Imagine what it might have looked like: New York City at the dawn of the skyscraper era. Into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Gilded Age New York (1877-1917) still had church steeples that stood out on the skyline, a vista not so different from that of medieval towns in Europe where white glistening cathedrals were once the tallest buildings, and the first and last structure visitors saw as they approached and left a town.
But New York had one thing more as the nineteenth century drew to a close: the tall gothic gates and elegant network of wires that formed the Brooklyn Bridge. Opened in 1883, it was our first skyscraper — symbolically, at least — and seemed literally to scrape the sky as it spanned the great East River. The bridge, brainchild of John Roebling, and completed by his son Washington Roebling, was the first emblem of what was to come. It literally connected Manhattan to Brooklyn, but metaphorically it declared New York as the American city of the soon-to-be-born twentieth century. There had been suspension bridges in America before this, notably Roebling’s own for Cincinnati, but the bridge that came to set the standard was Roebling’s masterwork in New York harbor, which pointed to the dreams of what a modern city could achieve.
There are panoramic photos of the Brooklyn Bridge that clearly indicate how inspiring it must have been to late nineteenth-century New Yorkers: a sleek line across the sky, blending old stone piers and uprights with the transformative technological breakthrough of spidery steel cables: a wonderful meeting of the old and the new. The city’s newest immigrants could walk across the bridge every day, feel as if they were floating in mid-air, and know that they were in a place very far from the old villages and towns they had left far behind. It was a gateway; they had literally and figuratively crossed over. At that moment in history, New York was the defining American city, the First City.
But this was not always the case. In the original cluster of British colonial towns that appeared in the American northeast, there was always a rivalry. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia each made an early claim on being America’s most important population center and dominant economic hub.
We all know about the rivalry between New York and Boston, which survives in the present day via the intense rivalry of its two baseball teams, each an emblems of its city. Younger generations might think it only goes back to 1918, when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees — thereby invoking the so-called Curse of the Bambino, which was only broken in 2004, when Boston finally won the World Series. Not so.
This contention is just the shadow of what once was. Boston was the cultural and intellectual center of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. The town that was founded by Puritans was home to many of the leaders of American independence. Just outside the city of Boston, in bucolic Cambridge, was the campus of the oldest American college — Harvard. Beyond Cambridge was the town that in many ways is the birthplace of the first great wave of American literary genius: from Concord came the giants Emerson, Thoreau, and American Transcendentalists. Visitors still make pilgrimage to that leafy hillside in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord where American letters had its first flowering. Boston stood for culture and art — although it also always had an uneasy time defining what it would or would not tolerate.
Philadelphia was a port town. Founded by Quakers, Philadelphia became a welcoming home for those interested in science and art. Among Philadelphia’s first families were the scientist, inventor, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin as well as the artist Rembrandt Peale. Philadelphia also boasted one of America’s earliest theaters and its first printing presses.
New York City did not have art or science or philosophy or literature at its core. Left in near ruins by withdrawing British troops at the end of the American Revolution, New York focused on regaining its foothold as a center of commerce, which had been at the heart of its original founding by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. By 1830, it had the largest population of any city in the United States. By the years just before the Civil War, it had become the center of publishing. And with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York firmly took hold of the position of commercial heart of the nation.
By the age of the robber barons in the years following the Civil War, New York was the capital of capitalism, as many historians have noted. In many ways, the city defined what a twentieth century city was.
Part of that transformation, indeed, the definition of modernity, begins with the invention of the elevator in the 1850s by the Otis Company. A tall building was inconceivable if there was no way to reach its highest floors. But slowly at first, and then rapidly after the First World War, New York began its vertical climb.
The Flatiron Building (1902) is one of the earliest New York skyscrapers. It looked like the prow of a ship; and as many have observed, it turned its back to the past, the lower (older) city, and pointed defiantly uptown, towards the future.
New York’s only real competition in vertical growth in the years before World War II came from Chicago. After the Second World War, all of America’s cities reached for the skies. But until then, Chicago was New York’s only real rival. Devastated by fire in 1871, Chicago found itself rebuilding just at the moment that the skyscraper was being born. New technologies made that city an experimental lab for all that was to come. From the air, looking at the oldest parts of these two great American cities, it looks like skyscraper gardens clustered together. We know now it was not a garden. It was modernity.
