Description
The Flatiron Building is the 22-story steel-framed triangle at the meeting of Fifth Avenue, Broadway and 23rd Street in Manhattan: a wedge of limestone and glazed terracotta, 307 feet tall, with a corner so narrow that it looks like the prow of a ship.
The thing to see is the shape. Stand across the street, near Madison Square, and look at the north corner, the "Point," where the two facades come together.
Look up too, at the arched windows, the oriels and the deep cornice that crowns the building, and at the little low shop in front of the Point, nicknamed the "cowcatcher" and added soon after the opening.
Daniel Burnham designed it, with Frederick P. Dinkelberg, and it opened in 1902. The facade is divided like a classical column: a limestone base, a shaft of terracotta and a decorated top. The sharp corner is also the reason it has a name: the shape recalls a cast-iron clothes iron.
When the steel went up in 1902, people placed bets on how far the debris would fly once the wind knocked it down. A tower of twenty stories on a thin triangle of land: they called it "Burnham's Folly."
It is still standing: its steel frame was designed to resist four times the strongest wind in the area. The wind did cause trouble, though. It swirled around the sharp corner and lifted women's skirts, and according to some accounts policemen chased off the men who gathered to watch with a shout of "23 skidoo."
Officially it was the Fuller Building, after the construction company that built it as its headquarters. But the name everyone used was the Flatiron, to the builders' annoyance. It was even written on Burnham's drawings.
In 1903 Alfred Stieglitz photographed it in a snowstorm. To him it looked like "the bow of a monster ocean steamer – a picture of a new America still in the making."
The thing to see is the shape. Stand across the street, near Madison Square, and look at the north corner, the "Point," where the two facades come together.
Look up too, at the arched windows, the oriels and the deep cornice that crowns the building, and at the little low shop in front of the Point, nicknamed the "cowcatcher" and added soon after the opening.
Daniel Burnham designed it, with Frederick P. Dinkelberg, and it opened in 1902. The facade is divided like a classical column: a limestone base, a shaft of terracotta and a decorated top. The sharp corner is also the reason it has a name: the shape recalls a cast-iron clothes iron.
When the steel went up in 1902, people placed bets on how far the debris would fly once the wind knocked it down. A tower of twenty stories on a thin triangle of land: they called it "Burnham's Folly."
It is still standing: its steel frame was designed to resist four times the strongest wind in the area. The wind did cause trouble, though. It swirled around the sharp corner and lifted women's skirts, and according to some accounts policemen chased off the men who gathered to watch with a shout of "23 skidoo."
Officially it was the Fuller Building, after the construction company that built it as its headquarters. But the name everyone used was the Flatiron, to the builders' annoyance. It was even written on Burnham's drawings.
In 1903 Alfred Stieglitz photographed it in a snowstorm. To him it looked like "the bow of a monster ocean steamer – a picture of a new America still in the making."