Posted by baad lamb
The angular path Broadway creates as it cuts through the regular grid of the Commissioner’s Plan Manhattan is well known for producing interesting building shapes and challenging lots for developers. The most famous is surely the Flat Iron Building, originally known as the Fuller Building for the developer who built it.
This was not the world’s first steel framed skyscraper construction, but its height and site combined to emphasize the unusual shape, and the prominent position at the southwest corner of Madison Square Park only drew additional attention to this new building method. At the start of construction in 1901, there were still plenty of skeptics predicting the building would fall.
Before steel frames, masonry buildings were essentially small rocks piled on top of the larger supporting rocks below them, but Fuller’s construction company had already built a number of buildings with this new steel frame technology. I saw an exhibit years ago that claimed architect Daniel H. Burnham was so tired of explaining and defending this method, already successfully done plenty of times, that he instructed the construction crews to put up rows of masonry wall in the middle of the building to demonstrate how they could hang alone, with no stones below for support.
But this is not a mystery about the Fuller Building.
