Flatiron Building

The iron-shaped tower on a triangular lot, one of New York’s first famous skyscrapers

Local name: Flatiron Building

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The tip of the Flatiron where Broadway meets Fifth Avenue · Gabriel Fernandes from São Paulo, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Flatiron Building. It stands on a triangular lot where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street. That is where the nickname comes from: from above, the building looks like an old-fashioned clothes iron. Officially it was named the Fuller Building, after George A. Fuller, the founder of the construction company, who was called the father of the skyscraper. The design came from Daniel Burnham’s Chicago firm, and its lead author was the architect Frederick Dinkelberg. The building opened on the first of October 1902. It has twenty-two stories, and after an addition in 1905 it stands 307 feet tall. The northern tip of the building is only about six and a half feet wide. Writers compared it to a great ship sailing up the avenue. While it was going up, New Yorkers placed bets on how far the debris would fly when the wind knocked it down. It held: the steel frame was designed for four times the strongest wind it could ever face. But the wind around it really did turn unpredictable and blew up women’s skirts. They say policemen chased off the gawkers with a shout of “twenty-three skidoo,” meaning “get off Twenty-Third Street.” Where the phrase really came from is still disputed. In 1903 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz captured the building in a snowstorm, and a year later Edward Steichen photographed it too. Today the offices inside have been turned into apartments.

Visiting

175 Fifth Avenue, at 23rd Street. The best spot is the pedestrian plaza north of the building, facing its sharp tip; Madison Square is across the street. The building is residential, so there is no way inside. The 23rd Street subway station is next to it.