Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (5 page)

I remember pausing and thinking as I scanned the letterhead.
Carnegie Mellon University.
I knew a little about Andrew Mellon: a nineteenth-century American banker who later became the Secretary of the Treasury. I knew a lot more about Andrew Carnegie; his name was everywhere: Carnegie Hall in New York; the Carnegie Libraries across America and Great Britain; and the Carnegie Foundation for Peace. The Carnegie Mellon Business School was one among many prestigious institutions to which Carnegie, through his philanthropy, has attached his name. We may have forgotten Henry Bessemer, whose steel-making invention underpinned
Carnegie’s success, but by giving away his fortune Carnegie ensured that we still remember him today. It was all part of his grand vision, which he described in his 1889 essay, ‘The Gospel of Wealth’.
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That immediately caused an outcry among well-heeled capitalists. Carnegie planned to give away his fortune and urged his fellow tycoons, such as J. D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan, to do the same.

At that time, the wealth generated from the industrial revolution in the US was exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor. Rockefeller became the world’s first nominal billionaire in 1916, when many Americans still lived in slums with no running water or electricity. Carnegie believed that this disparity in wealth demanded action ‘so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship’.
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Carnegie’s call for wealth redistribution has resurfaced in recent years. Today the top one-tenth of a per cent of all earners in the US take home about 8 per cent of the country’s total income.
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Contemporary billionaires, including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, ask why the super-rich are not taxed more, and, like Carnegie, support giving money back to society through targeted philanthropy. Just as in the days of the strike at the Homestead Steel Works, sections of the public feel intense anger towards the rich, towards business and towards the political class.

The duty of the man of wealth, Carnegie claimed, was to set an example by living a modest and unostentatious life. All surplus revenues, he wrote, should be considered ‘simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer … to produce the most beneficial results for the community’.
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The wealth of the individual had been created by the wider community, and so it should be returned to them. This is the great paradox of Carnegie. His desire to give back all that he earned to society ‘encouraged him to be an even more ruthless business man and capitalist … the more he earned, the more he could give away’.
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Cutting wages and increasing workers’ hours were all part of his broader philosophy; he was convinced that he had a moral obligation to increase profits, rather than improve the welfare of his workers. He believed that his ‘superior wisdom and experience’ enabled him to administer this wealth ‘better than [workers] would do or could do for themselves’, but he also believed that he should only help them
to help themselves.
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In this way he set a trend that exists to the present day; his philanthropy was designed for people’s self-improvement rather than subsidising them day to day. As a result, he invested heavily in education, building libraries and providing free tuition for Scottish university students.
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He also opened scientific research institutions, music halls, art galleries and even a natural history museum in Pittsburgh. In 1900, he founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, which would later merge with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to become Carnegie Mellon University.

His work had a great impact on Rockefeller, who wrote to him after the Carnegie Library opened in Pittsburgh: ‘I would that more men of wealth were doing as you are doing with your money; but, be assured, your example will bear fruits, and that time will come when men of wealth will more generally be willing to use it for the good of others.’
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Yet, in private, he discussed the apparent vanity in Carnegie’s philanthropic donations. The manager of one of Rockefeller’s charitable trusts wrote to him that Carnegie gives money ‘for the sake of having his name written in stone all over the country’.
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In comparison, Rockefeller’s donations were discreet, perhaps so that he could not be accused of trying to curry favour in the face of Standard Oil’s trouble in the courts.
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In 1910 Carnegie founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is still active today. For a long time Carnegie had been an outspoken campaigner for world peace, opposing foreign intervention by the US and the UK. On the eve of the First World War he founded the Church Peace Union. By promoting moral unification and leadership, he hoped the Union would put an end to war for ever. Iron, or more accurately the profits from iron, was again being used as a force for peace. By the time of his death in 1919, Carnegie had given away 90 per cent of his wealth. He arranged for the rest to be distributed through the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Despite the events of the strike at the Homestead Steel Works, we remember Carnegie as a benevolent philanthropist. Even Henry Clay Frick, the antagonist of the tragedy, is now remembered by a glorious collection of art on Fifth Avenue in New York.
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Men are remembered by their ends, by their ultimate generosity, rather than the process by which
they achieved those ends. As we look at the Vermeers, Holbeins and Rembrandts in the Frick Gallery we think of beauty and benevolence and not of the innocent lives lost at Homestead.

In mid-1971 I had been living in New York for about six months when a friend of mine, a professional cellist, invited me to a concert at Carnegie Hall, which sits across Central Park from the Frick Collection. We went to listen to Paul Tortelier, the famous French cellist, playing
Variations on a Rococo Theme
, a piece by Tchaikovsky in the warm and colourful acoustics of the hall. When the hall opened in 1891, with a concert conducted by Tchaikovsky, it quickly became a New York City icon. The striking Italian Renaissance-style façade of terracotta and iron-spotted brick was as fascinating to many visitors as the illustrious artists performing inside. The hall was designed by the architect William Burnett Tuthill, himself an amateur cellist. He decided against the use of steel support beams, but as a consequence had to build concrete and masonry walls several feet thick. Stone simply cannot carry the same load as steel. It is the thickness of the walls, along with the smooth elliptical hall interior, that lends Carnegie Hall its fine acoustic properties (and helps to drown out the rumble of traffic from 57th Street and Seventh Avenue outside). In 1891 it was already being overshadowed by a new breed of building, shooting up across the city: the skyscraper.
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Just six-storeys high, Carnegie Hall was dwarfed by headquarters of the
New York Times
and
New York Tribune.
Ironically, it was the availability of cheap and abundant steel produced by Carnegie that supported this growth.

As early as in ancient Greece, iron had been incorporated into buildings so as to improve stability, but never had an entire load-bearing structure been fashioned entirely out of iron. In the 1820s cast-iron columns and beams were introduced into buildings in Chicago and New York. Architects and engineers were impressed by its compressive strength and durability and soon whole buildings’ fronts were being made from cast iron. As an added bonus, unlike wood, iron did not burn but it did, however, melt. In the extreme heat of Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, building
fronts buckled and collapsed and iron fell out of favour. Soon stronger and safer steel, pouring out of Carnegie’s steel mills, enabled steel skyscrapers to rise upwards.

Architects and the public alike still worried whether they could trust steel to support such gigantic structures, but there was a need to find new space in the increasingly cramped cities. Great social and economic changes were sweeping New York. Immigrants were arriving daily from Europe, sailing past the steel-framed Statue of Liberty. Trusts and corporations were growing quickly and all wanted office space in the financial and business capital of the US. Land prices were rising rapidly and the only direction in which to expand was upwards. Traditional stone was just not suitable. The taller the building, the greater the downward weight and therefore the thicker the base had to be. Early plans for the nine-storey masonry structure of the now demolished Tribune Building show basement walls that are two metres thick, a huge waste of valuable floor space. For architects to reach above six floors they had to rely on steel. Between 1870 and 1913, New York was raised from a city of six-storey buildings to one of fifty-storey skyscrapers.

When I arrived in New York on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1971, I hated it. I did not know anyone, the hotels were shabby and the people were rude. But, becoming a resident of Greenwich Village, I soon grew to love the city. Fast-paced and full of interesting people, New York was, and still is, one of the most exciting places in the world. Like other great world cities such as Venice, Tokyo and London, New York is a unique and unmistakable urban environment. In particular, I remember being struck by the city’s fantastic architecture. Elegant brownstone town houses are interspersed with imposing gothic and art deco skyscrapers. The city would rise up around you on all sides to a vertiginous height. It was very different from anything I had seen in Europe.

At weekends in New York I would cycle around the city. Leaving my apartment off Washington Square, I headed south through the then almost deserted district of Soho, which is the site of the most significant and largest collection of nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings. I would head back north and just above Houston, in a rather grimy and run-down office area, one building stood out. It was called the Flatiron Building and
it symbolised to me the growth of New York, over the last one hundred years, into the thriving metropolis of the 1970s. As its name suggests, the shape of the building resembles an old clothes iron, with a stark triangular cross-section that rises up to a height of 87 metres. The twenty-two-tiered structure may seem squat in comparison to New York’s modern-day mega-structures, but, on completion in 1902, the Flatiron was a significant feat of engineering.

It was built by the George A. Fuller Company. George Fuller was an architect and pioneered the building of skyscrapers in the US. In 1900, long before the first steel struts of the Flatiron were raised, Fuller died and the presidency of the company was assumed by his son-in-law, Harry Black. For some time he had had his eyes on the small triangular plot of land at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The site would be perfect for the company’s new headquarters, acting as an advertisement for his rapidly growing business. Six months after Fuller’s death, with the company now in his control, Black bought the land. The prime motivation for building upwards was profit. An editorial in
Life
magazine in June 1901 declared, ‘here in New York the price of land determines the height of the building’.
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And land prices were very high. Only above the tenth floor would investors break even on the land purchase. The tiny plot of land, just 9,000 square feet, had cost Harry Black $2 million ($55 million today).

As a result, aesthetics and economics were often at odds as skyscrapers began to dominate the city skyline. Many worried that the city would be overshadowed by unimaginative yet towering monstrosities. The Flatiron was designed to make the most out of the oddly shaped triangular plot of land, but Harry Black would often argue with the architect, Daniel Burnham, over the building’s soft, curved edges. Why, Black would demand, were 93 square feet of valuable floor space being wasted? The Flatiron soon began to rise up from the wedge-shaped site. Thousands of steel columns, joists, struts and rivets arrived truck by truck and were put together much like a child’s constructor set. Finally, the builders, standing on wooden platforms that hung down the length of the building, laid the terracotta-tile skin. In June 1902, it was complete.

The Flatiron was different from any other skyscrapers in the city. Many architectural critics regarded the building as a feat of engineering but a failure as a work of art. But the building was embraced by the public and artists alike. The
New York Tribune
reported in 1902 that the Flatiron would attract crowds of ‘sometimes 100 or more’ and was painted and photographed more than any other building in the city.
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Symbolically modern, the Flatiron appears to change shape depending on where you were standing. On a winter’s day in 1902, photographer Alfred Stieglitz stood looking up at the Flatiron and, pressing the shutter button, created a memorable image.
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‘With the trees of Madison Square covered with fresh snow, the Flat Iron impressed me as never before’ he wrote. It appeared to be moving towards me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of new America still in the making … The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.’
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The unique shape and location made the Flatiron another, and instant, New York City icon, but it was far from being the tallest building in New York. For one reason, its height was restricted by the strong winds that blew down 23rd Street, which bordered the southern edge of the Flatiron. Build too high, so the architects worried, and the building might be brought tumbling down. Locals placed bets on how far the debris would fall if this were to happen. It was an unlikely event as the Flatiron was designed to withstand four times the maximum wind force that it would ever come up against. In part, this strength lay in the building’s odd shape. A triangle is the strongest of geometric shapes as it is a self-supporting structure: applying pressure at one point creates greater resistance at the other two points. Soon after the first tenant moved in, a 100 kilometres per hour windstorm braced the city, but inside the Flatiron not a vibration was felt. One tenant claimed that not even the filament inside his desk lamp shook. In fact, it was the Flatiron that held control over the wind. The shape of the building would channel the wind into blustery down draughts that could raise the skirts of female passers-by. Men would loiter around the tower in the hope of catching a rare glimpse of ankle, the police calling out ‘23 skidoo’, since the Flatiron is on 23rd Street, to move the chancers along. One local dressmaker even created a ‘wind-defying’ skirt.
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Hats blew off heads and umbrellas were turned
inside out, but the wind could also create more serious havoc. On the surrounding streets shop doors were blown open and plate-glass windows smashed. One February afternoon in 1903 a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, who was attempting to make it around the prow of the Flatiron towards Broadway, was blown into the middle of Fifth Avenue and killed by a passing motorcycle.