Woolworth Building

For sixteen years the tallest building on Earth was a Gothic cathedral built for a five-and-dime fortune. The Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway rises 792 feet (about 241 metres) over City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, its pale terracotta tower climbing through setbacks to a copper-roofed pyramid crowned with pinnacles. When it opened in 1913 it took the title of world's tallest building from the Metropolitan Life Tower, and held it until 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building overtook it in 1929–1930.

The tower was the idea of Frank W. Woolworth, whose chain of five-and-ten-cent stores paid for it as a corporate headquarters. The architect was Cass Gilbert, and the steel frame was engineered by Gunvald Aus and Kort Berle. The first scheme was for a modest office block of a dozen or so floors; Woolworth kept pushing it higher, even sending surveyors to measure the Metropolitan Life Tower so that his own could beat it. Gilbert dressed the steel skeleton in Neo-Gothic ornament drawn from 15th- and 16th-century models, with strong vertical piers running unbroken to the crown and a skin of glazed terracotta made in subtly varied tints so that the facade reads as one stone colour from the street. A clergyman's booklet of 1916 nicknamed it "The Cathedral of Commerce", a label Gilbert himself disliked. On the opening night of 24 April 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington to switch on the building's lights.

The cruciform lobby is the building's other marvel: barrel-vaulted arcades lined with veined marble from the Greek island of Skyros, ceilings of blue, green and gold glass mosaic, and a stained-glass skylight. Sculpted grotesques at the mezzanine caricature the men who made the building — Gilbert clutching a model of the tower, Aus measuring a girder, Woolworth counting nickels and dimes. The building became a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and a New York City landmark in 1983; its upper floors have since been converted into residences.

Lower Manhattan, the oldest part of New York City, holds the city's first generation of skyscrapers, and the Woolworth Building faces the city's own City Hall across the park. Its silhouette, with the copper crown visible from miles away, was designed to be read from a distance.

Getting there

The building is in Lower Manhattan, New York City, on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street, opposite City Hall Park. The subway stations at Park Place and City Hall are next to it and a block to the north. The nearest airport in a straight line is Teterboro Airport (TEB), about 16 km away, a general-aviation field; the main commercial airports are LaGuardia (LGA) and Newark Liberty (EWR), each roughly 13–14 km away in a straight line.