The Building of Manhattan, page 5
In Manhattan, as in the rest of the country, the work week was six days long, 9 or 10 hours a day, and workers received about 12 dollars a week. Child labor and sweatshop working conditions were widespread.
Farther up Broadway, at the corner of 42nd Street, a riveted steel building, the Hotel Pabst, had just been torn down. The journal American Architect and Building News noted that “unfortunately for the science of construction, the building removed was built only four years ago, so that it affords little opportunity for studying the effect of time upon metal skeletons cased with masonry.” This building had to be taken apart by the “tedious and costly operation of sawing off the heads of the rivets.” Would architects, the journal wondered, have to consider how their buildings could be torn down even as they designed them?
Trolley cars and horse and buggy were the means of surface transportation along Broadway when the Fuller Construction Company began to erect its new building. In their brochure for prospective tenants it was described as follows:
“For many reasons this building is unique. It is the cumulative result of all that is known in the art of building, and is equipped with every conceivable convenience that human ingenuity could devise. From a structural standpoint it is the strongest building ever erected.
“It is equipped with six rapid-running Otis hydraulic elevators, and has its own steam and electric plants, furnishing heat and light to tenants free of charge.
“The woodwork is mahogany and quartered oak, and has all undergone a process of fireproofing, in order to eliminate the possibility of fire.
“If early application is made, anyone desiring it may have one or more entire floors arranged and finished in a special manner, without charge, and so make available space otherwise devoted to corridors.
“The offices, as laid out, are very commodious, and, owing to the peculiar shape of the building, have the best of light. The height of the ceilings is as follows: Sub-basement, 10 feet; basement, 12 feet; first floor, 21 feet 6 inches; second, third and fourth floors, 12 feet 10 inches; fifth to fifteenth, inclusive, 11 feet; sixteenth, 11 feet 10 inches; seventeenth and eighteenth, 13 feet; nineteenth, 14 feet 2 inches; twentieth, 10 feet 6 inches.”
No mechanical equipment except the derricks is visible in this drawing, based on a photo in the Library of Congress. Two men on the sixth floor are raising a long piece of equipment by hand, using block and tackle. The scaffolding and the enclosed section show how the construction of tall buildings has changed in just a few years. The lower floors are not yet even closed in, while above, supported by the steel framework within, entire floors have been completely enclosed.
Today, the Flatiron Building is still one of the city’s most distinguished buildings.
THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING: 1913
Whoever builds a Bridge or a Building. Owes an obligation to the Community That it shall embellish and not deface the locality.
Cass Gilbert
Architect of the Woolworth Building
The Woolworth Building, considered to be one of the great works of architecture of the 20th century, was given landmark status in 1983 by New York City. It cannot be altered, reconstructed, or demolished in any way without the permission of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Woolworth Company had just completed a four-year, 22-million-dollar restoration of the building’s façade — 8.5 million dollars more than the whole building originally cost.
When it was built, in 1913, it was unique in its method of financing. F. W. Woolworth, famous for his five-and-ten-cent stores, paid for the construction of his building as it was being built—without a mortgage or any indebtedness.
Woolworth wanted a building Gothic in style, with a tower. He also wanted the windows arranged so that when any interior space was subdivided, each office would have natural light. There are 60 floors from sub-basement to top, with the average ceiling height being more than 12 feet; this is an esthetic use of space no longer considered economically practical. A skyscraper of the same height—792 feet — built today would have at least 20 floors more than the Woolworth Building.
It was impractical to make a skyscraper with Gothic structural characteristics, so the architect used ornamentation and details to create a “Cathedral of Commerce.” Almost the entire building is covered with terra-cotta ornamentation. The design of everything, from the doorknobs to the lobby’s barrel-vaulted ceilings, was carefully thought out to create a feeling of Gothic sculpture. The beauty of its exterior surfaces and of its entrance lobby at street level is unique in New York City.
From 1913 to 1930 the Woolworth Building was the tallest office building in the world, surpassing Manhattan’s 47-story-high Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building at 700 feet. How high could architects and builders go without losing stability in their skyscrapers? What would lightning do to such a tall building? What would happen in a violent storm?
The basic skyscraper structure, with its inner steel skeleton and vertical steel columns and connecting steel cross beams. had now been established. In Europe, as well as in the United States, engineers were developing new techniques for strengthening these internal skeletons. One obvious method was to add diagonally placed beams between columns and to add bracing where columns and beams connected.
The many pieces of the skeleton thus joined act as a connected whole to prevent its collapse and to absorb the pressures and stress placed on the building by the great weight of its parts and the force exerted against it by strong winds. The columns and beams all share in distributing the weight and in channeling stresses to the foundation of the building and into the bedrock.
The steel columns used in the Woolworth Building were the heaviest ever used in a building up to that times. All its steel members were riveted together. In addition to diagonal bracing and knee braces, Cass Gilbert, the architect, decided to use a recent development, portal bracing, to strengthen the building. The strength thus achieved allowed for the use of delicate and intricate design units on the exterior of the building, since these elements could then be purely ornamental and would not be required to help support the structure of the building.
One of the foundation girders, fabricated in Pennsylvania by the American Bridge Company, weighs 68 tons. It is 23 feet long, 8 feet deep, and 6 feet wide. This immense girder was taken from a boat to the site on Broadway on a 100-ton truck pulled by forty-two horses.
Terra-cotta is clay, baked at a high temperature to create a very hard. lightweight, durable, ornamental tile, or shaped brick. It can be easily modeled into almost any shape: delicate and intricate, or bold and powerful. It can be made to look like sculptured stoneware or enameled metal, and is adaptable to many styles of architecture.
Terra-cotta has been used since ancient times, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was widely used as an ornamental façade in the construction of buildings.
In the four-year restoration of the Woolworth Building, the entire terra-cotta exterior was minutely inspected. About 26,000 panels had to be replaced. and some 100.000 others were secured with new stainless-steel anchors.
The replacement blocks are made of concrete—now considered to be better able to withstand the extremes of New York City’s weather. They are anchored into the brick masonry and cemented in place with epoxy adhesives, which were unknown in 1913.
BOOM AND BUST: 1900—1930
Manhattan had a population nf 1,850,093 in 1900 and 2,331,541 by 1910. It was, and is, one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
Horse-drawn vehicles and steam- and electric-powered surface and elevated railroads were inadequate to transport such vast numbers of people about Manhattan and to and from the other boroughs. In the early 1900’s the automobile was just beginning to be seen on the city’s streets.
On March 24, 1900, work began on a new underground rapid-transit system—now 241 miles long—connecting all the boroughs except the island of Richmond/Staten Island.
By 1904 one could travel rapidly underground all the way from City Hall to 145th Street. Soon the Bronx was connected to Manhattan by a subway tunnel under the Harlem River. By 1908 the subway went deep under the East River to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn.
By 1910 the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Queensborough bridges had crossed the East River. These bridges, together with the Brooklyn Bridge, provided easier access to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. Penn Station was opened in 1910, and Grand Central Station three years later, in 1913.
With these new transportation lines, many people now worked in Manhattan, but lived and slept elsewhere. Brooklyn, three times the size of Manhattan, would eventually have more homes than Manhattan.
Immigrants from Europe were again pouring through Ellis Island into New York City. In 1907, newcomers set an all-time record: 1,285,349 of them hoping to better their lives in America.
Few cities in the world could equal New York as a financial, manufacturing and commercial center. By the end of the first decade of the century its manufacturing work force totaled almost 700,000. It had more than 23,000 factories and was producing about 10% of the total factory output in the whole country. It was estimated that a ship sailed out of New York harbor about every thirty-six minutes, carrying the city’s goods overseas and to domestic ports.
Yet there was no effective government regulation of safety or health for workers. Young children, as well as adults, worked long hours. In 1914 only about 8% of the nation’s work force was unionized. In that year the Ford Motor Company in Detroit raised its basic wage rate to five dollars for an eight-hour day, remarkable for its time. It had been two dollars and forty cents for a nine-hour day. The average man in manufacturing worked a 52-hour week; women, 50 hours.
World War I came and went, with New York City as the nation’s seaport, shipping out men and supplies to Europe. The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918 swept through the city, leaving nearly 13,000 dead. Crime and political corruption were frequently rampant.
To control its growth, in 1916 the city enacted the first zoning code in the nation. It divided the city into use, height, and area districts. The code stipulated the height and bulk of buildings that could be built, by the use of setbacks in a building’s construction, as determined by the width of the street on which the building fronts. It regulated the location of trades and industries, and open spaces, to preserve residential districts and stabilize real estate values.
In the Roaring Twenties the city was a boom town. Another migration, of black Americans, was arriving in New York from the South, and Harlem became the nation’s greatest black community.
The pace of life had quickened and Manhattan was the place to be. Optimism was contagious, and it was everywhere. Forgotten was the financial panic of 1907 when banks across the country had failed.
A new building, the Chrysler Building, was to be built 77 stories high; it was to be the tallest in the world. Another, the Empire State Building, was to be even higher. The year was 1929.
In that year, on October 29th, the New York Stock Market collapsed. Wall Street was in panic. First New York shuddered . . . then the nation . . . then the world. History’s worst financial crisis—the Great Depression—had begun.
THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING: 1930— 1931
The Empire State Building was built in he Empire State Building was built in the earliest days of the Great Depression. More than 20 million Americans were without a job. Hungry men and women waited all day long in breadlines throughout the country—even in the heart of Times Square—just for a free meal.
Early in 1929, the developers of the proposed Empire State Building had decided to spend 44 million dollars on the building’s construction. The land cost 16 million dollars, although the site size was only about two acres.
On the site stood the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. While it was being demolished the stock market crashed and the world’s economy collapsed. But the project went right ahead. Final construction costs were less than 25 million dollars—the Depression had lowered the cost of everything.
The building’s design was greatly influenced by New York’s building code, which, in 1929, stipulated that no building could be built straight up from the street for more than 125 feet; at that height the building had to be set back from the street baseline. A further setback at the 30th floor would be necessary to comply with the floor size, which at that height could be no more than one-quarter the size of the land on which the building would be built.
It was a monumental task: to design the world’s tallest building, create as much usable rental space as possible, plan so it could be built within 18 months, and still have a handsome building. In the end, architect William Lamb worked on fifteen designs before his plan “K” was finally chosen.
Even before demolition of the old hotel had begun, the design of the Empire State Building was ready, together with a complete inventory of all construction needs. So well coordinated were design needs with construction needs that occupancy of part of the building began four months ahead of schedule.
Because of the Depression, the Empire State Building was never fully rented in its earliest years, but it immediately became one of the wonders of New York City and a favorite tourist attraction. Ordinary folk and the famous alike made the trip up to the observation tower and were enthralled by the sheer height of it all.
Today, more than 50 years later, nearly two million people a year ride the 1,250 feet up to its lofty tower to gaze out over Manhattan and marvel at the city scene spread out below them. On a clear day you can see 50 miles away. It is both unnerving and exhilarating to realize that workmen have stood on exposed beams in the open air at this great height to build the very observation platform upon which you are standing.
Clouds and fog may float below you. In a high wind the top of the building actually moves. It is frequently hit by lightning. The tip of the TV tower above you is 1,472 feet above street level, yet the steel skeleton of the building readily absorbs and dissipates both the force of the wind and the electric charge of the lightning. The 365,000-ton weight of the building is anchored into solid bedrock, 55 feet below the surface at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.
THE RIVETER: $1.92 PLUS HALF A CENT AN HOUR
The putting together of the open steel framework of the Empire State Building revealed one distinct difference from the framework of the skyscrapers being put up today.
It was full of rivets.
And its construction was audibly different from today’s methods of building.
Riveting made such an infernal racket that New Yorkers wrote angry letters to the newspapers about the noise.
A test had already shown that welded joints were stronger than riveted joints in construction. But, in the 1930’s, the riveting gang was still the center of activity in the building of skyscrapers. What they did held everything in place.
There were four men in a riveting gang. According to a news report of that time, they were called the “heater,” the “catcher” or “sticker,” the “bucker-up,” and the “driver” or “riveter.” There was also the young helper, or “punk.”
The heater cranked the handle of his forge, forcing air up through the coke or charcoal fire, making it flaming hot and heating to an incandescent glow the 10 or more rivet bolts buried in the fire.
When the driver was ready for a new rivet, the heater took a hot cherry-red one out of his forge with his long-handled tongs. And with an underhand toss he hurled the smoking rivet straight at the catcher, who caught it in mid-air in his catching can. The catcher then grabbed it with his tongs, tapped it against a beam to remove any cinders, and jammed it into the waiting hole.
The bucker-up held the rivet in place with his heavy steel dolly bar while, facing him on the opposite side of the pieces being riveted together, the driver pressed the release on his hammer. Within seconds, and with a chattering outburst of noise, his end of the rivet was smashed into a wide cap, permanently bonding together two more sections of the skyscraper framework.
Today, the steel beams and girders of the city’s skyscrapers are bolted together with special steel bolts and welded together. Compared with riveting, these connections are stronger, more quickly made, and require fewer men to accomplish.
At the peak of construction on the Empire State Building there were thirty-eight riveting gangs working from 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.—with half an hour off for lunch. The number of rivets set in place in a day depended on the size of the rivets, and whether the crew was straddling a cold steel beam with nothing much below them or working inside the protection of the building itself. A fast crew might set up to 800 rivets a day. Union scale for riveters was $1.92, plus half a cent, per hour, with double pay for overtime.
THE DERRICK
There were as many as sixteen derricks working on the Empire State Building at the same time. Their size and lifting abilities varied, from those limited to a 20-ton load to the biggest—capable of lifting the heaviest load needed, 44 tons.
Wherever possible, the derricks were positioned so that their booms overlapped, allowing material to be placed exactly where needed.
As construction proceeded and the derricks were raised to ever-increasing heights, their cables had to be lengthened to reach the hoist engines down below them. Holes were left in the newly poured concrete floors so the cables would have the most direct link between the hoist engines and the derricks.
The biggest hoist engines were ultimately placed on the 25th floor and the smaller ones on the 52nd floor, where the setbacks in the building’s design made it desirable to do so. At the greatest heights, the derricks had to raise the steel beams and columns in two separate liftings—changing over at the 25th floor.
