Flatiron Building — skyscraper
Image by kokygonzalez from Pixabay

Flatiron Building

  • 2 min read
  • 40.741° N 73.990° W

Interesting facts

  • At its northern tip the building is only about 2 metres wide, where the two long facades meet at an angle of roughly 25 degrees.
  • Despite the nickname, the plot is a scalene right triangle, while a real flatiron is isosceles.
  • While it was going up, New Yorkers took bets on how far the debris would scatter when the wind blew it over, and some called it Burnham's Folly.
  • Its steel bracing was designed to resist four times the strongest wind it could ever be expected to face.
  • The gusts swirling round the prow lifted skirts and scattered papers; according to a popular story, policemen moving on onlookers gave rise to the phrase 23 skidoo.
  • Before the tower rose, a wall on the site carried a New York Times sign made of electric light bulbs, the first sign of its kind in the city.
  • Men's restrooms are on even-numbered floors and women's on odd ones, because women's facilities were not part of the original design.
  • Its water-powered hydraulic elevators were the last of their kind in New York City when they were finally replaced in the late 20th century.
  • The steel frame was cut so precisely that, according to The New York Times, the pieces went together without altering a single bored hole.
  • In 1966 it and the Manhattan Municipal Building became the first two skyscrapers protected as New York City landmarks.

Why it is worth it

Few buildings have a better site than the Flatiron. Where Broadway cuts diagonally across Fifth Avenue at East 22nd Street, it leaves a thin triangle of land, and in 1902 Daniel Burnham's Chicago office, with Frederick Dinkelberg, filled it completely: 22 storeys and 307 feet of wedge, rounded to a narrow prow at the north end and only 87 feet wide at the back. Its developers named it the Fuller Building after George A. Fuller, founder of the construction firm that built it, but New Yorkers saw the shape of a clothes iron from the first day, and the nickname won.

The design is a skyscraper dressed as a Renaissance palazzo. The façade is divided like a classical column — a heavier base of limestone for the first three floors, a long shaft, and an ornate crown — and above the base the walls are clad in richly ornamented glazed terracotta. Behind it all stands a steel frame from the American Bridge Company, the technology that allowed such height on such a sliver. Stand at the tip and look up: the two long walls converge on a single rounded edge, and the building seems to lean towards you.

It was the camera that turned the Flatiron into an emblem. After a snowstorm in 1903 Alfred Stieglitz photographed it from Madison Square Park, its prow rising behind a snow-laden tree, and later remembered it looming like the bow of an ocean liner — "a picture of the new America", as he put it. Edward Steichen photographed it too, and the building has been a favourite subject of painters and photographers ever since. It became a New York City landmark in 1966 and a National Historic Landmark in 1989, and it gave its name to the whole surrounding district.

The best views are free and from the street: from Madison Square Park at dusk, when the windows light up, or from a few blocks up Fifth Avenue or Broadway, where the wedge closes the view like a ship moored in the grid.

Getting there

The Flatiron stands at 175 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, about half a kilometre from Gramercy Park. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is roughly 11 km away; JFK and Newark serve New York as well. The 23rd Street station on the BMT Broadway Line has entrances right beside the building.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New York 17The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Striking Skyscrapers in the United States 6The Most Striking Skyscrapers 20The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Flatiron Building is a 22-story, 307-foot-tall (93.6 m) steel-framed triangular building at 175 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, New York, US. Designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg, it opened in 1902. The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street—where the building's 87-foot (27 m) back end is located—with East 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak. The name "Flatiron" derives from its triangular shape, which recalls that of a cast-iron clothes iron.

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