At 7.30 on the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pushed a
button on his desk in Washington, DC, sending a telegraphic signal to New
York where it set off an alarm bell in the engine room of a skyscraper and
set in motion four mighty Corliss-type engines and dynamos. In an instant,
some 80,000 incandescent bulbs flashed on, illuminating for the first time
the world’s tallest skyscraper – the Woolworth Building. Thousands of
spectators had gathered in City Hall Park and along lower Broadway to
witness the dazzling electrical spectacle that marked the opening of this
fifty-five-storey addition to New York’s skyline. On the New Jersey shore,
people caught their breath as the tower appeared, shimmering against the
night sky, a gleaming beacon of modernity visible from ships a hundred miles
away. As the 792-foot tall skyscraper was bathed in electric light, the news
was being transmitted from its pinnacle by Marconi wireless to a receiver on
the Eiffel Tower. From there it was beamed around the world. This modern
media event was, as one commentator said, “the premier publicity stunt of
this or any other day”. It was a fitting opening for what would become the
most famous office building in the world.
The pinnacled tower of the Woolworth Building no longer dominates Manhattan’s
vertiginous skyline as it once did. But at the time this “singular Gothic
spire” offered New Yorkers passing by on the pavement “an experience of
sheer vertical ascent unrivalled by the taller but stepped-back skyscrapers
of the 1920s”. The Skyscraper and the City, Gail Fenske’s beautifully
illustrated biography of this landmark building, tells the fascinating story
of the people behind its construction, from the workers who risked the bends
digging its 100-foot-deep foundations in pressurized caissons, to the
structural ironworkers, balanced precariously hundreds of feet above ground,
who assembled its steel skeleton at a record-breaking rate of a storey and a
half a week. But two figures loom large in the story of this architectural
marvel: the building’s architect, Cass Gilbert, and Frank Woolworth, the
building’s owner.
Members of New York’s Hardware Club were rumoured to refer to Woolworth as
“the Napoleon of commerce”. Within thirty years, Woolworth had built his
chain of five- and ten-cent stores into a $65 million multi-national
corporation, including seven three-and-sixpence stores in Britain.
Ironically, according to Fenske, Woolworth was “an outstandingly inept
salesman”. But whatever his skills behind a retail counter, he was
undoubtedly a shrewd businessman. In particular, he was an expert judge of
urban locations for his stores. In choosing the site for his New York
headquarters, he made detailed studies of crowd flows along the Manhattan
sidewalks. He wanted his skyscraper to be at the pulsing heart of the
metropolis. It would promote the identity of his company like a “giant
signboard”, he told a friend, becoming the flagship of his vast retail
empire, a “monument to the Woolworth business”.
The man he chose to design his landmark structure was Cass Gilbert. When he
first met Woolworth, Gilbert had been running a successful New York
architectural practice dedicated to the “city beautiful” for thirty years.
He described himself as “just an ordinary young fellow with his mind so bent
on his art and so intent on it that everything else was second to it”. What
Fenske describes as his “monumental, pictorial, and lavishly decorated
Beaux-Arts compositions” had already helped to create the visual identity of
New York as a world city. Gilbert and Woolworth were both ambitious men,
keen to create a spectacular architectural statement that would raise their
profiles in New York and America. On business trips to Europe, Woolworth had
made notes on buildings. The Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament in
London made a particular impression on him. A soaring tower such as this
would, he believed, imprint the Woolworth corporate brand forever on the
skyline of New York.
Later, Gilbert recalled drily that his client took a keen interest in progress
on his building: “There was no detail that did not have Frank Woolworth’s
personal supervision . . . somewhat to my temporary distress”. Woolworth was
not disappointed in his choice of architect. The finished building was a
triumph, both aesthetically and technologically. From the outset, Gilbert
had made it clear that he was not interested in designing “a purely
commercial structure”. He wanted “to clothe it with beauty” and “to make it
a worthy ornament to the great city of New York”. Although Woolworth kept a
close eye on every purchase, no expense was spared. The steel-framed
structure was cast in limestone-coloured, glazed architectural terracotta
panels, which gave the skyscraper the patina of age and a hand-crafted
appearance. But this was the machine age and the building was also fitted
with the latest plumbing, electrical and ventilating technologies. The
interior decorations were opulent beyond anything that had been seen before
in New York’s skyscrapers. To walk through the Tudor Gothic portal and into
the cruciform lobby arcade, with its stunning blue, red and gold mosaics,
was to experience the spiritual aura of a great cathedral. Woolworth was
satisfied with his skyscraper. It was “beautiful beyond description”, he
said, rivalling even Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
For all its evocative allusions to early Christian and Gothic architecture,
the Woolworth Building was without question a modern shrine to commerce and,
as Fenske ably demonstrates, a “heroic feat of technology”. In the early
years of the twentieth century, there seemed to be no limits to what science
and technology would achieve. Utopia seemed to be within the grasp of city
planners. Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella’s Invented Edens examines
this attempt to realize the dream of the ideal city with the wonders of
technology, urban experiments they term “techno-cities”. Beginning with
Ebenezer Howard’s seminal notion of the “Garden City” in the 1890s, their
slim yet detailed study shows how this urban model was reinterpreted between
the wars in the very different contexts of New Deal liberalism (Norris,
Tennessee), Italian Fascism (Torviscosa, Friuli-Venezia Giulia), Soviet
Communism (Stalingrad), and German Nazism (Salzgitter, Lower Saxony). In
each case “modernist reformers” sought to redefine the classic industrial
city, designing out urban problems such as congestion, pollution and
disease. These were all cities on a human scale, with walkable distances,
open communal spaces and green belts. For city planners from Roosevelt’s
America to Hitler’s Germany, the techno-city became “technologically
enhanced Edens that were to be the birthplaces of a ‘new man’”.
Later attempts to build the ideal city included Oak Ridge in eastern
Tennessee. Originally known only as Site X, this secret city did not appear
on maps until 1949. It was created as part of the Manhattan Project to build
that most terrible symbol of our techno-scientific age: the atomic bomb. Its
industrial facilities enriched uranium and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant
that still looms over the landscape was “the largest building in the world
under one roof”. By the end of the war, some 75,000 people were living in
Oak Ridge. Yet the plan for this techno-city harked back to romantic notions
of man’s place in nature, with tree-lined streets and houses laid out not in
a mathematical grid but “in organic clusters to foster a sense of
community”. There is, of course, a profound and tragic irony in the fact
that the people who lived in this utopian city were building a weapon
designed for one purpose – to destroy cities. Like the mythic Eden invoked
by Kargon and Molella, this ideal Garden City was built with the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil right at its heart.
The authors conclude with an account of the design and construction of
Celebration in Florida. Opened in 1996, it was originally the “utopian
dream” of Walt Disney who envisaged a space-age, futuristic environment. In
contrast, this New Urbanist city looks more Norman Rockwell than Buck
Rogers. But the pre-war architectural styles are a veneer concealing a
high-tech reality, including an advanced fibre optic communication network.
According to Kargon and Molella, this is “a revolution designed to give us
both our past and our future at the same time”. As the authors point out,
such techno-cities have always been an uneasy union of both modernist and
anti-modern elements. In the same way as the Woolworth Building fused
technology with Gothic fantasy, so the planners of techno-cities were “drawn
to the nostalgic notion of the pre-industrial village Eden”, an attempt to
bring small-town values into the city. What the authors term
“techno-nostalgia” created a fatal fault-line running through the ideal of
the techno-city: “the machine in the garden is a seductive dream, but a
problematic reality”. Techno-cities may have been “bold social experiments”,
but in the end they were doomed to failure.
Invented Edens offers many intriguing and original insights into the links
between technology and urban planning. But it lacks a strong sense of what
it was like to live in these techno-cities. The physicality of the urban
experience is, however, splendidly evoked by Dell Upton in Another City, his
impressive study of urban life in the new American republic. For Upton,
cities are human environments, not just collections of architectural
structures. To describe the urban landscape, you need both intellectual
history and the experiences of “the bodies that built and used it”. Upton’s
book offers a memorable glimpse of the “sensory encounter” with early
nineteenth-century American cities. Drawing extensively on travel accounts,
diaries and letters, he shows how the “insistent and importunate sights,
sounds and smells surpassed anything previously known in the new nation”.
According to Upton, “oceans of fetor” flooded pre-Civil War American cities.
Tanneries, distilleries, slaughterhouses and fat-rendering plants all
belched their unique stenches into the metropolitan air. Added to this were
the smells of the animals with which people shared their cities: horses,
cattle, goats and pigs. In New York, “public porkers” were still roaming the
streets in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most American cities of the
time had no drainage systems. Rubbish was generally thrown out into the
street where it collected in a putrefying heap known as “corporation pie”,
until scavengers hired by the city disposed of it. “Climate, poor drainage,
unpaved streets, and air pollution rendered the urban environment palpable
as well as fragrant”, writes Upton, with notable understatement.
It was not just the noses of urbanites, but also their ears that were
continually assailed. Even before the internal combustion engine, a
perpetual cacophony reigned in the city. One person complained that in New
Orleans “the very air howls with an eternal din and noise”. There was the
clatter of metal-rimmed cartwheels on cobbled streets, the sound of
manufacturing in the upper storeys of residential buildings, and the cries
of street vendors: “Hot Muf-fins!”, “Sweep, O-O-O-O!”. Upton argues that the
sheer sensory overload of urban life, the kaleidoscopic deluge of
experiences in the city, challenged people’s sense of self: “The relics of
civilized life that bombarded the senses, and the mixed throngs that crowded
the streets of antebellum cities, were the crucible within which city
dwellers formed a sense of what it meant to be a citizen of a republican
city”. As Upton's meticulously researched study shows, it was this daily
confrontation with the chaotic nature of urban life that convinced citizens
of the new republic that they needed to bring order and unity to American
cities. Believing as they did that the environment can shape the moral
outlook of individuals, Americans attempted to create urban environments
that were both civilized and urbane, ones that encouraged a sense of
community and shared citizenship. As Kargon and Molella show, such
aspirations continued to resonate in twentieth-century debates about the
ideal city.
In the years after 1790, urban elites in America tried to realize their dream
of a shining city upon a hill. A concerted effort was made to “regulate”
their cityscapes, a term used for what Upton describes as the “meticulous
ordering” of the environment: “The regulation projects of the early republic
constituted an aggressive new campaign to subdue the environment, creating a
landscape that would embody republican values and that would promote
republican modes of citizenship and selfhood”. They introduced quieter
street surfaces, passed laws stopping vendors from using “noisemakers” and
criers to attract customers, built sewers, relocated cemeteries away from
city centres, replanted parks and squares to make them suitable for genteel
promenading, and cleaned up waterfronts – “all projects directed toward the
twin goals of civilization and urbanity”. Cities were redesigned, often
using a grid plan (as in New York and Philadelphia), in order to create
environments where civilized and urbane interactions could take place.
The attempt to transform spaces and lives in the new republic extended to
institutions such as Philadelphia’s revolutionary Eastern State
Penitentiary, “one of the most significant architectural monuments of the
early republic”. Just as the aim here was to create model citizens out of
criminals, so Upton argues that there was a concerted attempt to “reorder
human relationships” in American cities at this time in order to create a
new republican self. Ultimately, however, this “republican spatial
imagination” (as Upton terms it) was somewhat less successful at reforming
people’s lives than it was at reorganizing urban spaces. Life in the big
city remained chaotic and messy. Fortunately so, perhaps, for as one writer
said in 1854 about New York, “its hurry, its bustle” and its constant noise
were all a vital part of the dynamism of life in the modern metropolis: “It
is contagious, and it has a good effect upon the spirits and health of an
idle man”.
Gail Fenske
THE SKYSCRAPER AND THE CITY
The Woolworth Building and the making of modern New York
352pp. University of Chicago Press. $65; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £34.
978 0 226 24141 8
Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella
INVENTED EDENS
Techno-cities of the twentieth century
190pp. MIT Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £16.95.
978 0 262 11320 5
Dell Upton
ANOTHER CITY
Urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic
416pp. Yale University Press. £30 (US $45).
978 0 300 12488 0
P. D. Smith’s study of science and German literature, Metaphor and
Materiality, was published in 2000. His most recent book is Doomsday Men:
The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the Superweapon, 2008. He is an
Honorary Research Fellow in the Science and Technology Studies Department at
University College London.
