In the essay below, Stephen Rustow, an architect and urban planner, ruminates on skyscrapers — one of the most visible icons of cityscapes — as more than monuments to behold from a distance. They are also buildings that have historically created public access, for the price of admission, to a particular way of beholding the city. But as Rustow eloquently describes in this opinion piece, that access to the city viewed from on high has been fully privatized in many of the newest additions to the skyline. Rustow’s critique is far more than the standard alarm in response to the latest frenzy of supertall residential towers; it’s a theoretically informed reflection on the relationship between individual pieces of architecture and our collective perception of the urban landscape.
As such, it’s a fitting way to introduce Rustow as one of UO’s official columnists, a group of respected professionals of design, policy, history, and advocacy who provide a range of unique and pointed perspectives on issues that face the New York metropolitan region today. Stay tuned as we announce additional columnists in the new year and build upon our commitment to sharing new ideas that enrich the culture of citymaking.
The public appropriation of height in New York City has a long history, as does the carefully fostered civic pride in the modern monuments that tower over it. Monuments in large part because they were modern: they embodied the latest advances in building technology and a certain daring and arrogance that spoke to the collective ambitions of a world city on the make. There was a romance to height in which its double-sexed promiscuity played an important part because the tops of these new monuments were in some real sense collective spaces, in imagination but also in fact.
The tradition in New York goes back to Manhattan’s church steeples, symbols par excellence of a collective faith. One didn’t literally climb to their tops, but the all-seeing eye of the divinity was always at the apex. Trinity Church had the tallest spire in the city on its completion in 1846, even if it didn’t quite compete with those of Europe’s cathedrals. Its primacy was briefly surpassed by the Latting Observatory, a wood and iron tower that stood next to New York’s Crystal Palace on a site opposite what is today Bryant Park, built as part of the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.1 Latting’s tower rose 315 feet high and offered viewing platforms at three levels equipped with telescopes that allowed the public to see fifty miles or more in every direction. TheTimes reporter covering the opening said he “was not prepared for the wonderful panorama,” which surpassed anything available in London or Paris (including the view from Notre Dame, as it was higher), as well as the view from the summit of the Great Pyramid of Giza.2 The Observatory was originally planned to incorporate a steam elevator but, as built, apparently provided only stairs to bring up to 1,500 visitors at a time to its sheltered lookouts. The sameTimes reporter described the ascent as “fatiguing but aiding digestion” (anticipating de Montherlant by a generation). In a fate that recalls Babel, the heathen tower burned and collapsed in 1856, leaving Trinity’s spire once again master of the local heavens.
When New York got serious about building pagan towers at the end of the 19th century, it was the newspaper publishers along Park Row and insurance company offices that filled the tallest buildings, enterprises founded on mass communications and commercial products specifically intended for the broad urban populace.3 This first wave of skyscraper construction culminated in Cass Gilbert’s magisterial building for Woolworth’s, which remained the world’s tallest building for nearly three decades. Dubbed “the cathedral of commerce”4, it was a spire literally built with the nickels and dimes of the city and the nation’s growing pre-war wealth, and it incorporated a public viewing platform on the 57th floor.
- 1. Michael Pollack, “FYI: Over the Bounding Pond,” The New York Times, August 28, 2005.
- 2. “Additional City News; Amusements this Evening,” The New York Times, July 1, 1853.
- 3. The history of the early tall buildings of 20th century New York is beautifully laid out in several features on the Skyscraper Museum’s website.
- 4. Thus named in an eponymous booklet published by the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman in 1916. /Norval White & Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York City (4th ed.), New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000, p. 67.