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Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building

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Woolworth wanted to produce the largest income of any building in the world while having a building that would function as a trademark.[1] While Woolworth was imagining his building, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower stood as the tallest office building in the world, and it advertised a company that paralleled his own in terms of size and presence.[2] Woolworth was surely incited by this to create something grander in all aspects. This was an endeavor of its own; Julia, the wife of architect Cass Gilbert, said that the project was so challenging “that [he] began to talk in his sleep, a little sign that he was using too much mental fuel.”[3] Gilbert himself shared in Woolworth’s extravagant vision for the building, wanting it to be highly pictorial and visible from all of lower Broadway and the Brooklyn Bridge, with City Hall Park as a backdrop.[4]

The first step in creating his iconic tower was selecting an appropriate site, and Woolworth’s methodology did not include a geological survey. Woolworth had originally considered a site at West Broadway and Reade Street, two blocks west of his office in the Stewart Building, but he settled on the southwest corner of City Hall Park adjacent to Newspaper Row.[5] Woolworth “studied the circulations of New York’s crowds as they crossed the [Brooklyn] bridge and moved along lower Broadway,” adapting his proven techniques for store siting for his skyscraper.[6]t was said that he studied the streets so much that he could pinpoint exactly where the greatest number of people passed on a sidewalk during a certain period of time.[7] Since his building was both functional and an advertisement, visibility was an important factor in Woolworth’s decision. This pedestrian view led to Woolworth valuing City Hall Park higher than Lower Manhattan’s ever growing skyline as many of the views of the building would not have been possible in the financial district.[8]Woolworth also wanted to have a sweeping view of both Lower Manhattan’s skyline and City Hall Park from his office.[9] These factors pushed him to increase the selling power of the office spaces in the building with lucrative street level storefronts that captured the maximum foot traffic in the area.

In addition to his modified store siting technique, Woolworth considered his proximity to other businesses. Woolworth desired to be close to the wholesalers and small manufacturers located west of lower Broadway that were responsible for some of the goods sold in his stores.[10] Woolworth said that the location of a headquarters showed with whom a company negotiated; the F.W. Woolworth Company certainly had strong ties to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange.[11] Placing himself on the fringes of the financial district legitimized the purchasing power of his company. Woolworth was set on not only profiting from the high land values near Wall Street, but also increasing the value of land around City Hall Park through the landmark status of his monumental building.[12] As the F.W. Woolworth company occupied only a small portion of the building, the majority of the revenue would come from speculative office spaces. Knowing this, Woolworth did everything in his power to choose and create the most profitable site for the Woolworth Building.
 
 
[1] Sarah Landau and Carl Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865-1913 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 382.
[2] Gail Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 149.
[3] Julia Gilbert, quoted in Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City, 149.
[4] Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City, 159.
[5] Ibid, 46; 121.
[6] Ibid, 46.
[7] Ibid, 48.
[8] Ibid, 57.
[9] Ibid, 20.
[10] Ibid, 49.
[11] Ibid, 21; 164.
[12] Ibid, 62-63.

Kenneth Frye

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