Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building

The Woolworth Building as an Architectural Model for the Columbian Mutual Tower

            The Woolworth Building housed and promoted the world’s preeminent discount retail company in the early twentieth century. Frank Winfield Woolworth worked in a dry goods store before opening “Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store” in 1878 in Utica, New York. While this first store failed, the second, opened in 1879 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was successful. Over the next decades, Woolworth franchised a chain of stores across the United States and England. In 1910, the company merged with its four major competitors to form the F. W. Woolworth Company. After this merger, Woolworth’s had 611 stores, and F. W. Woolworth began planning his company’s signature headquarters. After 1886 Woolworth’s head offices were located in New York City, where most of the company’s suppliers were located. In 1888 Woolworth began renting space at 280 Broadway (Trench and Snook, 1845), three blocks north of the future site of the Woolworth Building. The company thus had a corporate presence in the business district near City Hall decades before its own signature skyscraper was begun. The Woolworth Company’s construction of their landmark headquarters would reflect the retailer’s ambitions to be a economic leader whose brand was known worldwide.
            When F. W. Woolworth chose to build a separate headquarters for his company, he began a process that ultimately resulted in the world’s tallest building. Woolworth purchased a lot on the corner of Broadway and Park Place, across the street from City Hall Park. He hired Cass Gilbert, an architect who was educated at the École de Beaux Arts in Paris and designed the New York Customs House (1901-1907) before receiving the commission for the Woolworth Building. Gilbert also designed smaller skyscrapers in New York, among them the West Street Building (1905-1907), which foreshadowed the use of Gothic forms in the Woolworth Building. Woolworth’s company headquarters was initially intended to be ten to sixteen stories, but its height was subsequently increased to surpass neighboring buildings. It was further increased after Woolworth visited Europe, where he was frequently asked about the 1907 Singer Building (Ernest Flagg), which was the tallest building in the world at its completion measuring 612 feet. Woolworth later recalled that this inspired him “to erect a building that would advertise the Woolworth five and ten cent stores all over the world.”[1] The Woolworth Building would also surpass the 1909 Metropolitan Life Building (Napoleon LeBrun), which stood at 700 feet. Its status as the tallest building in the world came to be a defining aspect of the Woolworth Building in both its design and its public reception.
            Woolworth and Gilbert chose the Gothic mode for the Woolworth Building in order to express of the building’s verticality. The Woolworth Building features a thirty-story tall, U-shaped base topped by a thirty story tower. The exterior is covered in cream colored terra-cotta, with pointed arches, tracery, and polychrome terra-cotta decorating the lower stories and the window spandrels of upper stories. Both the wings of the base and the tower are topped with steeply pitched copper roofs weathered to a green hue. The building’s overall form was determined, in part, by the economics of skyscraper design; the base’s two wings form a light court in the center that maximizes the number of windows providing light to the offices within, making them more attractive to potential tenants. The building’s styling reflected its architect’s views on skyscraper design. Gilbert argued that “the inevitable logic of design now bids us lift these huge masses in the air with aspiring verticals, accenting rather than dissembling their height,” which was manifested in the Woolworth Building’s unbroken vertical piers rising the entire height of the building.[2] The exterior’s polychromatic treatment was used to accentuate the building’s dominant lines and enhance the shadows, thereby creating dynamic depth.[3] The Woolworth Building was inspired primarily by secular examples like the medieval Hotel de Ville in Brussels, Belgium (Jacob van Thienen, 1420) and the Gothic Revival Houses of Parliament in London, England (Barry and Pugin, 1870), evidenced in the massing of the tower, which features tourelles on the corners and a steeply pitched, dormered roof. The building is not, however, “a copy of anything, it was designed to meet conditions as they existed here in the belief that the skyscraper problem could be solved and could be beautiful.”[4] The Woolworth Building, then, evidences the design philosophy of its architect as well as the ambition of its patron.
            The Woolworth Building quickly became the best-known example of the Commercial Gothic style, critically acclaimed for its design and known throughout the world for its height. Nationally published architecture periodicals like The Architectural Record praised the Woolworth Building because it “most unmistakably denotes its skeleton” and argued that “the great architectural success of the Woolworth Building is eminently the success of an expressive treatment.”[5]  For the general public, however, the building’s most distinguishing characteristic was its height, and the executives of the Columbian Mutual Assurance Society would likely have read about the building in Atlanta newspapers in the years before they built their new headquarters in Memphis. In November 1917, The Atlanta Constitution bragged that a pile of the papers they printed weekly would measure 4,545 feet tall and “make Woolworth Building look like a cottage alongside of a skyscraper,” while a recurring advertisement in the paper juxtaposed an image of the Woolworth Building with a bottle of Lewis 66 Rye “towering away above the many brands of ordinary whiskey.”[6] Promotional materials described the Woolworth Building as “the Cathedral of Commerce,” which “set in motion a vast machine called industry, whose influences and benefits forever will be felt in every corner of the globe.”[7]  They emphasized the building’s illumination, its efficient elevators, and its abundance of light and ventilation enabled by its sub-basement power plant. Media coverage portrayed the Woolworth Building as the preeminent modern skyscraper of the era, and by association its Skyscraper Gothic style became the preferred mode for major corporate buildings across the nation. Among them was the Columbian Mutual Tower (Figure Two), whose designers sought to capture the Woolworth Building’s associations with modernity and economic success by emulating its physical form.
[1] Leo L. Redding, "Mr. F. W. Woolworth's story," World's Work (April 1913), 664.
[2] Cass Gilbert, "The Architecture of Today;” lecture at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, May 4, 1909, pgs. 8-9, Box 16, Cass Gilbert Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[3] Cass Gilbert, “The Tenth Birthday of a Notable Structure,” in Real Estate Magazine of New York, (May 1923), 344.
[4] Cass Gilbert, “Regarding Woolworth Building,” manuscript written for part of an article to be prepared by an editor in Philadelphia, Box 17, Cass Gilbert Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[5] Montgomery Schuyler, “‘The Towers of Manhattan’ and Notes on the Woolworth Building,” The Architectural Record 33, no. 2 (February 1913), 104; 111.
[6] “New York’s Highest Buildings Dwarfed by Piles of Newspapers,” The Atlanta Constitution, November 15, 1917; “Away Above Everything,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 7, 1912.
[7] Edwin A. Cochran, The Cathedral of Commerce (New York: Broadway Park Place Co., 1916), 5.

Ellen Dement

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