Plate from Starrett Brothers and Eken, Inc., Builders, A portfolio of photographs of office buildings, hospitals, university buildings, industrial plants, financial houses, housing projects, apartment houses, department stores, insurance company home offices, 1925 – 1931. Collection of The Skyscraper Museum.įar right: 40 Wall Street illustration. Collection of The Skyscraper Museum.īottom: Royal Insurance Building, 150 William Street, andīank of America Building at 44 Wall Street, Irving Underhill, 1927. Top: New York Telephone Building, American Architecture of the 20th. The details of the zoning formula are illustrated in a model case in the gallery. In addition, a tower of unlimited height was allowed over one quarter of the area of the lot – thus producing the spindly shafts of the Wall Street cluster. This setback formula was designed to preserve a measure of light and air for the streets below and better access to light for the workers on upper floors. Rather than the blocky, straight-up sides of the high-rises of the previous decades, these buildings followed rules that, after a certain height above the sidewalk, required the mass to step back as it rose. It was government regulation -– New York’s first zoning law, passed in 1916 – that sculpted these skyscrapers into ziggurats and pyramidal bases with slender tower shafts. There was a new scale of the tallest towers, which rose to between 50 and 71 stories and crowded on and near Wall Street, representing the peaks of land values in that area. Two Irving Underhill perspectives of lower Manhattan in the early 1930s, seen from across the Hudson (top) and from Brooklyn, show the characteristic setbacks and slender towers that shaped the downtown skyline after 1916 and until the early 1960s. Courtesy of the Woolworth Building.īelow: Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn, ,1931. Top: Lower Manhattan from Jersey City, 1932. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.
Its slightly asymmetric profile and abundant dormer sections followed the zoning template precisely and squeezed every cubic foot of rentable space allowed by the code.The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The largest is the 33-story 120 Wall Street, completed in 1930 and notable for its “wedding cake” shape and wide façade on South Street. In the East River view, a trio of white buildings illustrates the ziggurat form prescribed by the zoning law and adapted to different size lots. The design by architect Ralph Walker was heralded by critics as one of the first “modern” skyscrapers of the new era. This mountain-like pile combined offices in the tower section and acres of mechanical operations in the deep base, so its unusually massive size and distance from the Financial District were logical. Activity resumed around 1923, and one of the first major projects designed under the new regulations was the New York Telephone Building, which filled the block between Barclay and Vesey streets and fronted on West Street (at far left of the top photo). The impact of the zoning law was delayed initially by a lag in construction during World War I and the long postwar recovery.
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