![]() Working in a Beaux-Arts style, Flagg put his theories to the test in the Singer Tower, also called the Singer Building, expanding an original 10-story base to 14 stories, then building a smaller 33 -story tower atop it. “All four sides could then be treated architecturally, and ‘we should soon have a city of towers instead of a city of dismal ravines.'” Unconcerned with maximizing available real estate, he “urged that skyscraper towers more than 10 or 15 stories high should be set back from the property lines, so that the tower occupied only one-quarter of the lot,” writes Gray. For a brief moment, between the years 19, it was the tallest building in the world, until it lost the title to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, another unusual building unlike the rectangular skyscrapers against which Flagg railed. So impressive was it for its time that Flagg’s building won comparisons to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. The endeavor produced a modern marvel, “a one-of-a-kind tower” rising above the New York City skyline, notes the video above, “a total masterpiece of architecture and engineering unlike anything seen before” - the Singer Tower, built for the Singer Sewing Machine Company in 1908. “In the 1890’s,” writes Christopher Gray, Paris-trained architect Ernest Flagg “denounced the growing crop of skyscrapers, and by the turn of the 20th century he was horrified by the darkened streets and raw side walls produced by such buildings.” Flagg’s opinions were of little interest to his New York employers, so he “shifted his focus to reforming skyscraper design” instead of decrying them outright. Such opposition stretches back well over 100 years, to the turn-of-the-century New York of the Flatiron Building and Beaux Arts wonders like Penn Station, a building, The New York Times writes, that “once made travelers feel important.” In decades past, they fought the faceless towers that rose into the atmosphere and blocked the sun. Now, artists, urbanists, and architects protest faceless condos and big box stores. Its strata of public works projects, cultural institutions, department stores, hotels, hostels, housing, and skyscraping office buildings tell the story of its evolution. This goes for the city’s architecture as much as for its population. New York is never just one city it’s always several, interacting with – or pushing out – each other. ![]()
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