The Epic of New York City (68 page)

There in the Hoffman House, his face flushed with brandy, Barrymore sprang onto a table and, as gaslights flickered on his monocle, began reciting Mark Antony's funeral oration from Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” Few did lend him their ears, even though this was a free performance by one of the world's leading actors. A well-dress stockbroker, named Howard Burros, who had been chatting with a friend, turned toward the drunken declaiming actor and tried to silence him. Barrymore broke off his monologue, pointed dramatically at Burros, and snarled, “You, sir-r-rr, are an ignorant clod!” Burros snapped an insult at Barrymore. Barrymore's friends replied in kind, and the evening ended in a free-for-all. Barrymore had been lightweight boxing champion of England during his student days at Oxford; but he disdained to mix in the brawl, kept his perch on the table, and ignored the shattering of glasses and the smashing of furniture, his eyes flaming and his magnificent voice booming another famous line: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

At 6
A.M
. on Tuesday the temperature stood at 1 degree below zero, the snow stopped falling for a few hours, and the wind eased up. The worst of the Blizzard of '88 was over.

More than twice as much snow fell during the storm as had fallen
all winter long. The 20.9-inch deposit set no local record, for more recent storms have left even more snow upon New York's streets. What distinguished the Blizzard of '88 above all others was the deadly combination of an erroneous weather forecast, an unprepared city, a heavy snowfall, a ferocious wind, and a bone-chilling cold. The exact number of deaths caused by the storm is unknown. Property damage was estimated at between $20,000,000 and $25,000,000. The
Dictionary of American History
calls it “the most famous blizzard in American history.”

Chapter 32

A
NOTHER STORM
that struck New York in 1889 is of historical interest because it dashed itself against the city's first real skyscraper.

Until the 1870's none of New York's buildings was taller than five stories. Even so, it was difficult to rent the topmost floors because few people cared to trudge up many flights of stairs. Higher structures were erected as elevators improved. Elevators changed in size, shape, and operating principle. There were screw, hydraulic, steam, and finally electric elevators. As they became faster and safer, they won wider acceptance.

With the advent of the 1870's the city's five-story buildings were topped by others eight and ten stories high. Old-timers complained
that they threatened “to shut out the sky,” but enterprising men went on building them. In 1882 Cyrus W. Field put up the twelve-story Washington Building at 1 Broadway. This has been wrongly called the world's first skyscraper, but it was made of masonry, and true skyscrapers consist of steel skeletons.

These earliest tall buildings of solid masonry needed very thick walls to support the weight of each floor. As a consequence, the lower stories had such thick walls that they wasted a great deal of rentable floor space. A solid masonry structure was limited in height by the total weight it could support. With the development of elevators came the need for a new kind of construction that would allow the use of thinner walls all the way up the building.

The prototype of all skyscrapers was erected in Chicago, a city that was young and bold and short on precedent. After the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871 a flurry of new construction began on the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1884 an architect, named William Le Baron Jenney, built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago. It was only ten stories tall, and the Washington Building in New York soared to twelve stories. However, the Home Insurance Building was the world's first real skyscraper because it was the first to use steel skeleton construction instead of solid masonry. Its steel frame supported the weight of the thinner walls, as well as the weight of each floor.

The success of the Chicago landmark proved that there was no reasonable limit to the height of buildings. Besides steel construction and elevators, however, a third element was required to erect skyscrapers. This was a tough thick bed of rock on which to build. Parts of Manhattan's stony subsoil were perfect for shouldering the enormous weight of high buildings.

In the spring of 1887 a young New York silk merchant, named John L. Stearns, bought a lot at 50 Broadway on the east side of the street just south of Exchange Place. Its Broadway frontage was so narrow that a building only twenty-one and one-half feet wide could be erected there. Stearns wanted to put up a building that would earn him money from office rentals. If he built the conventional stone masonry structure, its walls would be so thick that he would not have enough rentable space to turn a profit. The more he pondered the problem, the more he felt that he had a white elephant on his hands. Stearns turned for help to a young New York architect, named Bradford Lee Gilbert.

For more than six months Gilbert meditated. Then one day he
realized that the solution was to erect a building like a steel bridge stood up on one end. First, he would raise a steel skeleton framework six stories high. On top of this he would place a seven-story superstructure. The walls would be only twelve inches thick and bear no weight at all. The weight of the walls and floors would be transmitted to the steel columns and then down to the cement footings of the foundation. The thin walls would provide more floor space and thus command more rentals than the usual masonry structure.

New York's ancient and rigid building laws, geared to solid masonry structures, dictated the exact thickness of walls in office buildings. Gilbert and Stearns agonized through long negotiations with various city officials before they were granted a construction permit by the buildings department. When newspapers heard about the plan for the radical new building, they dubbed it the Idiotic Building. New Yorkers were positive that Stearns' building would be blown over in the first strong windstorm. An engineer even wrote an alarming letter to Stearns, who handed it to his architect. By now Stearns himself feared that his new building would topple and that he would be sued for unprecedented damages. Gilbert, whose faith in himself never wavered, said to Stearns, “I will make my offices in the upper two floors of the Broadway end. If the building falls, I will fall with it.”

The statement satisfied Stearns, and work began on New York's first true skyscraper. The building was so slim that it began to look like a gigantic exclamation mark. Stearns named it the Tower Building because it towered into the sky. Except for the roof, the thirteen-story structure was finished when a hurricane hit the city one Sunday morning in 1889. With gusts of wind reaching a velocity of eighty miles an hour, Gilbert and Stearns rushed from their homes to the Tower Building to share in the crucial test it was undergoing.

By the time they arrived at 50 Broadway, a crowd had gathered—at a safe distance—to watch the fate of the building. The spectators babbled to one another that it was damned well going to blow down. Janitors and watchmen scurried out of buildings across the street, jabbering that they didn't want to be crushed to death when it fell.

Gilbert grabbed a plumb line and began climbing a ladder left in place by workmen when they had quit work the evening before. Stearns followed at his heels. From the crowd arose screams: “You
fools!
You'll be killed!” The architect and businessman could barely hear them above the shriek of the hurricane. Stearns' courage gave out when they reached the tenth floor. There he sprawled full
length on a scaffold and held on for dear life. Gilbert, who felt that the risk of his reputation was worth the risk of his life, continued to climb the ladder, rung by painful rung, his knuckles whitening with strain and gusts of wind battering him unmercifully. When he reached the thirteenth and top floor, he crawled on hands and knees along a scaffold. At a corner of the building he tugged the plumb line from a pocket, got a firm grip on one end of the cord, and dropped its leaden weight down toward the Broadway sidewalk. He later reported, “There was not the slightest vibration. The building stood as steady as a rock in the sea.”

In that moment of triumph Gilbert rashly jumped to his feet on the scaffold. His hat had been tightly crushed on his head. Now he snatched it off and waved it exultantly. The wind knocked him down. It scudded him toward one end of the scaffold. He gulped. He prayed. Wildly he grabbed about him. Just as he was about to be swept off the end of the board and down to certain death, he caught a rope lashing about in the wind from an upright beam of the tower. His grip held. The rope held. He steadied himself, eased down onto his knees, and carefully picked his way back to the ladder. Climbing down the ladder, he was joined by Stearns at the tenth floor, and the two men then made their way slowly back to street level.

Spectators cheered the heroes of the hour and gave way to let them pass. Locking arms, their chins upthrust, the architect and the businessman marched up Broadway, dumbfounding Trinity Church members just leaving the morning service, by singing in unison: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . . .”

New York's first skyscraper had passed its first test. The thin walls Gilbert designed gave Stearns $10,000 a year in extra rental. New York was to become
the
city of skyscrapers, a man-made Rocky Mountain range wondrous to behold. The end result was the world's greatest concentration of the tallest possible buildings on the smallest possible site. One year after this memorable Sunday, with the opening of the sixteen-story Pulitzer Building near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, a guest stepped off the elevator at the top floor and asked in a loud voice, “Is God in?”

New York needed a large hall for orchestral and choral music. The Metropolitan Opera House was inadequate for concert music because an orchestra's best effects were lost in the vast recesses of its stage. Chickering Hall and Steinway Hall were suitable only for
recitals. Theaters lacked the proper atmosphere for serious music. The Oratorio Society, founded by Leopold Damrosch in 1873, gave concerts in the showrooms of a piano store.

Damrosch also established the New York Symphony, and before he died in 1885, he passed along to his son Walter his vision of a huge music hall in New York. After his father's death Walter Damrosch became director of both the New York Symphony and the Oratorio Society. Serving on the society's board was Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. Young Damrosch told Carnegie that a chorus as large as that of the Oratorio Society had to have a much larger place in which to perform. Carnegie preferred pipe organs and bagpipes to symphony orchestras and choral groups, but his wife, twenty-four years his junior, urged him to give the city a great concert hall.

Carnegie acquiesced, partly because he foresaw the use of such a hall as a lecture platform and partly because he hoped that such a building could pay its own way. He told Damrosch that he was willing to spend $2,000,000 to construct the building, but that other New Yorkers would have to maintain and expand the institution. In the spring of 1889 Carnegie organized the Music Hall Company, and that summer excavation began for the main building.

The chosen site was the southeastern corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, then considered far uptown. Saloons abounded in the neighborhood, and Carnegie, who never drank liquor, was annoyed when he heard that at the end of a working day his laborers headed for a bar run by a brewery on Fifty-sixth Street. He cut off this source of supply by buying the property and closing the tavern.

The Music Hall, as Carnegie Hall was first called, was designed by William B. Tuthill. Besides being an accomplished architect, Tuthill had an excellent tenor voice, played the cello, was secretary of the Oratorio Society, and knew all of New York's serious musicians. In those days acoustical engineering was in its infancy, but Tuthill methodically studied the acoustics of all the important European concert halls. When the cornerstone was laid on May 13, 1890, Carnegie said of the structure, “It is built to stand for ages, and during these ages it is probable that this hall will intertwine itself with the history of our country.”