay-as-you-go financial methods adopted by the Singer and Metropolitan Life Insurance companies, choosing instead to set up the Broadway Park Place Company to help finance the building's construction. When construction was completed, Woolworth bought back the shares from the Broadway Park Place Company, consequently owning the building outright, and letting the company collect the tenants' returns on his investment.

The Woolworth Building project started out as a twenty-story office block adjoining a taller thirty-story tower, based on the Victoria Tower, Houses of Parliament, a civic tower that Woolworth had suggested as a model. When Woolworth enlarged the site, Gilbert retained the idea of a civic Gothic tower, but sought a new model for the building's compositional scheme, casting back to medieval Flanders in search of a theme. Gilbert had observed that in the major cities of Flanders, Gothic civic buildings, particularly the hotels de ville, celebrated the success of the city's mercantile trade. Such a celebration of commerce on an urban scale, he must have assumed, found a parallel in contemporary New York. In his choice of the hotel de ville as a compositional motif, Gilbert, like Price, Flagg, and Le Brun, was only acting in the spirit of the time. All were seeking an appropriate architectural character for America's newly powerful commercial enterprises.

The Woolworth Building's composition, with its central tower projecting from a lower block—although a block of proportions consider ably more grandiose than those of the Singer and Metropolitan Life Insurance complexes—was enriched with Gothic elements and details appropriated from a diversity of other civic and ecclesiastical sources besides the hotel de ville, including the Perpendicular Gothic facades of the Houses of Parliament and the Flamboyant Gothic tracery of the Cathedral towers at Reims, Antwerp, and Malines. The contradictions of such a bold use of imagery borrowed from civic and ecclesiastical sources for a commercial office building were emphasized by the building's siting—at the northern boundary of the business district, with direct access to the Broadway subway line on one hand, and at the corner of City Hall Park, New York's municipal government nexus, on the other. The ambiguities of the Woolworth Building's siting were reflected in its tenancy, which included manufacturing, engineering, railroad, and publishing concerns, but also a vast number of lawyers. For a short time, the city's federal courtrooms were housed in the building's twelfth story.

The Banker's Trust Company, by comparison with the Singer, Metropolitan Life, and the Woolworth companies, chose to build its own head office relatively early in its history—after leasing space for only six years in the immediate vicinity of its chosen building site. More over, Banker's Trust's strategy for choosing a site had less to do with the familiar issues of visibility and room for expansion than with the desire to be near the Stock Exchange. The company's stated intention was to erect a "monument" at "the vortex of America's financial life, namely, where Wall, Broad, and Nassau Streets meet." The rapidity of the company's growth was attributed to its powerful directorate, not the least of whom was J. P. Morgan, but there were other influential factors as well. In 1908, the company began pursuing international business with the establishment of its foreign department, and it took over the Mercantile Trust and the Manhattan Trust companies in 1911 and 1912. The takeover activity occurred while the head office tower was under construction.

In 1909 the new home of the Banker's Trust Company was announced as a sixteen-story tower on the site of the old seven-story Stevens Building, an L-shaped office building fronting on Wall Street and also Nassau Street, the corner being occupied by the needlelike eighteen-story Gillender Building. The Banker's Trust Company had decided to lease the land, so expensive was the purchase price of land on the block. Soon thereafter, the Gillender site was acquired, making it possible to build a more imposing square building on the prominent corner with its principal entrance on Wall Street. As usual, the company's plan was to lease a sizable percentage of the tower to tenants. Banker's Trust retained Trowbridge & Livingston in the same year to design a freestanding thirty-one-story steel-framed tower, which in basic concept recalled Bruce Price's design for the American Surety Building. Encased in granite, the tower's vertical rows of windows, contained by pilasters, extended from the Ionic colonnades that demarcated its base to the engaged Ionic colonnades that encircled its crown. Topped with a solid geometric stepped pyramid, the whole had an air of vaultlike gravity and permanence (Figure 6.6).

After the tower was completed, the Banker's Trust Company continued to expand, but it also continued to lease space in its tower to tenants, choosing to occupy the first three stories only. As the Federal Reserve System diminished the necessity for bankers to have their "own" reserve system, Banker's Trust began to function more like a commercial bank. It began operating a securities department in 1918 and a bond department in 1919, which included wire offices to Chicago and to eleven other cities in the East and Midwest. As part of this expansion, the firm developed New York branch offices.

In each of the case studies analyzed above, the restructuring of urban space by corporations constructing landmark headquarters involved not just changes in the skyline, but the reshaping of ground- level plots and the simplification of street facades as well. City blocks comprised of perhaps a dozen discrete buildings providing a variegated facade became more uniform and more monolithic. The footprints of corporate office buildings expanded to monopolize increasingly larger areas on their particular blocks. Such a pattern of urban change was also followed by at least a half-dozen speculative office complexes that were built around the same period. Their impact on the city, along with the corporate head office construction, hastened the critical attitude toward massive building schemes and, in turn, precipitated the Zoning Resolution of 1916. The promoters of these giant speculative office structures sought anchor tenants, firms that wanted to be close to the key sites, but did not want to develop their own head office space. They also sought the same lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, and industrial agents that corporate head office developers yearned for as tenants to underwrite their buildings. In the heady decade that opened the twentieth century, hardly a day went by, it was claimed, that a company did not announce a decision to move its head office, or a major sales office, to New York. So congested was the Wall Street area that there was talk of a shift of development north to Canal Street, but as the opening of elevated railway lines made the trip from Forty-second Street to Wall Street fifteen minutes instead of an hour, the demand for Wall Street offices continued. "Steel frames and elevators made it possible to accommodate within a quarter of a mile of the Stock Exchange an office population which without them would have needed all the available space for three times that distance."

Many of the key sites in the vicinity of the Stock Exchange were along lower Broadway. Just north of Trinity Church, Harry S. Black, president of the Fuller Construction Company, replaced the old five story Trinity Building (1852) during 1904 and 1905 with a twenty-story office block. The new Trinity Building, designed by the architect Francis H. Kimball, was 40 feet wide and 270 feet deep. It was essentially one row of thirteen offices facing Trinity churchyard, with a corridor and banks of elevators on the northern edge. Then, in 1906, Black proposed building an addition, also designed by Kimball—the U.S. Realty Building—directly north of the Trinity Building. Black used the caissons of the Trinity Building and exploited a relocated Thames Street as little more than a light well, adding another twenty stories and 260,000 square feet of office space in the vicinity. About 70 percent of the space was rented immediately to "four bankers, thirteen attorneys, besides brokers, engineers and trust and other companies." The ground floor was occupied by the "Carnegie Trust Company and the newly formed National Copper Bank." Both of these buildings rose from the sidewalk as no-nonsense speculative buildings, just like the City Investing Building, which fully exploited the site to the north of the Singer Building (Figure 6.7).

The Hudson Terminal complex, another bulky speculative development, designed by Clinton & Russell and completed in 1908, loomed over its neighbors at Church and Cortlandt streets. The developers of the Hudson Terminal had as their major tenant various subsidiaries of the newly formed, Morgan-dominated, United States Steel Corporation: American Steel Hoop, American Steel and Wire, National Tube, American Steel and Tin Plate, National Steel, American Bridge, Shelby Steel Tube, United States Steel Products and Exports, and Lorain Steel. The subsidiaries leased four full stories in the highest single annual rental agreement in the city. And yet the president and other executives of U.S. Steel operated out of the Empire Building, at 71 Broadway immediately south of Trinity Church, where presumably they were closer to the critical actors on Wall Street.

Immediately to the south of the Empire Building at 71 Broadway, the American Express (63 Broadway) and Adams Express (59 Broadway) companies rebuilt their sites (twenty-one and thirty-two stories respectively) to take advantage of the demand for space in key locations on Broadway. To the east of Broad Street, two separate buildings at 43 Exchange Place and 43 Wall Street were reconstructed—43 Exchange Place in 1903 to a height of twenty-six stories and then the United States Trust Company at 43 Wall Street during 1906 and 1907. As the U.S. Trust Building (also designed by Kimball) was constructed, the rear walls of 43 Exchange Place were knocked out to make a combined twenty-six-story tower fronting on both Exchange Place and Wall Street that offered 5,000 square feet per story at the node around the Stock Exchange. The escalating pace of rebuilding narrow lots after the turn of the century made the squabble between the American Surety Company and Astor over a cornice line seem minor by comparison.

Such intensive construction activity fueled debates about height and light, which came to a head with the criticism of the proposed Equitable Building, documented in the Heights of Buildings Commission's 1913 report. When fire destroyed the eight-story Equitable Insurance Building in 1913, an entire block bounded by Broadway, Pine, Nassau, and Cedar became available. Thomas Coleman du Pont financed a new forty-story building, designed by D. H. Burnham & Company, that extended straight up from the sidewalks (Figure 6.8).56 It provided 1.2 million square feet of rentable space, with 30,000 square feet in each of the upper stories. It also cast long shadows over surrounding buildings. Owners of buildings that once towered over the eight-story Equitable reportedly offered du Pont $2.5 million to keep the new building at the same height, but he chose instead to maximize his profits. The widespread reaction to the intrusive nature of this building made it a target of the movement to fix the height and bulk of buildings, and ultimately facilitated the passing of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The Equitable entered the same market in which the Woolworth and City Investing buildings were keenly seeking tenants, and although the Equitable Life Insurance Company took 125,000 square feet of floor space, a depression led to high vacancies—until World War I broke out in Europe. Then J. P. Morgan & Company took an entire floor to coordinate the buying of munitions for the Allies and quickly "inland manufacturers of everything that fighting soldiers needed, brokers, lawyers and a host of others signed up for space."

The Trinity, U.S. Realty, City Investing, Hudson Terminal, and Equitable buildings resulted from patterns of land purchase, design, construction, and occupancy as rich and complex as those of the American Surety, Singer, Metropolitan Life, Woolworth, and Banker's Trust buildings. For both kinds of skyscrapers—those built primarily for speculative purposes and those built primarily to house a head office and secure an image—the search for tenants large and small was critical to whether the buildings were successful as financial ventures or not. Corporations that sought to build for long-term accommodation of their own head office staff had a more relaxed attitude toward their building ventures than those who built strictly for speculative purposes. Speculators often ceased planning new buildings in times of oversupply and low rents. The building industry's journal observed in 1911: "Of late years it has been banks, insurance buildings or individual investors like Mr. Woolworth who have been erecting the sky scrapers; and inasmuch as they can afford to accept a smaller return on their investment, they are making the operations of speculative real estate companies in this field increasingly difficult."

The story did not end once a tenant list had been established, backed up with signed leases. Leases were often yearly leases, occasionally five-year leases, and tenants were shameless in their lack of loyalty to the building owner or the location. The volatile market for rental space meant that any slight variation in rental costs, in the perception of the acceptable office standard in terms of light, heat, air, and services, or in the opinion of a desirable location could lure customers to a new set of office spaces among the millions of square feet of floor space available. Even when the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad became a prime tenant of the new West Street Building in 1908— taking four floors in a building filled with coal and iron agents, railroad and steamship concerns—it still participated in the broader rental market. In 1913, its foreign freight department leased four rooms in the executive office story of the New York Produce Exchange, and its general eastern freight office took space in the Woolworth Building.

The restructuring of New York's urban environment was not just a matter of changing the skyline. The landmark towers that were so conspicuous in skyline views were rarely of any true functional use to their corporate builders—this was shown time and time again, whether by the American Surety Company, which never made full use of, and eventually vacated, its tower; by the Singer Company, which hardly occupied its tower; by the Woolworth Company, which had difficulty leasing its tower; or by the Banker's Trust Company, which refused to take space in its tower before opening ancillary offices in midtown. The only justification for the towers was an enterprise's augmented visibility on the urban scene. Whereas there is no simple explanation for why some enterprises sought such visibility as opposed to others, familiar themes were advertising and public relations, establishment of a physical presence for an unmaterial business such as insurance, and the assertion of an individual ego, as in the cases of John Rogers Hegeman and Frank Woolworth. In general, the visibility afforded by the towers expressed, and ultimately, legitimized a newly powerful commercial order (Figure 6.9). The unabashed appropriation of a form typically reserved in earlier civilizations for ecclesiastical or civic purposes vividly conveyed the dominance of commercial affairs in American life.

It was not just the towers, however, that remained for the most part unoccupied by their corporate builders. As a rule, the corporations used only a fraction of the offices that they financed and built. Their role as agents of change in the metropolis was contingent upon their ability to finance and construct office buildings that would be occupied by others. It was the others—a shifting population—whose work places were responsible for the demographic makeup of the city's commercial districts. Consequently, while the large-scale enterprises functioned as agents of physical change, the construction program that they proposed would not have been feasible without the sweeping, less easily defined, social changes that gave rise to the white collar work force and its attendant spatial requirement for housing paperwork. The same held true for speculative builders orchestrating the shaping of the urban environment. It was the intersection of corporate capital and property capital with the design and engineering fields that translated the national and global restructuring of industry and trade into the tangible built environments called New York skyscrapers. And without a large army of agents, brokers, and directors—and their white-collar work force in turn—in search of space, the built changes the corporations and the speculative builders proposed would have been impossible. Nor would corporate enterprise have been able to assert itself as powerfully as it did on the urban scene. Such a scale of construction in all probability would not have been carried out with out the range of tenants who helped to finance it.