What the New York City Skyline Looked Like 100 Years Ago

New York City, mid-1920s

Rising up from the inlet of the Hudson River, New York City has one of the world’s most recognizable and expansive skylines. It’s a built environment defined by skyscrapers, with towering historical icons such as the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and the Woolworth Building. The city — Manhattan in particular — has a legacy of cutting-edge vertical architecture dating back to the late 19th century. But 100 years ago, many of the city’s most famous buildings didn’t exist yet.

In 1924, New York City was hardly in its infancy. It had been the most populated city in the United States since 1790, and it grew to become the second most populated city in the world by 1900. As of the 1920 census, the city was home to more than 5.6 million people (compared to roughly 8.8 million today). At the time, New York’s tallest buildings were concentrated in lower Manhattan, the colonial center of the city, which by 1910 contained a bona fide vertical skyline. When downtown land became too scarce and costly, developers began building skyscrapers in midtown, which was a transportation hub thanks to Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. But this development didn’t take place until the late 1920s. In 1924, the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was located at the site of the eventual Empire State Building, and the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center were still 50 years away. Let’s travel back a hundred years for a glimpse at a very different New York City.

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Lower Manhattan skyline south of the Brooklyn Bridge, 1895.

The construction of tall buildings in Manhattan was spurred by two things: a finite amount of space on the narrow island, and the advent of the passenger elevator, which enabled developers to add higher floors that could be accessed without climbing stairs. Construction was completed on the city’s first two elevator-equipped office buildings in 1875, which historians consider New York’s proto-skyscrapers: the 11-story, 260-foot Tribune Building and the 10-story, 230-foot Western Union Building. The engineering capabilities of the time meant that both structures were built with load-bearing exterior walls — the walls of high buildings were designed to taper to greater thickness on the ground floor in order to provide support for the top floors. Ground-floor walls for a 150-foot building needed to be 3 feet wide; they had to be even wider for greater heights, thus reducing space on the ground floor. This created a sort of practical (and economic) cap on building height, and both the Tribune Building and Western Union Building remained New York City’s tallest occupiable buildings for many years.

Such height limitations were solved in the 1880s by a method known as skeleton construction, in which support for each floor was provided by an iron or steel frame, replacing the need for load-bearing walls. The first structure in New York City built using skeleton construction was the Tower Building in lower Manhattan. At 11 stories tall, it didn’t become NYC’s tallest building when it was completed in 1889 (it used skeleton construction to overcome a narrow lot size, not to achieve grandiosity), but it did provide the means for the city’s skyline to take shape.

The 1890s ushered in an era of increasingly tall buildings. When the New York World Building was completed in 1890, the 16-story, 309-foot office tower became the first structure to exceed the height of the colonial-era Trinity Church’s spire. It was not only the tallest building in New York, but also the tallest in the world. In 1894, the 18-floor Manhattan Life Insurance Building surpassed it at 348 feet to become the world’s tallest building. Five years later, the 30-floor, 391-foot Park Row Building was completed; it had a nine-year stint as the world’s tallest building before the 42-floor Singer Building thoroughly towered over any other building at the time, at 612 feet tall. In 1909, only a year later, the 50-story, 700-foot Metropolitan Life Tower was completed and became the world’s tallest building. By 1968, the New York World Building, Manhattan Life Insurance Building, and Singer Building had all been demolished. But 100 years ago, they were some of the centerpieces of the New York City skyline.

Office buildings proliferated at the turn of the 20th century as the American economy shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and service industries. These industries required clerical work that in turn required office space to accomplish. But the need for commercial space wasn’t the only reason building heights soared; the lucrative real estate market was another important factor. The high value of property near already-established commercial districts motivated skyscraper construction in midtown and downtown Manhattan. The value of vertical real estate was illustrated to an extreme degree in 1913 with the completion of the Woolworth Building, which took the mantle of world’s tallest building, and became an unsurpassed fixture of the New York City skyline throughout the 1920s.

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Construction of the Woolworth Building on Broadway in lower Manhattan, 1912. On the right is the Municipal Building, also under construction, with the East River in the background.

Standing 792 feet tall, the Woolworth Building contained 58 floors above ground, and another three floors below ground. With its Tudor-style arched entrance portal, sculpted allegorical figures, Greek marble and stained glass interior, it was such a striking example of Gothic Revival architecture that it was referred to as the “cathedral of commerce.” But even though the building was commissioned by F.W. Woolworth as a grand representation of the retail giant, only one and a half floors of the building were actually occupied by the Woolworth Company. The rest of the building — 60.5 floors — was essentially an investment in real estate. Records from 1914 show that the other floors were leased by as many as 1,000 tenants.

New York City’s building boom wasn’t entirely a height race, though — other skyscrapers were adding grandeur to the skyline without breaking records. In 1889, 41 Park Row was built as a Richardsonian Romanesque headquarters for The New York Times. The Flatiron Building (officially, though obscurely, named the Fuller Building) was completed in 1902 as a distinctly wedge-shaped (or iron-shaped, hence its nickname) beaux arts office tower for its intended tenant and original designer, the George Fuller Construction Company.

Other buildings focused on size, but in the form of usable office floor space, not height: In 1908, the City Investing Building became the largest office building in the world in terms of square footage, with 559,000 square feet of office space. It was surpassed by the nearly 1 million square feet of the Manhattan Municipal Building in 1914, which was then exceeded by the 1.2 million-square-foot Equitable Building in 1915. The dark corridor the building made of Pine Street, which ran between it and 100 Broadway, is an example of an unfortunate side effect of the skyscraper boom, leading to the city’s first-ever zoning law the following year.

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The skyline of lower Manhattan, circa 1915. The Municipal Building is at the far left; the Woolworth Building is the tall skyscraper to the right of that. The Singer Building is the darker skyscraper in the center of the photo.

New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution contained a provision that would have major implications on the design of the skyline from that point forward: It required tall buildings to include setbacks in order to preserve street-level light. Per the law, a tower would need to be indented if it occupied more than 25% of its lot. The requirement was in effect until 1961, and its impact can be seen in buildings such as the Bush Tower (1917), Cunard Line Building, Crown Building (both completed in 1921), Standard Oil Building (1928), and American Radiator Building (1924).

This setback was also incorporated into the signature ziggurat design element of the art deco movement that emerged in the late 1920s. But 100 years ago, the New York City skyline was dotted with buildings designed in Gothic Revival, neoclassical, beaux arts, Jacobethan, Renaissance Revival, Richardsonian Romanesque, French second empire, and neocolonial styles. Art deco icons such as the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building, completed in 1930 and 1931, respectively, were just around the corner.