High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

by Jim Rasenberger

  “In the eyes of all men, not hidden in shops nor buried in the bowels of the earth, they are continually plying their muscular yet delicate and venturesome craft,” declared one admirer in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in July of 1901. “Look up fifteen stories along the steel ribs of a great business structure just under way and the structural workers are like insects creeping over the great metal limb…. With but a plank, perhaps a beam of iron only, as a resting place between earth and sky, the workers are doing wonderful things, just how wonderful you must be up there to see.”

  For those already up there, the view was superb. It contained shards of the past and glimpses of the future, a mind-boggling collage of transformation. Far out in the waters of the harbor were the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where nearly half a million immigrants would arrive within the year. Closer, to the east, was the Brooklyn Bridge, 20 years old and supporting tens of thousands of people a day. At the foot of the island, near the anchorage of the bridge, was Wall Street, where the New York Stock Exchange surged into record territory—an astonishing two million trades in a single day, then three million a few months later.

  It was down there on Wall Street that J. P. Morgan had recently consolidated the largest single corporation in history, United States Steel. Largely formed around Andrew Carnegie’s already enormous holdings of steel mills, railroads, and mines, and worth over a billion dollars, U.S. Steel instantly controlled 60 percent of the American steel market and 30 percent of the world steel market. In March of 1901, the cover of Harper’s Weekly featured a drawing of the earth girded by a thick belt; Uncle Sam stood over the earth, pulling the belt tight. “A Steel Cinch on the World,” read the caption. Lest anyone miss the point, an editorial in the magazine affirmed it two weeks later: “The United States has become the master of the world in making steel. It has no rival.”

  Most strikingly, what the man on the 15th floor saw from his perch of steel—steel, as it happened, that had been forged by U.S. Steel; the Flatiron was among the new conglomerate’s first customers—were the high spires and towers, the domes and turrets, of brazen new buildings. This was a very different skyline from the one that made Whitman swoon 20 years earlier. Over 300 buildings rose nine stories or higher. Dozens rose 15 or 20 stories, and at least seven now soared above the steeple of Trinity Church. Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building, at 309 feet, had been the first to overtake Trinity in 1890; the Park Row Building, its twin copper-roof cupolas reaching nearly 400 feet over City Hall Park, was the latest, completed in 1899.

  “It is not easy to imagine the feelings of a New Yorker exiled for a period of ten or twelve years—no more—who is returning to his native land by one of the ocean steamships,” the engineer William Birkmire had written a few years earlier. “As he looks about from the deck of the vessel as it steams up the bay, the first glance that he obtains of the lower part of Manhattan island will probably be, if he has not been forewarned, the greatest surprise of his life.”

  The buildings inspired a wide range of reaction, from awe to disgust. Mainly, they seemed to inspire anxiety. A public accustomed to stocky stone buildings remained skeptical that these high wispy things could stand. In 1888, during the construction of a narrow 145-foot-tall structure on lower Broadway called the Tower Building—generally credited as New York’s first true metal-frame skyscraper—a leery crowd gathered in a gale at a safe distance, fully expecting to watch it topple. The building’s architect, Bradford Gilbert, tried to reassure the crowd by climbing to the top with a plumb line. “When I reached the thirteenth floor, the gale was so fierce I could not stand upright,” Gilbert later told the New York Times. “I crawled on my hands and knees along the scaffolding and dropped the plumb-line. There was not the slightest vibration. The building stood as steady as a rock in the sea.”

  Gilbert’s demonstration notwithstanding, rumors about the instability of tall metal-frame structures had proliferated through the first decade of New York’s skyscrapers. A tenant of the 20-story American Tract Society Building claimed that on upper floors clocks and watches lost time or ceased functioning due to vibration. A Boston newspaper warned that all buildings within the vicinity of skyscrapers were in mortal danger. Even the renowned architect of many of these enormous new buildings, George B. Post, publicly expressed doubts about their viability. “It may stand a short gust of wind blowing very hard, but if this were to keep up for any length of time, the cage might begin to sway,” he told the New York Times. “Then matters would be serious. The rivets would be cut off and the oscillations would increase with each swing backward and forward, soon wrecking the building.”

  From Paris, meanwhile, came a prediction from a French savant with even more ominous implications for metal-frame structures: that the iron of the Eiffel Tower would spontaneously polarize, becoming, in effect, a 1,000-foot-high magnet sucking everything metal toward it. “All the houses in Paris will suffer from a St. Vitus’s dance, and, gradually attracted toward the Champ de Mars, will finally find themselves stuck to the tower,” reported the Scientific American in 1886, evidently more amused than alarmed by the prospect. “As for locomotives entering Paris, it will be found impossible to stop them at the various termini; they will rush through Paris, and dash themselves to pieces against the center of attraction.”

  A more recent and serious concern among many architects and physicians was that tall buildings would cause rampant spread of disease by casting streets in permanent midnight. “The results of bacteriological investigation show that the evil microbes flourish and increase in damp, dark places, but that sunlight destroys their life,” stated an 1896 report by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Our narrow streets, when lined with tall structures, will become unhealthy alleys….”

  The most pressing concern of many New Yorkers was simply that their old city was quickly vanishing beneath an alien new city of skyscrapers. A few years after the Flatiron topped out, the writer Henry James, returning to his native New York from a long sojourn in Europe, would despair at these “monsters of the market,” as he referred to the tall buildings. “Where, for the eye, is the felicity of simplified gothic, of noble pre-eminence, that once made of this highly pleasing edifice the pride of the town and the feature of Broadway?” he would plaintively wonder of old Trinity Church. “The answer is, as obviously, that these charming elements are still there, just where they ever were, but that they have been mercilessly deprived of their visibility.”

  CHICAGO

  Whatever one thought about these new buildings, they were an authentic American creation. They were not an idea borrowed from across the Atlantic, from Henry James’ beloved Europe, like so much American architecture and culture in the nineteenth century. They were as “indigenous as the red Indian,” the British architect Alfred Bossom would later write. And they came not from the east, but from the west—from Chicago.

  Riveters on the Trinity Building, New York City, 1904. In the background is the steeple of Trinity Church, the tallest structure in Manhattan until 14 years earlier, now overwhelmed by the steel skyscrapers rising around it. (Trade Catalog Collection, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries)

  “In the early eighties…Chicago was like a young bustling giant bursting his clothes,” wrote Paul Starrett, one of four brothers who would become legends in the skyscraper-building industry—and who all began their careers in Chicago. The city was the nexus of the expanding country; virtually every major rail line passed through it. Just a decade earlier, it had been leveled by a ferocious fire, but it had been reborn, more robust and brash than ever. By 1880, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the country.

  The red hot center of Chicago was the Loop, a small patch of the sprawling city circumscribed by Lake Michigan to the east, the Chicago River to the north and west, and railroad yards to the south. Businesses pressed themselves into the confines of the Loop, and the more businesses that built and settled there, the more businesses
that wanted—needed—to be there. The price of real estate escalated rapidly through the 1880s, from $130,000 to $900,000 per acre. For property owners, the rising price of real estate created an overwhelming incentive to add leasable square footage. Given the limits of available land, there was only one way to go: up.

  The height of buildings had been pretty well fixed at six stories through the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a matter not of structural integrity but of human endurance, five flights of stairs being about as many as anybody could reasonably be expected to climb. This first problem of height had been solved by Elijah Otis’s “safety elevator,” first demonstrated in 1854 and now commonplace in 10-and 11-story office buildings and hotels around the Loop. But while Otis’s elevators made new heights plausible, the new heights created a fresh set of problems. The “elevator buildings” were primarily constructed of masonry, supported by walls of stone and brick. The taller a masonry building grew, and the more weight its walls had to bear, the thicker those walls had to be, particularly near the base. Thicker walls meant less floor space and fewer windows. The last of the tall masonry buildings in Chicago, the 16-story Monadnock, completed in 1891, required walls six feet thick at its base. Since lower floors yielded the highest rents, the equation was financially untenable.

  In 1883, a practical-minded architect with the ornate name of William LeBaron Jenney began planning the nine-story Home Insurance Building right in the heart of the Loop. Jenney, born in 1832, was one of the older architects in the city. He had employed and mentored many of the young Chicago architects whose reputations would eventually surpass his own, including Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan. He was respected and well liked—a natural “bon vivant,” as Sullivan described him—but nobody thought much of his aesthetic judgment. Jenney had spent the Civil War as an engineer for Ulysses S. Grant, and later for William Tecumseh Sherman, rebuilding bridges for the invading Union army. He thought like an engineer. Pragmatics came before aesthetics, calculation before decoration.

  As Jenney planned the building, he faced an architectural conundrum. On one hand, the building, to pay for itself, would have to be tall, at least nine stories. On the other hand, the president of the Home Insurance Company, J. J. Martin, insisted that the building have numerous windows to permit light and fresh air into offices. A normal masonry high-rise was out of the question. “How are you going to manage it?” wondered Martin. Jenney replied that he was going to go home and think about it.

  In one version of the story, almost certainly apocryphal, Jenney arrived home, deep in thought, and came upon his wife reading a book. As she closed her book and set it atop a birdcage, Jenney’s eyes narrowed on the birdcage. Seeing how the thin rods of the cage so effortlessly bore the weight of the book, he was struck by a vision of a building constructed like a cage, in which the weight of the building is removed from the walls and placed on a metal frame, and in which the walls are no more important structurally than the blanket laid over a birdcage at night. Eureka!

  A hapless young Minneapolis architect named L. S. Buffington had a more sinister explanation for Jenney’s epiphany: he believed that Jenney swiped his idea. Buffington had been dreaming of tall skeleton-frame buildings (he called them “cloud sketchers”) as early as 1880 and had written and spoken of them well before the Home Insurance Building came into existence, although he never actually built one. As for where he got his ideas, he credited the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, who years earlier had envisioned a building remarkably like a skeleton-frame skyscraper: “A practical architect might not unnaturally conceive the idea of erecting a vast edifice whose frame should be entirely of iron, enclosing that frame and preserving it by means of a casing of stone.”

  Actually, Jenney’s plan for the Home Insurance Building was neither an act of thievery nor a leap of genius. It was a simple step of logic. Iron columns and beams had been deployed architecturally since the middle of the nineteenth century, when cast-iron buildings first began to rise in New York City. In masonry buildings, cast-iron columns had been used to add strength to walls and piers, and wrought-iron beams had long served as lintels and girders. So the idea of using iron framing to support buildings was not new. What was new was the idea of supporting the building entirely with iron framing.

  The idea owed something to earlier architecture, but it owed an even larger debt, often overlooked in histories of skyscrapers, to the railroad bridges of nineteenth-century America. Jenney’s experience in the Civil War made him well acquainted with bridge-building techniques and almost certainly influenced his architecture. Bradford Gilbert, that fearless designer of New York’s Tower Building, referred to his own metal-frame design as “an iron bridge truss stood on end.” When steel-frame skyscrapers became common late in the century, it was bridge companies that fabricated the steel and oversaw their erection. Bridges, with a metaphorical aptness worthy of bad poetry, were what you crossed on your way to the modern city.

  FLYING TRAPEZOIDS

  “It is a notorious fact that there is no country of the world which is more in need of good and permanent Bridges than the United States of America,” wrote the American bridge builder Thomas Pope in 1810. Just four years after Lewis and Clark returned from their failed hunt for a water route across the continent, Pope foresaw that the future of the country depended not on navigating rivers but on spanning them. “Extended along an immense line of coast on which abound rivers, creeks and swamps, it is impossible that any physical union of the country can really take place until the labours of the architect and mechanic shall have more perfectly done away the inconvenience arising from the intervention of waters.”

  Nineteenth-century American bridge builders built more bridges than any country in the world. Before the end of the century, over 200,000 bridges would be erected in the United States, some 3,000 miles of bridge in all. Acknowledged masterpieces like the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Eads Bridge in St. Louis notwithstanding, the great majority of nineteenth-century American bridges were unlovely, workmanlike truss bridges, or what engineer Thomas Curtis-Clark referred to, in 1869, as “skeleton girder” bridges (anticipating the term for metal-frame building by about 30 years). A truss was essentially a brace, usually trapezoidal, that ran along each side of the bridge span to prevent it from sagging or collapsing. Each side of the truss was comprised of a top chord and a bottom chord—the principal horizontal girders—and, between the two, a lattice of diagonal cables or bars. The genius of a good truss was that it gave ample support without adding much weight. This was critical. The more something weighs the stronger it needs to be simply to hold itself up and—not incidentally—the more it costs to build.

  As with most engineering, bridge building was the art of doing more with less, and a good truss combined strength with economy. But strength was difficult for early bridge builders to calculate. Unlike buildings, in which strains, absent earthquakes, were fairly constant and predictable (gravity pulling down and wind pushing sideways), even the simplest bridge faced complex strains in keeping its own dead load aloft. Then came the sudden intense impact of the live load—a 35-ton locomotive, for instance, trailed by hundreds of clattering tons of freight—and the bridge jiggled and danced on its bolts and pins, its iron pulled and pressed and wrenched, and then a few moments later it was all over. The live load was off to torture another bridge, and the dead load recovered, unbent, and attempted to resume its pre-assaulted state. Every time this happened, it became a little more arthritic, a little less like its old springy self. And then, one day, perhaps, it collapsed.

  Bridges collapsed frequently in the late nineteenth century, 25 times a year on average in the 1870s and 1880s. Occasionally, a bridge collapsed spectacularly and with great loss of life, as occurred one snowy December night in 1876. Two locomotives, traveling front to back and trailed by 11 railroad cars, slowly started across a 13-year-old wrought-iron bridge in Ashtabula, Ohio. The first locomotive had just made it safely across when the bridge fell. Th
e second locomotive and all 11 cars fell with it into the deep gorge below. Ninety-two people died, making Ashtabula the worst American train disaster of the century.

  When a bridge fell, engineers flocked to its mangled remains, eager to learn what had gone wrong so they could avoid the fatal flaw in their own bridges. With every disaster they learned what worked and what failed. What were the tolerances of cast or wrought iron? Which arrangements of chords and diagonals gave strength to a truss and which did not? The bridges schooled American engineers, providing them an opportunity to experiment with new structural forms and to gauge the strength of materials, like iron, that would play such an important role in the development of skyscrapers.

  Iron was still something of a mystery metal when the first iron bridges began going up in the middle of the nineteenth century. The material had been in use in various forms for thousands of years but until this moment nobody had ever asked much of it structurally. The oldest form of iron is wrought, which humans began using in substantial quantity around 1200 B.C. Wrought iron is the reduction of iron ore heated at very high temperatures. Cast iron came later, in the fourteenth century. The main difference between wrought and cast iron is the amount of carbon that binds with the iron during smelting. Wrought iron has very little carbon; cast iron has a great deal of it. Wrought iron is softer, more pliable and flexible. Cast iron is hard and brittle; it is easily cast in shapes—hence its name and prevalence as an ornamental metal—and bears up well under great weight. Under the wrong conditions, though, cast iron buckles and breaks. In the parlance of engineers, wrought iron performs best under tension—as, for instance, a floor beam—while cast iron performs best under compression, as a column. Nobody really understood these distinctions when builders began putting up iron bridges. And when the transition to steel began in the 1870s, nobody understood much about it as structural material either.