The Woolworth Building

Frank Woolworth had made a fortune selling nothing that cost more than ten cents, and in 1910 he decided to spend a large part of it on a headquarters that would advertise the fact. He hired the architect Cass Gilbert, told him he wanted the tallest building in the world, and then insisted on Gothic — the vocabulary of cathedrals and university halls, applied to a sixty-story commercial tower on lower Broadway facing City Hall Park.

The building opened in April 1913 at seven hundred and ninety-two feet, a steel frame sheathed in cream terra cotta and crowned with a tower of buttresses, gargoyles, and pinnacles. Woolworth paid for it in cash, reportedly about thirteen and a half million dollars, which spared him a mortgage and gave the newspapers a detail they repeated for decades. The vaulted lobby of marble and glass mosaic carried carved caricatures of the men who made it, including Woolworth counting his coins and Gilbert holding a model of the tower.

At the opening dinner a clergyman called it the Cathedral of Commerce, and the phrase became the building's permanent nickname — half admiration, half unease at a church's language borrowed to glorify a chain of variety stores. President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington that lit the tower for the first time. The observation deck drew paying crowds, and the floodlit silhouette became a fixture of the lower Manhattan skyline for a generation of New Yorkers and visitors.

It held the world height record for seventeen years, losing it only in 1930 when the towers of the midtown height race went up. The Woolworth Building then settled into a long second life as an ordinary, if extraordinarily ornate, office address, and its upper floors were converted into apartments after 2012. It remains the clearest surviving statement of a brief American idea — that the tall commercial building, the newest thing in the world, ought to look like the oldest.