On this day in New York · October 1, 1902
The Flatiron Building Opens Its Doors
The tower everyone in New York bet would blow over in a strong wind opened for business on October 1, 1902, and never left.
The facts
- Ready date
- October 1, 1902, per Fuller Company brochures advertising the building "ready for occupancy"
- Address
- 175 Fifth Avenue, at the triangular junction of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 23rd Street
- Size
- 285 to 286 feet tall, 20 stories, ranked Manhattan's seventh-tallest building at completion
- Architect
- Daniel Burnham's Chicago firm, with Frederick P. Dinkelberg as designer, built for the George A. Fuller Company
On October 1, 1902, the George A. Fuller Company sent out brochures declaring its new triangular tower at Fifth Avenue and Broadway ready for tenants. The building rose on the wedge-shaped lot where Broadway cuts across Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, designed by the Chicago office of Daniel Burnham with Frederick P. Dinkelberg drawing the plans. While the steel frame was going up in 1901 and early 1902, skeptics on the street bet it would topple in the first hard gust off the rivers and started calling it Burnham's Folly before it even had walls. It didn't fall. It opened as one of the tallest buildings in the city and quickly became more famous for its shape than for its actual name.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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without so much as the alteration of a bored hole, or the exchange of a tiny rivet
The New York Times, on how precisely the building's prefabricated steel frame pieces fit together
Source: Wikipedia -
the only office I know of where you can stand in one place and see the East River, the Hudson and Central Park without moving
Thomas McCormack, president of St. Martin's Press, on his firm's decades as a tenant in the building
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
A building the whole block expected to fail is still standing at that same corner more than a century later, and its nickname is now the word New Yorkers use for that whole shape of building. Few structures in this city turned skepticism into a landmark quite that fast.
Sources
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