Woolworth Building

A Gothic skyscraper that was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1929

Local name: Woolworth Building

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Woolworth Building tower seen from below · MariekeSlagter, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Woolworth Building, the skyscraper nicknamed the Cathedral of Commerce. Its owner, Frank Woolworth, grew up on a farm. In 1879, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he opened his first successful store, where everything cost five or ten cents. Shoppers picked goods off the counters themselves, and the chain grew fast. In 1910 Woolworth hired the architect Cass Gilbert. An account of their conversation survives. Gilbert asked how high to make the tower. Woolworth answered with a question: how high can you make it? And he asked for fifty feet more than the Metropolitan Life tower, then the tallest in the world. The skyscraper went up between 1911 and 1913. It has sixty stories and stands 792 feet tall. On the twenty-fourth of April 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington, and the lights of the new building came on in New York. It remained the tallest building in the world until 1929. From outside it looks like a Gothic cathedral, and it is clad in terra cotta. The preacher S. Parkes Cadman called it the Cathedral of Commerce, and the name stuck. The lobby is lined with marble from the Greek island of Skyros, and the vaults are covered in mosaic. Funny little figures hide under the ceiling: the architect Gilbert holds a model of the building, and Woolworth himself counts his nickels and dimes. After 2001 the lobby was closed to tourists, but since 2014 tours have been taking visitors inside again. Today the upper floors are apartments.

Visiting

233 Broadway, across from City Hall Park; the Park Place subway station is right by the building. It is a residential and office building, and you cannot just walk in. The lobby can only be seen on a paid, reserved tour; check in advance whether tours are running. The whole tower is best seen from City Hall Park.